July 4th., a Piece of History

 

Platoon 35.  On July 6, 1948, Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981, integrating the United States Armed Forces.   This photo is dated July 1, 1950, so it's one of the first integrated Marine Corps training classes from Parris Island, in South Carolina.  Unless I missed someone, I counted five black troops in the class.  Anyway, a fair amount of info on the front of the photo.  M.C.R.D. stands for Marine Corps Recruiting Depot.  Just for the hell of it, I did a search for the three sergeants named, H.A. Eravi, H.E. Moore, and P.H. Myers.  Nothing came up.  There is an Ashley Moog, professional photographer located in Beaufort, South Carolina.  A daughter or a granddaughter of the Moog credited as the photographer on the front of the print.  Possible, perhaps even probable, but not guaranteed.  

Camp Croft

I wrote in my last post that photographs of men in uniform were quite common and that I had a lot in the collection.  In the next three or four posts I'm going to put up a few of the ones that have yet to see the light of day.

This print was once pasted to something, and when it was removed from that backing things got a bit damaged.  There is a stamp on the back, but it's only partly readable, but enough is  there that I was able to figure out that this photo was taken by E.A. Beeks from Spartanburg, South Carolina.  Well, the man in this photo looks to be from the World war 2 era, so a quick search, and I found out that there was an army infantry replacement camp just outside Spartanburg.  Camp Croft was open from 1940 to 1946, and as the name implies, soldiers were sent there and waited to be shipped out to replace combat casualties.  A lot of men passed through Camp Croft.  Some of them went on to fame in civilian life, including Nelson Riddle, Hoyt Wilhelm, Zero Mostel, Henry Kissinger, Alan Cranston, and Spiro T. Agnew.