New York

Kilroy was here Too!

  Contents  of  This  Page

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Keitha Kellogg Petersen (Sterlingville, New York)

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Creighton Abrams  Soldier (Thunderbolt 4th. Armored) 

    Bill Mauldin  GI Cartoonist  (Thunderbird 45th. Infantry)

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    Mary and I both grew up and attended school in the small northern New York State village of Black River.  At that time in the 1920's and 1930's Pine Camp nearby was a summer training area for the United States Army.  There were permanent posts at Sacketts Harbor and Oswego on Lake Ontario and Plattsburgh on Lake Champlain.   This was still the days of the Cavalry and I  recall the excitement of the troops in full battle gear on horse back, guideons flying, towing their 75 mm cannon replete with caissons traversing the village thoroughfares on their way to and from Pine Camp, quite stimulating for the young people running alongside.

This is a panorama of the Pine Camp (Fort Drum) summer encampment

Taken in 1910 facing West from the Hogs Back water tower.

Left foreground Officer's Quarters & guests on the Hogs Back

Center background encampment area is set up on present day Airport site.

Right background overlooks Sterlingville and George Gates farmland.

Several of these 1910 photos can be found by Searching for Pine Camp at the  Library of Congress Web Site

    In the 1930's the main gate and cantonment area then was about 6 miles up the Black River at the village of Great Bend.  It was here that the troops and their horses from further away came by train.   They had facilities here for unloading the horses as well as very large stable accommodations along the river on the north shore.   The number of horses involved could be quite astronomical by today's standards.   The main post consisted of a concrete one way roadway in and out with a median between.  To this day that roadway is still there.    The only permanent buildings were the canteen  store  (PX) by the main gate and to the west of the roadway a caretakers and the commanding officers residence.    To the east of the roadway with very few exceptions were tent platforms of various sizes which in season were covered with tents.
    All the rest of the roads on the encampment were basically wherever one drove across the sand.  This was also true of the airport, which was near its present location with a sand runway but much smaller and during maneuvers would occasionally have a few WW I  Jenny bi-planes on board.   My grandfathers farm was located near where  the present airport to Philadelphia road drops below the sand plains just north east of the present day airport.   The village of Philadelphia then and still does have its water reservoirs on the back side of what was his farm.  Four generation of his family had operated saw mills in that area and in so doing had purchased many plots of land to obtain the trees for lumber.   I have found deeds in the County clerks office indicating that my grandfather sold 500 acres in several parcels to the United States in 1910 in this area.
    A major change took place in 1941, with WW II looming over the horizon and the United States forced to play catch up, Pine Camp was vastly expanded.  This included the acquisition of 75,000 acres expanding the Fort Drum area to its present  land size of 107,265 acres.  There were 5 small communities and hundreds of farms with 525 families displaced by this expansion with a minimum of disruption and civil unrest.  (Can you imagine the litigation and protest that would ensue from this type of action today in the 90's.)  "By Labor Day 1941, 100 tracts of land were taken over.  Three thousand buildings, including 24 schools, 6 churches and a post office were abandoned.  Also a major construction project created the main post from Great Bend across the sand plains to Black River with the main gate being placed just outside that village.  In a period of 10 months at a cost of $20 million, an entire city was built to house the divisions scheduled to train there.
    Eight hundred buildings were constructed:  240 barracks, 84 mess halls, 86 storehouses, 58 warehouses, 27 officer's quarters, 22 headquarters buildings and 99 recreational buildings as well as guardhouses and a hospital

    Just recently  (June 26, 2002)  I received a letter from Keitha Kellogg Petersen who lives in Pulaski, NY.  Keitha grew up as a child in Sterlingville leaving there in 1935 when her parents moved to Mexico, NY.  I have corresponded with Keitha back in 1997 when we met through an article in the Watertown, NY Daily Times titled the Cemeteries of Fort Drum.
    This time she sent me an article from the Thousand Island Sun of Alexandria Bay, NY, titled "You Can't Go Home Again".  This article with pictures of old Sterlingville, was written by her daughter-in-law Laurie Lind Petersen, is a synopsis of a book which Keitha has written which is titled "Drummed Out; A History of Sterlingville and Environs," is to be printed this summer by Benjamin Press of Watertown.
  Some highlights of interest from  the news article report that "Like so many other North Country settlements, Sterlingville started out with a nudge by the post-Revolutionary War land baron James LeRay de Chaumont.
    Where he wanted to stimulate settlement, he sent workers to build structures, roads and dams.
    There was no road across the future Pine Plains, but he got someone to build the DeLancey sawmill on Black Creek, a mile north of the eventual site of Sterlingville.
    A couple of years earlier, a Quaker adventurer, Daniel Sterling had plowed through the forest with his wife and small sons to settle in Antwerp.....................
    Son James Sterling learned iron working at Rossie and Redwood, then came back to Antwerp with a head full of dynasty making.   In 1836, he got wind of a farm north of Antwerp where natural iron had surfaced.  The land rich Parish family actually owned the Hopestill Foster farm, but weren't turned on by the prospect of setting up a mine in the middle of nowhere.   They sold the piece to James Sterling for $ 200, and the eventual Iron King of the North Country swung into action....................... "

 

    "Meanwhile where Keitha Kellogg would later grow up, 1866 Sterlingville supported a basket maker, two black smith's, a bootery, a butcher shop, a butter maker, a millinery shop, a music teacher, a painter, two doctors, a post office, three carpenters, a carriage maker, a cheese factory, a forge, a cheese box maker, a grocer,, a general store, a grist mill, a liquor store, a clock repair shop, a pump maker, a shingle mill, three saw mills and a hotel.
    The latter is where Lewis and Alyeen Kellogg raised the five children who survived North Country plagues and winters.
    Lewis had been a farmer before buying the rebuilt hotel, where the 1841 Sterling House had always stood.  But Keitha says, the sandy Pine Plains weren't the best place to farm.  Although some pockets of loamy soil and some river land supported good crops, the locals were fond of saying that the only things you old raise in Sterlingville were "hell, huckleberries and children.
    Along the way, Keitha's father Lewis, was a farmer, mailman, auto mechanic, hotel manager, and mayor.  But the management period only lasted until Keitha was five years old, because Sterlingville's sole hotel burned to the ground on December 8, 1928.

    "The hotel burned while we were living in it," she says now, recalling that winter night when she stood at the foot of the central stairway yelling, "Get the baby! Get the baby!"...................................
    For the rest of her Sterlingville years she remembers sledding on Furnace Hill where the Sterling factory once stood and where James Sterling dammed Black Creek to get himself some mill power.
    New York Central railcars ran across a trestle behind the family's back porch, she recalls, adding, "And that is why we got so many bums coming to the door begging for food.  I don't know maybe somebody put a mark on the house."
    During the sum of her Sterlingville years, she saw a movie only once, when her teacher from the one room Sterlingville school house, Edna Hart took her home to Carthage for the weekend.  The jaunt included a shopping trip to the five and ten.  It was a cowboy movie, Keitha says.  She didn't see another until she was 17 years old and had moved to Mexico, N.Y...........................
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    Today August 01, 2002 I had a card from Keitha in which she says her book is now on the Bookstore shelves and any one that would like a copy can get it from her at $ 15.00 per copy plus shipping cost.  Her home address is.
Keitha Kellogg Petersen
298 Lehigh Road
Pulaski, New York   13142
 

When the 4th Armored left Pine Camp in late 1942 it was replace by the 5th Armored Division, which was followed shortly by the influx of the 45th Infantry Division.  This must have stretched the capacity of Pine Camp to cope with 2 divisions at the same time. The 45th was a guard unit from the southwest and the transformation to the winter climate of northern New York must have been quite a shock to them.   As I recall the winter of 1943 was a cold one and remember watching from the school windows as infantry squads in rout step marched by in -20 degree temperatures.  At this time as I knew the military was my next step after high school the Navy and the prospects of the warm south seas began to appear as a pretty good alternative but this was not to be.    Another character who came on the scene with the 45th Division at Pine Camp was Bill Mauldin a budding cartoonist who later was to become quite famous for his  GI Infantry characters Willie and Joe.  One of my favorite northern NY stories is in regard to the fact that Willie and Joe had not yet been fully developed and recognized this early in the war but Bill approached our local Watertown Daily Times newspaper editor and publisher with the hope of getting some of his work published in their paper.   The long and short of it was that Bill was more or less politely told to buzz off sonny.   When in later years I wrote the present owner pushing some of my own political cartoons I reminded him of the Mauldin episode and cautioned him not to be to hasty in rejecting them.  What I got was the same response that Bill got 50 years earlier but for some reason or other he left off the sonny.  He being the grandson of the then owner,  good naturedly agreed that they probably had blown that one in Bills case.

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  I got real lucky a couple of weeks ago, at a used book store, I acquired a 1944 copy of    Up Front     by  Bill Mauldin.     In addition to a few cartoons of them, he spoke of the Engineers as follows.
    " If I was trying to tell somebody about the war I would certainly say more about the Engineers.   But I don't know how they bolt braces on Bailey bridges, and I don't know the finer points of neutralizing a Teller mine, so I can't draw many pictures about them, except as they come into contact with the Infantry.   Combat engineers carry rifles and often use them.   When they put down their rifles they have to pick up their tools.
    I intended the picture of the professional fighting man and the man who is laboring on the road as pure sarcasm.   The cartoon was probably understood by few people outside the engineers and infantry.   The fighting man won't be able to put his knowledge to good use after the war, and the muddy engineer probably owned a fleet of trucks in civil life.
    Mine detectors are always good cartoon material, but unfortunately you can't draw very realistic cartoons about them, because mine detectors are seldom used for anything but detecting mines.   That's the trouble with drawing pictures about specialists and their equipment.   All these guys are fighting a war and some of the time they are doing it in great danger.   They develop a rather serious turn of mind, and so an engineer might stare with some wonderment if you tried to show his life with his mine detector in a series of gags.   He is usually a little scared when he is poking around in a minefield and he stopped feeling silly about it a long time ago."
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    Later Pine Camp was re named Fort Drum after General Hugh Drum  it has been long used as a summer training ground for various army units.   In the last dozen years it has had a major building program and is now considered one of the Army's most modern bases and has become the home base of the Army's 10th Mountain Light Infantry Division.   The most recent construction has been an airport expansion which allows the largest planes to land and move units quickly around the world.
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By Bob Greene
Chicago Tribune

August 11, 2002

Someone from the 3rd Infantry Division got in touch and said he thought I'd want to know. He said it was about Bill Mauldin.

What followed was not so good.

I'll get to that in a moment. For those of you too young to recognize the name: Bill Mauldin, who is now 80 years old, was the finest and most beloved editorial cartoonist of World War II. An enlisted man who drew for Stars and Stripes, he was the one who gave the soldiers hope and sardonic smiles on the battlefields; Mauldin knew their hearts because he was one of them. Using his dirty, unshaven, bone-weary infantrymen characters Willie and Joe as his vehicle, Mauldin let all those troops know there was someone who understood. A Mauldin classic from World War II: an exhausted infantryman standing in front of a table where medals were being given out, saying: "Just gimme th' aspirin. I already got a Purple Heart."

Baby-faced and absolutely brilliant, Mauldin became a national phenomenon. Talk about a boy wonder: By the time he was 23 years old he had won a Pulitzer Prize, been featured on the cover of Time magazine, and had the country's No. 1 best-selling book, "Up Front." Yet he remained the unaffected, bedrock genuine, decent and open guy ... his fellow soldiers loved him.

And he stayed that way ó right down to the baby face ó all the way into his 50s and beyond. I was brand-new in Chicago, 22 years old and a beginning reporter, when I walked by the old Riccardo's restaurant one night, and there was Mauldin having a drink at one of the outside tables with his friend Mike Royko. Mauldin had seen me around the hallways; he motioned me over and invited me to join them. I sat down and tried to act as if this was nothing exceptional at all, as I looked around me at the table and thought to myself: You're six weeks out of Bexley, Ohio. That's Bill Mauldin. That's Mike Royko. This is a dream.

He was always so nice to me; he volunteered to write the foreword to one of my first books. We sort of lost touch after he moved to the Western part of the U.S. full time, and I guess that when I thought of him it was still as the eternally boyish, eternally grinning, eternally upbeat Mauldin.

And then the message came the other day from the 3rd Infantry man.

Bill Mauldin needs help.

He suffered terrible burns in a household accident a while back; his health has deteriorated grievously, and his cognitive functions are barely working. He lives in a room in a nursing home in Orange County, Calif., and sometimes days at a time go by without him saying a word. He was married three times, but the last one ended in divorce, and at 80 in the nursing home Mauldin is a single man.

I spoke with members of his family; they said that, even though Bill hardly communicates, the one thing that cheers him up is hearing from World War II guys ó the men for whom he drew those magnificent cartoons.

Which is not what you might expect. Mauldin was not one to hold on to the past ó he did not want to be categorized by the work he did on the battlefields when he was in his 20s. He went on to have a stellar career in journalism after the war, winning another Pulitzer in 1959. Many Americans, and I'm one of them, consider the drawing he did on deadline on the afternoon John F. Kennedy was assassinated ó the drawing of the Lincoln Memorial, head in hands, weeping ó to be the single greatest editorial cartoon in the history of newspapers.

But it's his World War II contemporaries he seems to need now. The guys for whom ó in the words of Mauldin's son David ó Mauldin's cartoons "were like water for men dying of thirst." David Mauldin said his dad needs to hear that he meant something to those men.

He needs visitors, and he needs cards of encouragement. I'm not going to print the name of the nursing home, so that this can be done in a disciplined and scheduled way. A newspaper colleague in Southern California ó Gordon Dillow ó has done a wonderful job organizing this, and he will take your cards to the nursing home. You may send them to Bill Mauldin in care of Dillow at the Orange County Register, 625 N. Grand Ave., Santa Ana, CA 92701.

What would be even better, for those of you World War II veterans who are reading these words in California, or who plan on traveling there soon, would be if you could pay a visit to Mauldin just to sit with him a while. You can let me know if you are willing to do this (bgreene@tribune.com), or you can let Gordon Dillow know (gldillow@aol.com).

Bill Mauldin brought hope, and smiles in terrible hours, to millions of his fellow soldiers. If you were one of them, and you'd like to repay the favor, this would be the time.

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