College Days

These pictures and notes are from my days in the World War II Navy V-12 and Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps at Duke University, Durham, NC. The period was from November 1, 1943 to February 28, 1946. I should mention that I was too small to enter sports with "the big guys," so I did the types of things where size didn't matter. I weighed only 118 pounds when I arrived, and about 130 at graduation.
	Soon after I arrived at Duke I met Ed Stancik (left), a marine who had transferred from another school and was ahead of me in the officer training program. He became my teacher in gymnastics. In the wartime program at Duke we didn't have a coach for gymnastics. Ed's picture was taken on the roof of the swimming pool at the gym.
	Fortunately for me (left), I had been doing some gymnastics before I arrived, and soon became an unofficial physical training assistant. So, in the winter snow, I didn't have to go outside for physical training.
	You can see that my form was not very good. Later I learned to keep my feet together. Although being far from Olympic stature, we did pretty well. Whipping around the horizontal bar involved quite a bit of force. One time while doing "giant swings" on that bar, I pulled one of the support cables out of the floor, and the whole thing came crashing down.
	Ed and I tried to develop some routines together, but we didn't have much time for it. Here we are on the parallel bars. Ed also taught me some tricks on the flying rings.
	On the left, Ed is teaching me to do a running back flip. Later, I learned to do a running front flip and a back flip without running.
	A lot of the following pictures were taken all on the same day. Being over 60 years old, some of them are deteriorated. On the left Ed Stancik is at the top, I'm in the middle, and our PT instructor, Navy Chief Gant is at the lower right.
	On the left, I'm on top, Ed Stancik is in the middle, and Chief Gant is holding both of us.
	All these pyramids were done under Ed's guidance. On the left, Ed and I are in the middle.
	On the left is another type of pyramid, with Ed and me in the middle.
	On the left, several of us doing handstands. Ed was very good at this. Often, after our workout in the gym, he would walk on his hands the length of the gym (about 150 feet) and down the stairs to the ground floor to the showers. He was also a good student, being in an honors program in mathematics. We did some studying too, but I don't have any pictures of that! My Navy class of 33 students graduated in February 1946. As of December 2006, only 10 of us are left.