Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 92.djvu/60

 Turning Sailors into Craftsmen

��How bluejackets at Dunwoody Training Station are fitted to trades they like

By Willard Connely, U.S.N.R.F.

���A class in gas engineering. Some of these men \vill see ser- vice on the de- stroyers used to hunt submarines

��THE United States Government is the professor of independence in the University of America. One of his pet classes is the Navy, in which he teaches competence for life to his pupils, the bluejackets. For them he has schools on land as well as on water, from which his approved graduates may re-enter civil life awarded a degree whose counterpart is given at few colleges — the degree of Bachelor of Thoroughness.

One of these land schools is the Dun- woody Industrial Institute in Minne- apolis, now a United States Naval Train- ing Station. There, more than six hun- dred bluejackets and petty officers are acquiring skill in the crafts which they want to make their life work. The men are not enlisted from one community, any mere than the midshipmen at Annapolis are all from Maryland. They arrive in detachments from the various recruiting centers— Detroit, Chicago, Buffalo, Rich- mond, Pensacola, New Orleans, San Francisco and Seattle.

Nine courses of study are offered the naval apprentices at Dunwoody; and he is an odd youth indeed who never in his life has evinced particular concern about one or more of them. In general, the

��classes are formed from two sorts of men. Suppose Captain Moffett, Commandant of the Great Lakes Naval Training Sta- tion, were to send one hundred radio men to Dunwoody. He first combs his roster for bluejackets who have had previous experience in wireless telegraphy and who desire to continue; second, for men who have long wanted to be operators but who have never had the chance to learn before they joined the Navy. If mental qualifica- tions are satisfactory, the latter men are elected as well, and later graded so as not to be a drag on their more experienced mates. After a four months' course of electrical study and operating practice in the international code, these men are able to receive twenty to thirty words per minute, and can go direct to sea. In electricity, they have laboratory work, and lectures in magnetism, storage batteries, condensers and oscillating currents, spark systems, wave meters and measurements. The bluejackets who learn to be ship's bakers probably have as much actual fun out of their work as any. With all the latest scientific mixing and blending ap- paratus at hand, they leisurely turn out one thousand loaves of bre-.id a day, three hundred loaves going for the general mess

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