Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 92.djvu/62

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��Popular Science Monthly

��A class which specializes on the study of storage batteries, magnetism and kindred subjects

���and the remainder being sold to a local baker at cost. On demand, they supply a hundred apple pies or fifty chocolate cakes in the course of a morning.

"Will you run a bakery of your own after the war?" I asked one of them.

"Not much. This is no life for me," was his swift answer.

"Then why are you taking the course?"

"I want the chemistry that comes with it. I work in the chemical laboratory after hours. I'm going into the drug business after I've served my next enlistment."

Many of the apprentices are as re- sourceful as that, with their eyes con- stantly on the future. In what is called the "related work," as chemistry to bak- ing, they have the chance to specialize as they desire. The man who wants to be a druggist made such a good record as a baker that he was advanced to an assistant instructorship.

In fact, out of every fifteen men at Dunwoody, one has been found proficient enough to earn the i)ost of assistant in- structor. On Saturday mornings these men are taken aside in special classes by the chief instructors, who give them work in theory and api)lied problems.

The men in the gas-engine class are learning to be motorboat pilots. They

��will operate the boats used by the naval officers in getting from one ship to another in a fleet, or in going ashore from anchor- age out in the harbor.

The coppersmiths are making pipes and conduits, boxes and kitchen utensils. In all their work they first make blueprints in the drafting room. The assistant in- structor here is a bluejacket from Seattle, who has been in the coppersmith business for himself. When war was declared, he sold out his shop at a sacrifice in order to do his bit in the Navy.

Not the least important of the classes are the cooks. To prepare the food for six hundred hard-working bluejackets three times a day would seem enough to do, but these fifty embryonic chefs have scientific instruction in the classroom too. They are taught how to cut sides of meat, to know the comparative food values of vegetables and breadstuffs, and how to compose a balanced menu.

So it is not dilficult to understand why the naval training course worked out by Ensign Colby Dodge, U.S.N., Command- ing Officer at Dunwoody, and by Dr. Charles Prosser, Director of the Institute, means something more to the bluejacket, than scrubbing the deck or polishing the brass. It is the free gateway to a self chosen and lucrative career.

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