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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