Keith Oliver’s book stirs up memories for Don Knight

Standing outside the PA shop at NAS Quincy, MA the morning of reporting for duty. Don Knight is on the far right. He is carrying his toothbrush and comb ("I had a lot of good teeth and hair in those days") and standing on a curb facing the duty officer which makes his 5’7” look like 5’11”. A big sign nearby reads: “Welcome Weekend Warriors.” The word Weekend has been covered with a big X.

To: Keith Oliver,
OK, I’ve reached Appendix #3 [of Keith Oliver’s book “Command Attention: Promoting Your Organization the Marine Corps Way” ] and will pause long enough to catch my breath and send you some thoughts, scattered with words of praise, about “The Book.”

It’s a great piece of writing (terse, personal, informative, entertaining) and I hope you sell a million copies and that this little gem becomes the guidebook for all communicators of all stripe in the Corps and beyond. I especially enjoyed the words about our information revolution, including that part about the manual typewriter (just kidding).

Don Knight, awards chairman, is no taller today.

I will be mailing my copy to Dick Truitt in Connecticut . Why? He’s a famous PR practitioner, a former agency guru, former Marine platoon leader in Korea , speechwriter for Ike, a print judge in our USMCCCA awards program, etc.  He and I teamed up over a 15-year period in Washington when I was e.d. for a national media campaign (a C6 operation) aimed at salvaging  the Federal Highway Trust Fund (under major attack in those days). The program was called The Road Information Program (TRIP) and with Dick as my counsel we picked off three of those chrome-coated silver anvil statues the PRSA hands off annually in its highly-touted awards program. The statues are silver, not gold like the one in the museum at Quantico that Norm Hatch garnered for the Marine Corps with his battle film from Tarawa.

Dick is known for his candor and no-nonsense approach and I hope he will read your little gem and report back to me. He is semi-retired now and tooling around Long Island Sound in his yacht.

Anyway, what really triggered this missive was your frequent mention of your time at MCAS Cherry Point. I have many memories about my one year in the PA shop there. Let me explain how I got to that garden spot in the swamps of North Carolina .

On June 25, 1950 I was heading for home in Quincy , MA from having just picked up my journalism degree from B.U.  The buzz around South Station was that Truman had just declared a “police action” against North Korea and among other things his action had automatically locked in all military reservists for active duty.

I was, at the time,  a “Weekend Warrior”  at the Naval Air Station at Squantum, on the south shore of Boston Harbor, thereby pocketing a bit of cash to augment my $90 monthly government stipend as a G.I. student.  I was part of a five-Marine PA shop at the station and we were suddenly on a war footing with some real stuff to write about. Job-hunting days in Boston were terminated.

A few months later, the entire Squantum contingent flew to Cherry Point. My two-semester training stint while at the Quincy Patriot Ledger (the largest daily on the south shore of Boston ) came into play. There was a gold mine of material for those Joe Blow pieces for  hometown consumption. The reserve unit from Squantum had everything from bank tellers to corporate chiefs, and of course there were pilots from WWII headed for training in the new jets and deployment to Korea .

One of our Weekend Warriors at Squantum was a baseball player named Ted Williams. He was on the flight line at CP, preparing for a trip west and he was not a happy camper.  Like many of us he was a two-timer Marine and again had to quit his job in the middle of another big year for the Red Sox.

When the tabloid Sporting News sent a query to the PA shop at CP asking for an interview with Ted, specifically to find out if he was planning to come back to Boston after the war, I thought I might be a logical candidate to take on the assignment as the liaison person. The shop was  loaded with talent at the time, including a former veteran sports writer from the Flint Michigan Journal. He pulled  rank and got the job.

The whole thing went sour, however,  when Ted refused to speculate on his future in major league baseball. To say he was somewhat ticked off at the media (especially those pundits on all four newspapers in Boston ) would be understating the situation. But he went on to fly many combat and ground-support missions in Korea , at one point bringing his damaged fighter plane to a safe landing. He did return to baseball and continued with his great career. 

The town of Havelock was, as you know, a close-by liberty haven for Marines at CP. And, as expected, the local newspaper kept a close watch on Cherry Point. Thus the story on the front page one day in 1952 headlined “Marines Flee During Raid on House of Ill Repute.”  The local gendarmes did in fact raid such a house off  base, scattered the clientele and booked several of the ladies of the evening.

I don’t remember how the PA shop reacted to this bit of local news, if at all. I have scanned “Command Attention” in search of some sound advice to follow in such a situation and found nothing applicable.

Meanwhile I was having a ball with news straight from the flight line. There were mechanics, bank tellers, accountants, merchants,  pilots, all with a story to tell the home folks about their new jobs in the Marine Corps. Almost everything that I sent back to the Patriot Ledger showed up on the op-ed page, including a long piece on the air base and how it was gearing up for another war on distant shores.

This experience enhanced my job search at time of  discharge in late 1952. Rather than return to Boston and compete with thousands of new journalism graduates from half a dozen universities I went to a five-day daily near Richmond in time to cover the national presidential election that year. You could easily say I owe the Marine Corps (and the North Koreans) for giving me a start in the news business.

— Don Knight

P.S.  I know that you put that typo in Chap. 6 of your book to see how many readers would  eventually mention it to you. Perhaps I am the only one who noticed, and the only one to bother you with such trivia.  But hey, I coughed up 20 bucks for the book and I mean to get my money’s worth!