Holdings
Military Maneuvers It’s hard to imagine uniformed high school students marching around campus in drills, field maneuvers and parades. But you know what they say about extraordinary times, especially when the time in question was 1943. St. Edward’s Military Academy had a short but memorable life on campus when it briefly replaced the high school during World War II. Administrators switched to the boarding school format to help keep St. Edward’s High School open in the cashstrapped war years and to educate students too young to go off to war. During this era, Father James Gibbons, CSC, the principal, was called “commandant,” and the gym doubled as an armory. Nearly everyone on campus — including many of the religious — wore military uniforms (which included the regalia in the photo on the right). St. Edward’s Military Academy put down its arms and went civilian again in 1946, a year after the war ended. It only lasted a short time, but it left its mark on campus and beyond in moments like the stirring tableau, described in St. Edward’s University: A Centennial History by Brother William Dunn, CSC: “On Armistance Day 1944, the cadet corps formed ranks at Second Street and marched up Congress Avenue to the Capitol. There at 11 a.m. a bugle sounded and they faced west for one minute paying tribute to the war dead.” — Steve Wilson
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courtesy of University archives and special collections
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