A dream assignment in the Army

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It was the "luck of the draw" that sent Charles "Chuck" Newcomer to Hawaii, the duty of all duties, for his military service. He says he could have been sent to Korea in the aftermath of that war, or he could have been shipped to Alaska or Germany.

"Those were the other places they needed people, but I was one of only two people out of my Signal Corps unit who were sent to Hawaii," says Chuck. "It was some luck of the draw."

It was the summer of 1954 that Chuck enlisted in the United States Army. He was a native of Williamsport who had gone to the Milton S. Hershey School for boys and then to Hershey Junior College, finishing his degree in teaching and business administration at Susquehanna University.

"I couldn't get a job because I was draft-bait," he says, noting that he was deferred from the draft while in college, but became eligible after graduation. "No one was hiring people for teaching positions who were eligible for the draft, so I took the military's entrance physical in June and by July, I was in!"

Chuck was sent to Fort Gordon, Georgia for basic training and stayed on there to attend Signal School.

"It was an eight-week school and I learned how to be a teletype operator," says Chuck. "My undergraduate degree was in business education and I knew how to type, so they assigned me to the Signal Corps."

While at Fort Gordon, Chuck wrote home pretty much every day to his fiancee, Natalie Whittle, a young women he'd met during high school in Hershey.

"I went to private school and Natalie was in public school," says Chuck. "Mutual friends of ours set us up on a blind date. I appeared at her doorstep for the date, but didn't have a car, so we walked to a dance. That was the beginning. Both of us went to Hershey Junior College, and I finished my degree at Susquehanna University while Natalie went to Cornell University in New York for nursing."

"After I went into the Army, I came home for Christmas vacation and proposed to Natalie, but," laughs Chuck, "she didn't get an actual ring for another two months, when I purchased a GI (Government Issue) engagement ring from the PX (the Army's Post Exchange) at Fort Gordon and mailed it to her! She was in New York and I was in Georgia ready to be shipped to Hawaii."

Chuck arrived in Hawaii in February of 1955 and was stationed at Fort Shafter, just outside of Honolulu, a base known as a strategic outpost for America's Army in the Pacific. He jokingly says that one of his toughest days in the military came shortly after he got there.

"I had a day off and a couple of us went down to Waikiki Beach to surf. I got badly sunburned but still had to put on a shirt later to go into work that evening. It was go to work or face a court martial. It might have been February, but there was still great exposure from the sun. I had to work from midnight through until morning, and it was a painful night!"

Chuck says the Signal Corps unit on the Island worked four different shifts.

"There was communication back and forth from the Far East, to the Army Command in Hawaii, back to the mainland. I worked in a communications center there it was before e-mail. Sometimes we'd get encrypted messages that we would have to de-code. But most of the time I was there, it was all pretty mild, from a military standpoint."

"I kept my nose clean, pretty much," adds Chuck. "We would travel around the island, seeing the sights, and we spent a lot of our free time on the beach. I remember visiting the Punchbowl Cemetery, a military cemetery set in a circular area atop an extinct volcano."

The National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, located on Pouwaina Crater, is in fact an impressive sight. Commonly referred to as the Hawaii Punchbowl because of its shape, it is one of two resting places in the Pacific for the recovered remains of World War II dead whose families did not request their return to the Continental United States or who requested that their loved one be buried there. The cemetery opened for burials in 1949 and today is filled to capacity with 33,230 gravesites.

During a two-week vacation, Chuck says a group from the base traveled to the Big Island of Hawaii. They got to see another volcano, Kilauea, one of the most active volcanoes in the world. The word Kilauea in Hawaiian means "spewing" or "much spreading", an apparent reference to the volcano's active nature. In fact, records show there have been 34 eruptions since 1952, and since January 1983, eruptive activity has been continuous along one section of the volcano.

"Kilauea wasn't spewing anything when we were there, but it was impressive," says Chuck. "You could look into the pit and were able to walk across one of the more inactive sections."

Meanwhile, Chuck continued to write home, and Natalie wrote him daily as well.

"The period I was in Hawaii, from February of 1955 to May of '56, was our whole engagement period, so we filled it with letters and a few phone calls," says Chuck. "I tried to call Natalie once from Hawaii and ran out of money during the call. I hung up, went and got more change, and called back."

Private First Class Newcomer was discharged from the Army in May of 1956. He came home and he and Natalie were married a month later. Chuck says he and Natalie's parents actually did most of the preparation for the wedding.

"Natalie was in Berks County working as a visiting nurse. She came home about a day before the wedding. I think our game plan was to keep her busy so she didn't back out of the wedding," laughs Chuck. "We might have come into our relationship blindly, but we've stuck with each other!"

After getting married, the couple lived in Hershey. Chuck got a teaching job at a high school in Elizabethtown and Natalie worked as a school nurse in Lebanon County.

Three years later, Chuck was recruited back to his high school, the Milton Hershey School, where he taught bookkeeping for the next two years. In 1961, he became the assistant principal there. He also secured both his master's and doctoral degrees in psychology from Temple University, after which he served as school psychologist at the Hershey School for four years.

The couple also began their family, first with the birth of son John, who now lives in Virginia, and a couple years later, daughter Jean, now in Tennessee. Today, Chuck and Natalie also have three grandsons.

It was in 1966 that the Newcomer family arrived in Lock Haven and Chuck began a career teaching psychology at the then Lock Haven State College, where he worked the next 31 years.

Retired now for more than 10 years, Chuck and Natalie continue to enjoy their time together. For their 40th wedding anniversary in 1996, they traveled to Hawaii.

"It was my first time back since being stationed there 40 years earlier, and Natalie's first time ever. I got to show her all of the sites," says Chuck. "It was a pretty laid back place back then, nowhere near as expensive as it is today."

"I don't have any outstanding war stories - I didn't hit any war time where I was. I just appreciated having the opportunity to travel around the islands and be on the beaches. I wouldn't have gotten there otherwise."

"I would encourage young men and women to 'go for it' if they're interested in the military," adds Chuck. "I had regimentation in high school, going to an all-boys private school, so I adapted well to the military. And, I used the GI Bill to help pay for all of my master's degree and part of my doctorate."

"I also encouraged my son John to try the military," remembers Chuck. "John was in his first semester at Lock Haven University and I was his advisor. At registration, he asked if he could take an ROTC course as an elective and I said, 'Sure!' John was always interested in the military."

That interest continued and John has served our country the past 26 years, initially in the regular Army, then as a Reservist, and today as a full-time member of the Army's Active Guard Reserve.

In fact, it was the opportunity to sponsor a banner for John that drew Chuck and Natalie to the Hometown Heroes banner program in Lock Haven. The banners for Chuck and John hang side by side along the Lock Haven levee Riverwalk, with John's banner being sponsored by Chuck and Natalie, and Chuck's banner being sponsored by his long-time employer, Lock Haven University.

"We missed the first round of banners. Somehow, we didn't know about it," says Chuck. "But when we saw those banners being put up we went and inquired about it. Our first thought was to get a banner for our son, but when we talked to John about it, he said he wanted my photo on a banner, too, so we submitted information on both of us. I think the banner program has been great for the community, to recognize veterans, then and now. I hope they keep it going!"