Great Lakes Naval Training Station
by Jim Potter
When Robert “Bob” Parks, eighteen, left his home unannounced in McPherson County, Kansas, in October 1915, he may have been looking for adventure. A year-and-a-half later, in May 1918, when Robert was nineteen, he left on a much longer, more exciting journey. He enlisted in the United States Navy.
I’ve been unable to locate any irrefutable evidence about Robert’s return home or contact with his adoptive parents after his unannounced departure in 1915 until June 1918. However, he could have been missing for as little as a week before returning home. Just because newspapers didn’t report his return doesn’t mean he remained missing. A photograph of Robert in his Navy uniform, photographed in a McPherson, Kansas, studio suggests he was visiting his parents after graduating from boot camp and electrician-radio training.
On May 22, 1917, at age nineteen, Robert enlisted in the United States Navy at Kansas City, Missouri. This was about six weeks after the government declared war on Germany, and four days after President Woodrow Wilson signed the conscription bill that prepared for the government’s first draft of the World War (also known as the Great War).
It had been quite a journey for President Wilson and the country. Wilson was re-elected in 1916 on the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War!” But by 1917, American public opinion had turned against Germany. A major factor was the Kaiser’s resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare in February which permitted German submarines to attack and sink unarmed neutral ships. American citizens were also angered by the publication of the Zimmerman Telegram in March. It was an intercepted German proposal for a military alliance with Mexico if the United States joined the conflict. In declaring war, Wilson was fed up with Germany’s renewal of the U-boat terror campaign and explained that the entry of the United States into the war was “to make the world safe for democracy.”1
If Robert was living in McPherson County shortly before his enlistment in Kansas City, he had local opportunities to hear public speakers encouraging men to enlist in a just cause. The McPherson County Navy League sponsored speakers to call attention to the military branch.2
Since McPherson County had a sizeable population of German Russian Mennonites who held religious objections to combat, not everyone was eager to enlist.3
It seems remarkable that so many men from the Mid-West joined the Navy, but the military focused their messaging on young men just out of high school who were used to physical labor, many from working on farms. The Navy marketed its technical and travel opportunities to landlocked states, including Kansas. In advertising, the Navy gave reasons why the Navy was a better choice than the Army or Marines. In recruitment drives, potential enlistees were promised “Three Square Meals a Day, a Good Bed, and a Real Job” while seeing the world.
Since Robert Parks had helped his father on the farm and was fascinated with engines, he may have jumped at the opportunity to work with modern machinery or the emerging field of maritime radio. Although there were deadly risks at sea, especially from German submarines, to many, the horrors of prolonged trench warfare were an uncertainty to be avoided. Also, by enlisting in the Navy, men got to choose to serve—a point of pride—rather than being drafted by the Army and possibly begin training with friends in “boot camp.”
I haven’t found any documentation to suggest Robert had any experience with wireless radio prior to his enlistment, but I can imagine his excitement at the possibilities of working in high-tech. Unfortunately, I don’t know when Robert had his first inclination that the Navy might be his ticket to a professional career. At age nineteen, Robert could have enlisted in the Army with written parental consent since he was under twenty-one.4 The Navy permitted anyone eighteen or older to enlist on their own signature; seventeen-year-olds required parental approval. In 1917, the Navy was short of specialists, including radio operators who were transitioning from spark-gap to vacuum-tube technology. Selection of candidates were tested for intelligence, basic science, and spelling, while the Morse code audition checked a sailor for rhythm, auditory acuity, and the ability to distinguish subtle pitch differences. Due to the Navy’s crucial need, it was willing to train young men and pay them a competitive salary. Robert had to know that if he could get an opportunity to show his aptitude by training in maritime radio and electrical engineering, he would be better compensated than ordinary seamen during his wartime duty. The icing on the cake for Robert or any seaman, was a potential career as a skilled electrician, radio operator, or mechanic upon the end of the war.
*
Once Robert decided on joining the Navy, he would have taken a preliminary screening by a local recruiter or postmaster in or near his home, probably McPherson, Kansas. A train ride to Kansas City, Missouri, would follow, where he had to locate the United States Recruiting Station in the post office building at 9th and Walnut. That office served as the primary hub for processing recruits from both Kansas and Western Missouri during the war’s mobilization.
At the recruiting station, Parks completed his formal enlistment in the Navy which included a rigorous physical exam given by Navy doctors, and taking the Oath of Allegiance. Robert’s enlistment papers, dated May 22, 1917, reveal his civilian trade as farming, home address of McPherson, Kansas, “R-5” (Route 5), and his next of kin as his father, Henry Parks. Robert agreed to serve until the duration of the war, beginning at a rate for Apprentice Seaman of seventeen dollars and sixty cents per month.5
Parks’ age was listed as nineteen years and nine months old. He stood five feet, three and three-quarter inches, and weighed one hundred and twenty-one pounds. Parks had a ruddy complexion, brown hair, and “blue 7” eyes.6
Upon signing his enlistment papers, Parks was technically a sailor on active duty (but without a uniform and without pay). Due to the logjam of enlistees so early in the war and the limited space at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, Parks was sent home to wait for orders before being given a meal ticket and rail pass for the train ride to the training station.
Seven weeks after enlisting in Kansas City, Missouri, on May 22, Robert Parks again traveled to Kansas City, then to Chicago by train, and a short one-hour trip north. Parks probably arrived at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station overlooking Lake Michigan, on July 12. This tent city was boot camp for basic military training. Entering the facility, Robert picked up his canvas sea bag (for holding his clothing) and uniforms before another medical exam and a cleansing shower.
When Robert arrived, he was guaranteed twenty-one days in detention. It wasn’t jail, but all new men were segregated and observed to see if they had any contagious diseases, such as scarlet fever, measles, or influenza.
The Training Station, opened in 1911, was designed to accommodate a maximum of 1,500 apprentice seamen. Its rapid growth, seemingly overnight, is a remarkable story.7 In 1916, the average number of recruits received each month was 220. In January 1917, the numbers jumped to 618 per month; in February to 922; in March, 1,364; and in April—the month of the declaration of the war—9,027.8
Work on the tremendous expansion of camps didn’t begin until July 3, 1917, after government contracts were signed. Robert and his peers were living in tents while helping build the facilities, since all the enlisted men were quartered in tents through September.9
I haven’t any details as to the military training that Parks personally received at the Great Lakes Training Station. In preparation to fight in the Great War, sailors were taught more than weapons proficiency. They learned to drill, follow orders, and work as a team, while building their physical fitness through marching, exercise, and playing sports.
*
The McPherson Weekly Republican newspaper (McPherson, Kansas) published an informative article on Friday, July 20, 1917, about the Great Lakes Naval Training Station. It was a first-hand report by John Bennell, of McPherson, who had written a letter to the newspaper describing his experience of arriving at the station, being admitted, and his experience at the detention camp.10
TWO McPHERSON BOYS
John Bennell and Rob’t. Creager are having an enjoyable time at the Great Lakes Naval Training station. In a letter to the Republican, Mr. Bennell writes as follows.
Great Lakes, Illinois
July 14, 1917.
Dear Sirs :—
Robert Creager and I arrived in K.C., Sunday morning, July 8, and reported at the office about 9 o’clock. But as no one showed up, we proceeded over to the hotel and pulled the commodore out of bed. He rubbed his eyes and wanted to know what the trouble was. Anyhow he had dated our orders a day a head of time. We enjoyed the day very much, however, boating and swimming.
Monday evening twenty of us started for Chicago in a special Pullman and arrived in Chicago at 7:25 a. m., and at the camp which is thirty-five miles northwest of the city at about 11:45.
At the gate they lined us all up on the curb and searched us for firearms, liquor and cigarettes, after which we were marched on up to the administration building. Here we were signed up and given blankets and mattresses and assigned to our tents.
The camp as a whole covers several square miles and is divided off into several sections, the most important of which are, the Paul Jones Camp, Hospital Camp, and Detention Camp for twenty-one days until we have been vaccinated for smallpox and received three shots for typus. During the twenty-one days you are not allowed outside the camp for any purpose; can not talk to visitors. Except thru the bars.
Cigarettes are not allowed to be smoked in this camp for fear of spreading disease. After the first of August, I understand cigarettes will be abolished from all branches of the Army and Navy. Cigars sell for 4 and 9 cents and smoking tobacco 4c and 9c.
The Detention Camp is laid out nicely, it contains six barracks, administration hall, galley (mess hall) and hundreds of tents. As to the size of the other camps I don’t know on account of the trees, all we can see of the other camps is the tower of the Administration building of the Main camp and Aerial towers.
At the present time we have about 1,750 men in this camp and most of them are just as green as we are, as about 1,500 of the 1,750 have rolled in since last Friday. The biggest job seems to be feeding the mob. The galley was only made to cook for 500 men and they are now feeding over three times that number. The boys line up in two long lines and file by bins and get their mess kits and then on by tables where the eats are dished out. Believe me Packey (our chief cook) sees to it that every boy gets enough to eat. For breakfast today we had grapefruit, beans, bread, and coffee. On account of our practice, dinner and breakfast are rather light, but supper sure fills you up. For dinner today we had steak and onions, rice, fruit, cake, tea and coffee bread. For supper, spuds, salmon and cabbage salad, peaches and ice tea and bread.
Packey says I wants all Youse boys to gets enuf to eat, come on there Youse boys. He is a little Jew and sure a swell cook. Besides what I mentioned we sometimes have apples or cantaloupes for breakfast.
We rise at 5 a. m. swab out tents, bathe. Breakfast at 7, drill from 8 or 8:30 until 11:30. Dinner at 12 and then drill until 4:30 o’clock.
The first day we were here Bob [Creager] and I with about twenty other fellows were cleaning out the street around the galley that is swept and scrubbed after every meal and also all the tables and benches. Strung over an acre or so of ground.
Thursday and Saturday afternoons are devoted to athletic sports, such as wrestling, boxing, etc. And in the evenings stunts are pulled off over at the Y. M. C. A. building. We have out-of-door movie shows, two or three nights a week.
As a whole I sure like it fine, a fine bunch of young fellows, fine grub to eat, a cool clean place to eat, good officers and enough to do to keep busy. Some life eh?
*
The average stay at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station was three to four months, although some of the earliest recruits were rushed through to continue training on ships while helping the United States keep the path to Europe open by sea.11
It appears Apprentice Seaman Parks completed boot camp in less than five weeks because his service record shows his advancement in rating to Seaman Second Class (Sea. 2c) on August 16. That’s when Parks would have begun his additional, specialized training as a radio operator at the Great Lakes Radio School, one of fifteen specialized schools.12 The “underlying policy was to teach the ‘why’ as well as the ‘how.’” As with all subjects, it took a “willingness and an ability to learn.”13
“The course of training consisted of instruction in the Continental-Morse code, the students having to acquire a speed of approximately twenty words a minute; and instruction in the principles of electricity and magnetism, including motors, generators, and the principal parts of the various pieces of apparatus used in radio work and the connection with it.”14
Robert benefited from his prior mechanical experience working with automobiles and tractor engines in McPherson County. Besides being efficient with Morse Code, radio operators were required to maintain the radios and keep them running. All men being trained as radio operators were soon answering to a common nickname, “Sparks.” The moniker’s origin was due to the spark-gap transmitters used in wireless telegraphy that generated radio waves by creating a high-voltage electric discharge across a gap, which produced loud, bright blue flashes of light and a distinct crackling sound.
It’s impossible to imagine the culture shock of the raw recruits arriving at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, especially those from small towns across the Mid-West, but the young men rose to the occasion. They quickly adapted to training in a regiment of 1,726 sailors. As the men matured into Bluejackets (a Navy enlisted man below the grade of Chief Petty Officer), they helped change the world by serving their country.
Seaman Second Class Parks graduated from the Great Lakes Radio School on Friday, January 18, 1918. He was then transferred to the United States Radio School at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Parks had a long train ride over the weekend before classes began on Monday, January 20. After six months of training near Chicago, he was getting closer to sea duty in the Atlantic. Cambridge was just across the Charles River from Boston.15
*
NOTES
1. Note: During the World War, a German or Austro-Hungarian submarine was called an unterseeboot, which directly translates into English as under-sea boat. The word breaks down as follows: unter = under, see = sea, and boot = boat. The shortened version of the German word remains U-Boot.
2. McPherson Weekly Republican (McPherson, KS), May 11, 1917, 4.
3. McPherson Daily Republican (McPherson, Kansas), April 23, 1918, 1; Schowalter Oral History Collection, Henry Cooprider interview in 1969. Marginal Mennonite Society public group Facebook post, April 25, 2025. During the World War, the pacifist stance of Mennonites in McPherson County resulted in patriotic groups in the form of mobs tarring and feathering individuals who refused to purchase war bonds. On April 22, 1918, the home of Bishop Walter Cooprider, of the West Liberty (Old) Mennonite congregation in Groveland Township, was visited by about forty vigilantes intending to intimidate and punish Cooprider. When the bishop, 53, refused to purchase Liberty Bonds to show his patriotism, his son, George, 25, offered himself as a sacrifice in place of his father who was in ill health. “He was taken at his word, and a liberal dose of tar and feathers were administered.” The mob then traveled to the home of Charles Diener, a 27-year-old pastor of the Spring Valley Mennonite congregation who was accused of removing a flag off his church’s building that had been nailed to it by loyalists of the area earlier that day. After Charles said he had taken it down, the vigilantes continued their tar and feather punishment. After driving back to the Spring Valley church and spreading tar on the building, they confronted Daniel “D. A.” Diener, 62, leader of the Spring Valley Mennonite congregation, at his home. After declining the demand that he purchase bonds to support the war, Daniel’s whiskers were slashed and he was stripped of his clothing, receiving the same tar and feather punishment as his son, George. The Cooprider and Diener families reported that despite the leaders wearing masks, they recognized the highly respected businessmen and neighbors, many whom the Mennonites had assumed were their good friends. I’ve got to wonder if Henry P. Parks, the adoptive father of Robert Borchart Parks, would have participated in this vigilantism and wartime hysteria.
4. Note: The Army did not accept seventeen-year-olds, even with parental approval.
5. World War Service Records of Robert Walter Parks, National Archives, St. Louis, Missouri. Parks’ monthly pay was nearly doubled within a month of his enlistment date. On May 22, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson signed an act that raised the World War enlisted pay by fifteen dollars per month for those making under twenty-one dollars, but this increase did not take effect until June 1, 1917 (boosting the total pay to $32.60 starting in June). Additionally, during Parks’ service, his salary would have increased upon obtaining higher ratings. However, once he signed up for war risk insurance to opt into low-cost government life insurance, deductions decreased his take-home pay.
6. Service Records of Robert Walter Parks, National Archives. Note on “Blue-7” eye color: Prior to reading Park’s enlistment papers, I didn’t realize that the US military used a scale to standardize eye color classification. I thought someone’s blue eyes might have been called light blue, deep blue, or maybe blue-gray, but it’s much more complicated. In 1917, when Parks enlisted, German anthropologist Rudolf Martin had already created the “Martin scale” to categorize sixteen different eye colors. Blue-7 fell into a mixed eye category. It indicated a predominately light blue or blue-gray base that featured prominent brown or yellowish-brown patterning.
7. Francis Buzzell, Great Lakes Naval Training Station: A History. (Boston: Maynard & Company, 1919, 3.
8. Buzzell, Great Lakes Naval Training, 4.
9. Buzzell, Great Lakes Naval Training, 80.
10. McPherson Weekly Republican (McPherson, Kansas), July 20, 1917, 2.
11. Buzzell, Great Lakes Naval Training, 67.
12. Buzzell, Great Lakes Naval Training, 122.
13. Buzzell, Great Lakes Naval Training, 108.
14. Buzzell, Great Lakes Naval Training, 124.
15. Note: One example of other recruits receiving radio service training is from a December 14, 1917, McPherson Weekly Republican (McPherson, Kansas) newspaper article. Eight students at McPherson College were entering the US Navy department’s radio reserve service. The men were to report to Kansas City and then travel to the Great Lakes Station near Chicago for three months. After completing that training, they would be sent to Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts) for an additional four months of work.
Today, the Great Lakes Naval Training Station is named Naval Station Great Lakes. Learn more at the following link. https://cnrma.cnic.navy.mil/Installations/NAVSTA-Great-Lakes/
Leave a Reply