Stan's training at Clemson is recorded in Army ASTP records

Stan's training at Clemson is recorded in Army ASTP records

• Jan 28, 2022
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The search for the other Stanley Ruby yielded a few useful new items on our father. Ancestry has a fairly new collection of Clemson University Student Military Records, mostly dating from World War I but including WWII-era enrollees in the U.S. Army Specialist Training Program. 

That was the program that allowed some draft-eligible young men to defer military service while continuing their college education. The idea was to provide the Army with a cadre of technically trained specialists, and also to maintain enrollment at land-grant universities at a time when ROTC training had already been discontinued. 

From the records, we see that Stan was in the program at Clemson for two three-month sessions in the fall and winter of 1943-44. This tells us that he was still in South Carolina until at least mid-February of 1944, and thus gives a time frame for this later arrival shipment to New Guinea. 

We see in these records that it was at Clemson that Stan first met and became friendly with Dick Diamond, a Jewish kid from UCLA who would go on to a distinguished career in nuclear chemistry. Richard M. Diamond is listed in another section of the same company during Stan's six-month stint at Clemson. 

I'll try to learn about about the ATSP and what we can learn from Stan's attendance about the overall timeline of his military experience, before and after his six months at Clemson.