Today’s tidbit involves both the CCC camp southeast of Seneca, Kansas and military related news in March of 1941.
PLAN SCHOOL FOR DEFENSE
AT SENECA CAMP
Details Are Being Worked Out for Special Training Course
The Soil Conservation service is promoting plans for a special defense course in machine-shop work, to be given at the Seneca camp.
Hope is to obtain enough lathes and other tools of machine shops to provide one tool for each of 15 young men. These would be given a three-hour training course each evening for five evenings a week, course to last something like 15 or 18 weeks.
The camp is fortunate in having a man who knows the work and has the ability to present instruction as well. He is Harold Snyder, machinist.
The defense school is handled through government funds, to the states, then through state set-ups which require schools as nominal sponsors. Schools are asked to pay instructors, to be repaid the first pay check within 40 days and following checks within 10 days. Contacts have been made towards getting the Seneca school to act as sponsor. After the defense training is over, some of the equipment may go to the school.
Right now the big problem is to rustle the machinery. Machine shop-outfitters are swamped.
First course started may be limited to CCC enrollees. Mixed groups are not favored because of such items as discipline. It is entirely probable later other classes, open to other young men, may be started.1
- Courier Tribune (Seneca, Kansas), 27 March 1941, page 1 ↩︎