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Mount Grabs Win In Home Opener, 75-58

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Blair Garrett

The first of many has been achieved.

After a long offseason, the Mount St. Mary’s Men’s Basketball team cruised to victory in the team’s home opener of the season, defeating Gettysburg College, 75-58.

The Mount opened the game at a torrid pace, immediately igniting the crowd on a dunk by forward Nana Opoku to get the crowd roaring from the first whistle. Opoku’s score gave Mount St. Mary’s a lead it would not surrender throughout the entirety of the game.

A blistering pace over the first 10 minutes of the match saw the Mount form a sizable lead over the Bullets, punishing mistakes left and right and forcing Gettysburg to adapt to their dominant play down low. Mount St. Mary’s held a 25-6 lead in what looked to be a blowout early.

Basketball is a game of momentum, though, and the Bullets battled their way back to cut Mount St. Mary’s lead to just a few possessions, capitalizing off a string of turnovers.

With just an 11-point lead at halftime, the Mount had plenty of work to do to close out the game and take its first win of the season, but Gettysburg still had plenty of fight left.

The Bullets came out swinging, almost tying the game before a key timeout by head coach Dan Engelstad got the group back on track. “We just weren’t playing Mount basketball,” Engelstad said. “We’re not defending, we’re not back in transition, we’re not communicating. When you do that, that’s how teams can get back in the game.”

Mount St. Mary’s timeout allowed the players to take a breath, reset, and focus on getting back to the core of what makes them a successful team, and they followed that break by scoring the next 10 points, grabbing a convincing lead to close out the game.

Guards Vado Morse and Damian Chong Qui picked up the pace in the second half, forcing Gettysburg to turn the ball over and allowing the Mount to use its speed and athleticism to extend the lead. Morse finished the game with 14 points and four steals, while Chong Qui cashed in on 13 points.

Forward Malik Jefferson was a consistent thorn in the Gettysburg side, grabbing offensive rebounds to recycle the ball and offer second and third chances for Mount shots. Jefferson’s efforts netted him a double-double, putting up 14 points and 13 rebounds to pace the team.

While the end result reads as a win and the team’s first of the season, there is much work to be done to continue, putting up impressive results and playing to the potential this team has. “I thought we came out pretty well with some fire early, but then we got sloppy,” Engelstad said. “The second half, we had some plays where our offense was able to get initiated because of our defense, and we picked it up a bit.”

Communication has been a key word ringing through Knott Arena all throughout the offseason; and in order to reach the team’s goals, improvement in that department to clean up defensive assignments and passing plays will go a long way.

“Communication is something we’ve been preaching for so long,” Engelstad said. “It was good at points, but if we don’t string it together for the majority of the game, then we’ll have different results.”

A few miscues leading to turnovers and some poor shooting from beyond the arc left a bit to be desired for the team, so any improvement in those areas is a great place to start building confidence and momentum throughout the year.

The sky’s the limit for Mount basketball, and Engelstad has the systems in place for the team to breed success this season. Although there are things to work on early in the season, this team has all the tools to bring fans to their feet and wins to their record.

Catch your local college basketball team when the Mount returns to the Knott Arena on Tuesday, November 26, at 7:00 p.m. to face off against Utah Valley.

Our Neighborhood Veterans

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by James Rada, Jr.

The Living History of Chuck Caldwell

Chuck Caldwell and his father, George, came to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on the last day of June 1938 for the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. The town decorated with banners, bunting, and lights, and was so crowded that the Caldwells couldn’t find a room to stay in and spent their first night sleeping in a chicken coop. Chuck, who was fourteen years old, didn’t mind because he had made it to Gettysburg.

Chuck and his father visited the Veterans’ Camp, which had been constructed on the north end of Gettysburg College and some adjacent private property. Union Veteran tents were located on lettered streets, from Biglerville Road to Mummasburg Road. Confederate Veteran tents lined numbered streets, from Mummasburg Road to the Reading Railroad. Only about 2,000 Veterans had made it to the reunion, although tens of thousands more people were in town.

“It was a thrill to be able to see both armies together at one time,” Chuck said. “It was just too much. I would have walked from home to be there.”

When Chuck met a Veteran, he would get the man to sign his autograph book and write down his hometown and unit. Chuck also had his picture taken with the Veteran. Chuck later added some flourishes, such as a Union or Confederate flag. When he was finished, he had nearly fifty autographs in the book.

It’s a priceless piece of history that he still cherishes.

 

A Talent For Art

Chuck was born in Princeton, Illinois, in 1923. Because his father was a minister, the Caldwells moved from town to town each time he took a new job. Although both Chuck’s father and grandfather were clergymen, Chuck didn’t want to follow in their footsteps. That was obvious from a young age.

“I was a pew climber in church,” Chuck said. “I just wouldn’t sit still.”

With George preaching at the front of the church, it fell to Ellen Caldwell to keep her ears open to the sermon and her eyes on young Chuck, as he would crawl over, under, and across the pews, disturbing nearby churchgoers.

His mother finally stopped trying to make her son sit down. Instead, she gave Chuck paper and a pencil and let him draw, hoping to focus his attention elsewhere.

It worked. Chuck became so focused on creating something on the sheet of paper that the only part of him moving during the service was his hand. He still wasn’t listening to the sermons, but at least he wasn’t disturbing everyone around him.

Chuck won his first art competition at the 1940 Wayne County Ohio Hobby Exposition, with a diorama of the railyard scene in Gone With the Wind. The display featured four hundred different clay figures, in addition to the ones he had drawn into the background scenery. The piece was so popular that a local department store displayed it in their window to help attract customers.

 

Becoming a Marine

Chuck wasn’t large enough to play football, but he was a huge fan of the game, especially the University of Alabama team. Because of this, Alabama was his only choice for college when he graduated high school in 1941. He even became the freshman football team manager.

“I got picked on by the players because I was small. It was all right, though, because I was part of the team. I was part of the Great Crimson Tide.”

Chuck worked hard and long hours. Unfortunately, most of that time was spent with the football team. As Chuck grew skeptical about his chances of passing his classes, he decided that he needed a plan in case he wouldn’t be returning to the university after the Christmas break.

On December 1, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps. All that was left for him to do was to pass his final physical. He arranged it so that he wouldn’t be inducted until after Christmas.

On Sunday, December 7, Chuck was actually studying when his roommate rushed into the room shouting that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. Chuck was stunned. He knew from his roommate’s tone that something was wrong, but he wasn’t quite sure what.

“Where’s Pearl Harbor?” Chuck asked.

They had to dig out an atlas to locate Pearl Harbor.

As the realization settled on Chuck that the Japanese had attacked the United States and that the two countries were now at war, Chuck’s first thought was that he now had an excuse to do poorly on his exams. Then as he realized what he was thinking, he felt shame.

Chuck left school on December 15, without even taking his finals. It didn’t matter now. He headed home on the train to tell his parents that he was going to be a Marine.

The physical at the end of December was quick and basic. The minimum requirement for Marines at the time was that they weigh at least 120 pounds and stand at least five feet six inches tall. Chuck became a Marine by one pound and half an inch.

He made it through five weeks of basic training at Parris Island, South Carolina, and shipped out to New Zealand, knowing that he was going to be fighting in the war.

“I wasn’t scared,” Chuck said. “I was going to take part in real history.”

 

WWII

Chuck’s early months in the Pacific involved a lot of sailing, from one island to another, but then on November 2, 1942, he landed on Guadalcanal to reinforce a group of Marines who had been fighting the entrenched Japanese for weeks.

He spent the next five months on the island, fighting occasionally, and dodging bombs from almost daily air raids. Japanese bombers would fly from ships surrounding the island to drop their bombs. The goal was to destroy the runway on Henderson Field, in the hopes of keeping the Marines on the ground.

The raids kept the Marines’ nerves on edge, especially at night when they couldn’t see the planes coming.

Some mornings, they would find odd footprints from people wearing tabis in camp. These were Japanese tennis-shoe-type boots that separated the big toe from the rest of the toes. Chuck realized that the footprints meant that the Japanese had come through their camp unseen.

“It made me think that somebody was not guarding our camp too well,” Chuck said. “That’s when I started sleeping on my back with my K-bar next to me.”

On November 14, Chuck was awakened by nearby explosions, just after midnight. The Japanese ships had turned their large guns on the island and were shelling it.

“Coconut trees were splintered and falling everywhere.”

As the shelling continued, Chuck realized that it was too heavy to stay in the foxhole. He needed to get to the air raid shelter.

He started counting how long it was between the time a gun fired and when the shell hit. The time between firing from the ship and hitting the island was consistent.

When one shell hit nearby, Chuck took off running. Apparently, one of the shells came in quicker than expected. A coconut tree exploded near Chuck, sending wood splinters into his right knee, left chest, and wrist.

Chuck yelled as he hit the ground and rolled. He saw blood, but he wasn’t feeling pain at the moment. He couldn’t rest out in the open. He got to his feet and hobbled on. He would eventually receive a Purple Heart for this wound.

Chuck eventually got off Guadalcanal, but he was transferred to the Second Division Marines and sent to Tarawa a little more than a year after he had arrived at Guadalcanal. Although the fight there was shorter, it was just as fierce as Guadalcanal.

The Marines met heavy resistance as they landed at Tarawa. They reached the beaches, but could barely hold that position. Later waves of Marines took heavy casualties even before they reached the shore. Ammunition ran low, and the Marines had to scavenge ammunition belts from the dead.

The water was chest deep as Chuck started wading ashore. He held his rifle above his head. The Japanese peppered the water with bullets.

“We lost three hundred men in 500 yards,” Chuck said.

Chuck tried to ignore the men suddenly floating face down in the water around him. He dove underwater and swam, hoping to escape the bullets splashing around him.

His job at Tarawa was to offload the ships that made it to the dock with supplies. He and the other Marines carrying supplies were popular targets for the Japanese, because they were out in the open and couldn’t fire back.

Near the end of three days of fighting and almost no sleep, Chuck collapsed. It turns out that he had contracted malaria, most likely on Guadalcanal.

He returned home for a thirty-day leave in 1944, but after another bout of malaria, he wound up extending his time. While recovering in a Navy hospital, he met Jackie Murphy, a WAVE (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) nurse, who would eventually marry him the following year.

 

Nuclear Bombs

After the war ended, Chuck earned his art degree and took a job in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, designing displays for the American Museum of Atomic Energy. He eventually transferred to a different department, doing technical drawings, which turned out to be very boring.

Anxious to escape his boredom, he volunteered to spend the summers of 1957 and 1958 in Nevada, setting up atomic bomb tests and collecting data after explosions. He saw dozens of bomb detonations.

Chuck was excited to see his first atomic bomb detonation. He expected an ear-shattering explosion.

“It wasn’t that noisy, but what happened afterwards is that this doughnut rolled out from the center and knocked you on your ass if you weren’t kneeling down,” recalled Chuck.

The doughnut was the concussive force of the explosion stirring up sand as it moved outward from ground zero.

 

On His Own

In 1968, with four children and a wife to support, Chuck decided to strike out on his own as an artist. He quickly found work, including selling miniatures to shops in Gettysburg. The Caldwells moved to Lake Dallas, Texas, in the early 1970s, where Chuck had the promise of steady work.

Things didn’t pan out quite as he had expected, and the Caldwells decided to move to Gettysburg in 1980. Chuck came first and got his small shop in the Old Gettysburg Village established. He had been visiting the town for most of his life and was excited to finally call it home.

Over the years, he has sculpted more than 15,000 miniature soldiers, musicians, and sports figures. This doesn’t even count the thousands of even smaller figures he crafted to fill the stadium models that he built.

Jackie died in 2007, after sixty-two years of marriage, and Chuck decided that it was time for him to retire. He still makes some miniatures from his home.

At age ninety-four, Chuck is still healthy and living on his own in Gettysburg. He still visits with friends and hosts holidays for his family, which has grown to include four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

“Our gun crew around the gun after firing all day.” — Chuck Caldwell

Happily Ever After

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I Do. Do You?

By Valerie Nusbaum

Charles “Chuck” Caldwell has talked with Civil War soldiers, fought against the Japanese in WWII, and chased mushroom clouds after atomic bomb explosions. Now ninety-two years old, he had become part of the history that he loves so much.

His story is now the focus of a fascinating new biography by The Catoctin Banner’s contributing editor James Rada, Jr. Clay Soldiers: One Marine’s Story of War, Art, & Atomic Energy takes the reader on a journey from the Civil War to the age of the atom bomb and back again as it follows Caldwell’s adventures in life.

Chuck first came to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in 1936 on a family vacation and then again in 1938 to attend the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg as a fourteen-year-old boy. The 75th Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg was the last great reunion of Civil War Veterans. About 2,000 aged men gathered in the fields between the Peace Light Memorial and Gettysburg College. Caldwell was there to meet with as many as he could and ask them about the Civil War. To mark the occasion, he had an autograph book filled with pictures of him with the Civil War Veterans and their autographs, Civil War units, and hometowns. He even has the autographs of the men who turned out to be the last-surviving Union and Confederate Veterans.

Born in Princeton, Illinois, in 1923, Chuck spent most of his youth growing up in Orrville, Ohio. A Crimson Tide fan (still to this day), he was in his freshman year at the University of Alabama in 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He joined the Marines and was sent to Parris Island for training in January 1942.

During WWII, he served in the Pacific Theater and fought at Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and Guam. He received a Purple Heart for wounds he received at Guadalcanal. That is also where he contracted malaria.

At the end of the war, he married Jacqueline Murphy, a WAVE (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) he met in the hospital while recovering from a malaria attack.

After the war, Chuck went back to the University of Alabama on the G.I. Bill, and by the time he graduated in 1949, he had a job waiting for him in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The city had only been recently loosening its secret status to allow the public more access to the place where the first atom bomb was developed.

Chuck made displays and drawings for the newly formed Museum of Atomic Energy. He worked there about a year, until he was recalled to service for the Korean War. He didn’t have to fight in this war. When he returned home, he decided to switch jobs. He took a job doing technical drawings for one of the plants in Oak Ridge.

He spent the summers of 1957 and 1958 at the Nevada Test Site, setting up sensors in fake towns in the desert. When an atom bomb was detonated, he was part of the teams that would go back into those towns to try and find any of the fissionable material that they had set up for the test.

“I bet I am one of the few people still around who has actually been under an atomic explosion,” Chuck said.

In the early 1960s, Chuck became a full-time artist, sculpting miniatures for a variety of clients, including Major League baseball teams, the Franklin Mint, and the Ringling Brothers Circus Museum. Some of his miniatures were even displayed in the Knoxville World’s Fair.

Caldwell’s story is a fascinating one about an ordinary man who has been a part of so many extraordinary events in history. Rada’s narrative, based mainly on interviews with Caldwell and a review of his personal papers, captures the story perfectly.

Midwest Book Review called Rada “a writer of considerable and deftly expressed storytelling talent.”

Rada is the author of six historical fiction novels and nine non-fiction history books, including No North, No South…: The Grand Reunion at the 50th Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg and Battlefield Angels: The Daughters of Charity Work as Civil War Nurses. He also won a first-place award for local column writing from the Maryland-Delaware-DC Press Association in May, 2016. The award was for his “Looking Back” column that runs monthly in the Cumberland Times-News.

Clay Soldiers retails for $19.95 and is available at local bookstores, online retailers, and his website at www.jamesrada.com.

Charles “Chuck” Caldwell has talked with Civil War soldiers, fought against the Japanese in WWII, and chased mushroom clouds after atomic bomb explosions. Now ninety-two years old, he had become part of the history that he loves so much.

His story is now the focus of a fascinating new biography by The Catoctin Banner’s contributing editor James Rada, Jr. Clay Soldiers: One Marine’s Story of War, Art, & Atomic Energy takes the reader on a journey from the Civil War to the age of the atom bomb and back again as it follows Caldwell’s adventures in life.

Chuck first came to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in 1936 on a family vacation and then again in 1938 to attend the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg as a fourteen-year-old boy. The 75th Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg was the last great reunion of Civil War Veterans. About 2,000 aged men gathered in the fields between the Peace Light Memorial and Gettysburg College. Caldwell was there to meet with as many as he could and ask them about the Civil War. To mark the occasion, he had an autograph book filled with pictures of him with the Civil War Veterans and their autographs, Civil War units, and hometowns. He even has the autographs of the men who turned out to be the last-surviving Union and Confederate Veterans.

Born in Princeton, Illinois, in 1923, Chuck spent most of his youth growing up in Orrville, Ohio. A Crimson Tide fan (still to this day), he was in his freshman year at the University of Alabama in 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He joined the Marines and was sent to Parris Island for training in January 1942.

During WWII, he served in the Pacific Theater and fought at Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and Guam. He received a Purple Heart for wounds he received at Guadalcanal. That is also where he contracted malaria.

At the end of the war, he married Jacqueline Murphy, a WAVE (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) he met in the hospital while recovering from a malaria attack.

After the war, Chuck went back to the University of Alabama on the G.I. Bill, and by the time he graduated in 1949, he had a job waiting for him in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The city had only been recently loosening its secret status to allow the public more access to the place where the first atom bomb was developed.

Chuck made displays and drawings for the newly formed Museum of Atomic Energy. He worked there about a year, until he was recalled to service for the Korean War. He didn’t have to fight in this war. When he returned home, he decided to switch jobs. He took a job doing technical drawings for one of the plants in Oak Ridge.

He spent the summers of 1957 and 1958 at the Nevada Test Site, setting up sensors in fake towns in the desert. When an atom bomb was detonated, he was part of the teams that would go back into those towns to try and find any of the fissionable material that they had set up for the test.

“I bet I am one of the few people still around who has actually been under an atomic explosion,” Chuck said.

In the early 1960s, Chuck became a full-time artist, sculpting miniatures for a variety of clients, including Major League baseball teams, the Franklin Mint, and the Ringling Brothers Circus Museum. Some of his miniatures were even displayed in the Knoxville World’s Fair.

Caldwell’s story is a fascinating one about an ordinary man who has been a part of so many extraordinary events in history. Rada’s narrative, based mainly on interviews with Caldwell and a review of his personal papers, captures the story perfectly.

Midwest Book Review called Rada “a writer of considerable and deftly expressed storytelling talent.”

Rada is the author of six historical fiction novels and nine non-fiction history books, including No North, No South…: The Grand Reunion at the 50th Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg and Battlefield Angels: The Daughters of Charity Work as Civil War Nurses. He also won a first-place award for local column writing from the Maryland-Delaware-DC Press Association in May, 2016. The award was for his “Looking Back” column that runs monthly in the Cumberland Times-News.

Clay Soldiers retails for $19.95 and is available at local bookstores, online retailers, and his website at www.jamesrada.com.