At the start of 1944, with the country at war, Mr. and Mrs. Chester Smith of Arbon Valley had a letter from Congressman Henry C. Dworshak of Idaho. The news in it concerned their son, Frank Blair Smith, an apprentice seaman in Navy training at Pocatello: the congressman had nominated him for the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis and ranked him first among the state's candidates. The Associated Press sent the news out under an Arbon dateline, and the Pocatello Tribune printed it on January 3, 1944.
Frank Blair Smith was then twenty. His World War II draft registration, filled out at Crystal in June 1942, gives his birth as June 30, 1923, at Pocatello, and names Chester S. Smith as his contact; his older brother, Glenn Allen Smith, born at Crystal in 1922, registered the same month. His middle name was his mother's family name: she was Arvilla Blair, and the site's family research finds her named as a daughter of Frank Blair of Crystal in his 1956 obituary. Frank Blair chaired the Crystal school trustees in 1925, as the Hayden family page records, and in 1920 his family lived on the upper creek near the Bradleys.
His father is very probably the Chester Smith whom valley children of the 1920s knew as a teacher. A Chester Smith taught the Lyons school, District 26, in 1920–21, and in the autumn of 1923, the year Frank was born, he and Miss Marion Sparks taught the Pauline school, where the county superintendent found them on her rounds. The American Falls Press called him "a late soldier with an over seas record." That December his pupils reported in their own news column that "Mr. Smith and his room" had gone to the Allards' to hear a radio, the first radio the valley's records mention. No single record joins the teacher to the Crystal farmer, but name, age, war service and place all agree. By the 1930s Chester Smith was farming at Crystal and serving on the community's farm committees with Norman Hayden and Elva Thacker; in 1940 he sat on the Arbon–Crystal land-use planning board.
The nomination was a beginning, not a place at the academy. The Tribune headline called it an appointment, but the article itself said the young man still faced an entrance examination on February 16. The next day the paper's column of state notes repeated the news and called him a V-12 trainee at Idaho Southern, as the column named the University of Idaho's southern branch in Pocatello.
What happened at the examination is not known. No later report of Frank Blair Smith at Annapolis turned up in the Pocatello papers or the Utah papers searched for this post. If his family knows how the story ended, the site would be glad to hear it.
On this site: more of the valley's young men in the war years are followed in Arbon Valley men in uniform, 1941–1946.
The story as reported
Pocatello Tribune, January 3, 1944, page 3. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
An Arbon Valley man in Navy training was put forward for the United States Naval Academy as 1944 began. The Associated Press carried the story from Arbon: Congressman Henry C. Dworshak, an Idaho Republican, had picked Frank Blair Smith, then an apprentice seaman, as a candidate for Annapolis.
The source of the news was a letter Dworshak sent to the young man's mother and father, Mr. and Mrs. Chester Smith. Of all the young Idahoans he was putting forward for the academy, Dworshak said, Smith was his first choice.
One hurdle remained: an entrance examination, set for February 16.
The dispatch also sketched his path through college. He had enrolled at Idaho Southern, the University of Idaho's Pocatello branch, in 1942, and spent 1943 at the University of Idaho proper. By July 1943 he was back in Pocatello, now training for the Navy.
The Tribune ran the item on its third page under the headline "Frank Smith, Arbon Given Appointment."
The next day, January 4, the Tribune's page-two column of Idaho notes, signed by The Consul, carried the news again. There Smith appeared as a V-12 trainee on the Pocatello campus whom Congressman Dworshak had chosen for Annapolis, with his examination not yet taken.
Sources
- Pocatello Tribune, January 3, 1944, page 3
- Pocatello Tribune, January 4, 1944, page 2
- Pocatello Tribune, March 22, 1940, page 12
- American Falls Press, June 17, 1921, page 1
- American Falls Press, November 1, 1923, page 1
- American Falls Press, November 8, 1923, page 1
- American Falls Press, December 20, 1923, page 2
- Salt Lake Tribune, May 3, 1956, page 29
- World War II draft registration of Frank Blair Smith, June 1942, National Archives