Where Can I See Ft Slocum Today?

            Not at Davids’ Island.           

            There has been quite a lot of destruction over the years on Davids’ Island.  The Civil War post was thrown up in 1862-63;  by 1884 or so it was finished tumbling down.  The last pre-Army building was wiped away by 1892.  Temporary barracks from the 1880’s were demolished around 1906-08.   Artillery emplacements erected in the 1890’s were wiped away in 1930 and 1943, and the artillery itself removed by WWI.  The destruction of 2005-2008 may have been the most wide-sweeping but it was only the latest.  

            This last  destruction wiped away all physical traces of Ft. Slocum (save the road system and some sidewalks, bits of the seawall, the 1960’s flagpole, ¾ of the Abbot Quad mortar batteries, Battery Practice and of course thank goodness our 15” Rodman gun).  Some of the buildings were unique.  Most notable among those were the 1880’s barracks and consolidated mess hall complex (bldgs. 51, 120, 52 & 53) constructed by QM Capt. George Hamilton Cook.  (Bldg. numbers refer to the 1952 map, available above.)

            Some buildings however were cookie-cutter versions of standard Army designs;  and some of their clones or at least analogues  can be seen still standing today.  (And indeed, see below, there are even a few analogues to the unique Cook buildings.)  The following list is not exhaustive, but does indicate various locations in the U.S. and abroad where individual analogues can be found.  The best concentrations in the US seem to be at opposite ends of the continent, in WA & FL.

• Bldgs. 5/6, duplex officers’ quarters, may have clones at Ft Totten (nearby in Queens)
• Bldg. 22, company-grade officers quarters, has  a clone at Ft. Worden, WA (on the Olympic peninsula) (and it is possible to spend a night in former officers quarters, including the apartments in this building)
• Bldg. 151, the hospital and later Chaplain School, has an almost identical twin at Vancouver Barracks, WA (just across the Columbia from Portland, OR)
• Bldg. 119, the guardhouse, has a clone from the very same year, 1896, at Madison Barracks, NY (upstate, at Sacket’s Harbor on the eastern shore of Lake Erie)
• Bldg. 52 (one of Cook’s barracks, 1887) has a close analogue (1892-93) at Ft Totten in bldgs 107 & 108;  the design may have been influenced directly by Cook
• The same barracks pattern of our Quadrivium, bldgs. 54-47, may be seen in wood at Vancouver Barracks, WA;  and in brick, at Ft. Worden, WA
• Clones of the Trivium barracks, bldgs. 58-60, are still in use at Ft. Lewis, WA (near Tacoma)
• Those huge formidable 12” breech-loading mortars (see feature, elsewhere on this site) were removed from our Abbot Quad pits early in the 20^th century;  and, like most other examples, were melted for scrap.  However examples exist at Ft DeSoto, FL (near Tampa) and also in the Philippines (notably Battery Way, on Corregidor).
• Rodman guns, though usually the more common 10” models (or the 10”, retrofitted with 8” rifled sleeves) can be found in some surprising places;  though usually, like ours, on display but not as they would have been in actual battery, on carriages.   Of the 15” Rodmans, about 323 were manufactured and only about 25 survive.  Our 15” is not mounted on a carriage, but to see what one looks like in battery, there are examples at Ft. McHenry MD, Ft. Knox ME, Ft. Foote near DC,  and Ft. Barrancas FL.
• The 5” and 6” shielded pedestal-mounted direct-fire guns were removed after WWI (and their batteries demolished entirely around 1930 to make way for bldg. 58) but you can see what they looked like in battery at Ft Casey, WA (on the Olympic Peninsula, near Ft Worden) and at Ft DeSoto, FL.
• Parade fields at Ft Madison & Ft Worden, both lined with O Rows (though very different buildings) and both bordering the water, will bring back memories.  Governors’ Island and Ft Totten also have good O Rows, though not directly comparable to ours
• Riding the Staten Island ferry, or even the ferry to Governors’ Island, will also bring back memories

Military Salaries:  1958 & 2010 compared

While we were on Ft Slocum, how well did we live (just in purely financial terms)?  Have Slocum brats managed to improve our lots in life?  By way of getting at an answer, recently I looked at military salaries then and now.  If you want to answer the question for yourself, you can compare your own earnings with those of your father.

In the table below, I took the maximum 1958 salaries for each rank (the Max 1958 column) then matched them with current salaries for same rank & duration of service (2010 equiv to 1958 column).  Then I tried 2 separate methods of adjusting 1958 salaries to 2010 equivalents (CPI & GDP columns, in the middle of the table).   You’ll notice that in all cases the CPI method yields higher numbers.  Finally, I took ratios of (CPI) adjusted 1958 values to the current 2010 salaries for all ranks.   (These turn out to range from .54 to .73.)

		Comparative Salaries 1958-2010
Rank	Max 1958	1958 adj to CPI	1958 adj to GDP deflator	2010 Equiv to 1958	ratio 1958 CPI to 2010
O6	11820	87684	71236	120564	0.73
O5	9300	68990	56048	98376	0.70
O4	6360	47180	38330	79092	0.59
O3	6300	46735	37968	71460	0.65
O2	4560	33827	27482	52524	0.64
O1	3768	27952	22708	41448	0.67
W4	7140	52966	43031	84504	0.63
W3	6072	45043	36594	72720	0.62
W2	5280	39168	31821	60252	0.65
W1	4680	34717	28205	55632	0.62
E9	5280	39168	31821	63012	0.62
E8	4560	33827	27482	57996	0.58
E7	4272	31690	25746	51384	0.62
E6	3480	25815	20973	41808	0.62
E5	2880	21364	17357	34872	0.61
E4	2280	16913	13741	27516	0.61
E3	1692	12551	10197	23076	0.54
E2	1296	9614	7810	19464	0.49
E1	1260	9347	7593	17364	0.54
Entry	936	6943	6541
source for adjustments:   www.measuringworth.com
1958 figures:  Islander 14 May 1958 p 3
2010 figures:  www.militaryfactory.com

Army families get lots of subsidies:  food at the commissary, clothing at the PX, beer at the clubs, health care at the dispensary,  and a housing allowance.   The other side of the coin, of course, is that actual take-home pay was low.   In recent decades lower-ranking enlisted personnel have so joined the ranks of the many “working poor” in American society that they have found it necessary to apply for food stamps.  “A survey conducted in 1999, showed that about 6,300 military families were on food stamps,” it was reported at   http://usmilitary.about.com/cs/moneymatters/a/foodstamps.htm.  “That was a dramatic drop from the 12,000 who received aid in 1995,”  the report continues,  “and represents less than 1 percent of the 1.4 million men and women in uniform.”   The most striking aspect is not that it is less than 1% but that it can happen at all to men and women who are asked to put their lives on the line.   During the Viet Nam war, there used to be a joke among the opposition:  What if schools were funded but the Air Force had to hold bake sales to buy bombs?  During the Iraq war, this was no longer a joke, as parents of deployed soldiers had to subsidize them through personal purchase of things like air conditioners and even body armor which the Defense Department proved unwilling to provide.  

Still, in the all-volunteer Army it appears that pay has improved over that of the Cold War.   Soldiers then took home between ½ and ¾ (which is what the .54-.73 represents) of what their counterparts do now.  For example, in 1958 a full bird colonel (O6) -- the top-ranking officer on Ft. Slocum at that time  --  made $11,820 per annum.  Adjusted by the Consumer Price Index (CPI), that would amount to $71,236 in 2010 dollars.  But in 2010, an O6 with comparable service in fact would take home $120,564.  The top-ranked NCO (E9) took home about half of that:   $5,280 in 1958.  That would be $39,168 adjusted via CPI to 2010 dollars;  but the actual 2010 take-home of an active-duty E9 with comparable service is $63,012.

            And that’s a conservative estimate; had I used the GDP figures instead, the disparity would appear greater still.

So at Ft. Slocum, we really needed the commissary + PX + beer call + dispensary +  flounder blackfish etc.!

Now, whether this percentage really translates into more disposable income at home might be questioned.  In 1958, the Class B-1 landline telephone to our quarters cost $4 a month ($1.35 for an extension phone); we might be lusting after the NBC peacock in living color, maybe;  the only computer on post was a big mainframe in the NIKE IFC.   Now we have all sorts of consumer electronics, laptops Blackberries iPods 3D HD cable etc., to gobble up spare income.  Red Goose shoes got nothing on $100 Nikes that kids demand.  And so on.

I have yet to factor in housing allowances and compare them to current housing markets.   But this is a start, and as a start, you may find it interesting and eye-opening.