Military
Hodgson was born in Latham, Kansas. In 1911 he received the appointment to West Point Military Academy from the eighth Congressional district of Kansas. Throughout his four years at West Point he distinguished himself in academics and graduated eighteenth in the 164 member class of 1915 ("the class the stars fell on"). He was a star football player on the first undefeated Army team of 1914. He also participated on the varsity baseball and basketball teams and broke the then existing Academy records for the high jump and broad jump. Injuries, however, kept both him and his roommate, Dwight D. Eisenhower, from achieving greater fame in athletics.
Following West Point, Hodgson attended Army Engineer school in Washington, D.C.. In World War I he joined the 11th Division with the 211th Engineers but not soon enough to travel overseas. Tours on the West Coast and Washington, D. C. followed by graduation from the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth seemed to be preparing him for new opportunities. Illness struck him in 1941 and, after several months in Fitzsimmons General Hospital, Hodgson was discharged because of arthritis, a disease which afflicted him since his West Point days.
Read more about this topic: Paul A. Hodgson
Famous quotes containing the word military:
“There was somewhat military in his nature, not to be subdued, always manly and able, but rarely tender, as if he did not feel himself except in opposition. He wanted a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory, I may say required a little sense of victory, a roll of the drum, to call his powers into full exercise.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valour, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“Nothing changes my twenty-six years in the military. I continue to love it and everything it stands for and everything I was able to accomplish in it. To put up a wall against the military because of one regulation would be doing the same thing that the regulation does in terms of negating people.”
—Margarethe Cammermeyer (b. 1942)