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Show WORKING HIS WAY UP I Civ - IK I II I I I At the 1915 commencement exercises exer-cises of Columbia university Ensign Louis Randolph Ford, U. S. N., received re-ceived the degree of master of arts. That was only one incident in the determined fight this .young naval officer is making to achieve his childhood child-hood ambitions, which ambitions, it may well be, do not stop short of the insignia of a rear admiral. As a barefooted lad in Texas, where he was born thirty-two years ago, Louis Ford made up his mind to enter the navy, but his parents were not able to send him to college and the influence to obtain an appointment to the naval academy was lacking. .So at the age of fourteen Louis went to work on a Sabine river tugboat, and three years later became an apprentice appren-tice in a machine shop. In two years more he was a full-fiedged machinist and enlisted as such in the navy. Starting in at Mare Island, he worked his way steadily up to the rank of chief machinist, and in 1912 he took the examination for an ensign's commission, commis-sion, passing with the highest marks ever made by a warrant officer. Service on various vessels was followed by a post-graduate course at Annapolis, which included radio engineering, structural engineering, naval construction, ordnance and gunnery. Then came the welcome order to enter Columbia, where, as one of the professors said, he "worked his head off." Ford is now attached to the New York navy yard and eventually will devote himself to the designing of all sorts of naval machinery and the organization of the shops in the yards. |
