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Good old “Abe” has gone. The center of our football team has gone from our lives. For us who played beside him, he was a tower of strength, a great pivot around whom the plays moved on our way to a goal. Abe played all through every game in our last season, giving his substitute the same raw deal that “King” Boyers and “Bull” Tipton had given him years before. We played seventy minutes, too, with only a break between halves.</p>
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When <em>Clyde R. Abraham</em> arrived in June 1902 to join 1906, he was not yet nineteen, a bit timid, a bit overweight, and none too well prepared for the academic struggle, but he dug in determinedly to get that commission he desired; and though it kept him busy all four years, he made it. Alphabetically, he was the section marcher of the class in beast barracks but it didn’t help much with the tactical department, for he remained with a clean sleeve to graduation. We tried several nicknames on him, such as “Whiffle”, for no reason I can remember, and “Porpoise” because of the splash he made in the tank, but affectionately, in his class and in the service, he was just “Abe”.</p>
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Reporting after graduation at Fort Sheridan, Illinois, with several classmates, to the Commander of the 27th Infantry, he was soon en route with the regiment to Camp Columbia, just outside Havana, Cuba, for the task of Cuban pacification. It took three years for the job before the regiment brought him back to Fort Sheridan. Just then, the head of the Bingham School in Asheville, North Carolina, asked one of his graduates, our classmate, George Morrow, to recommend a good Infantry lieutenant for his new R.O.T.C., and George, who had been manager of our football team, recommended “Abe” He got the assignment, just as he got his new silver bar, and as Professor of Military Science and Tactics, Abe made for himself an enviable record of organization and administration at Bingham. Foreign Service rosters then required his transfer to Hawaii, where many classmates greeted him. Soon, he returned to the States on leave, went back to Asheville to marry Maude Willis, and brought her to Fort Shafter to a rousing reception by many friends. Maude added greatly to Abe’s military life, sharing all of it, wherever practicable, until his retirement, and then she made him a pretty home in St. Petersburg, Florida, until her death there in 1950.</p>
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Returning to Abe’s military career, he was promoted to captain in 1916 and soon assigned to the newly formed 32nd Infantry at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. By then World War I had closed in on Hawaii. The German gunboat, the <em>Geier</em>, and a dozen German commercial ships took refuge in Honolulu harbor, with the Japanese navy patrolling on the horizon to prevent their escape. Suddenly, early in 1917, all the German ships were found to be on lire. The U.S. Army and Navy took them over, put out the fires, and interned the crews under control of Abe’s regiment. We had a few hundred war prisoners long before we were at war—a ticklish international situation until the U.S.A. entered the war.</p>
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Abe’s regiment returned to take its place in the new war army. He was promoted to major before the end of 1917 and to lieutenant colonel in 1918. Sailing for France, he became Asst. Inspector General of the 2nd Army and then Inspector General of the 6th Division in France. Here again, he received many commendations, and on his return, reduced, with the rest of his class, to the grade of major, he was detailed to the Inspector General’s Department for the next four years of Army readjustment. Afterward, he went to the new Infantry School at Fort Benning, then on to the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth then for a short tour at Fort Brady, Michigan, and soon afterward to the Army War College in Washington, D.C., graduating to qualification for high command and senior staff duty.</p>
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He was given command of Fort Screven, Georgia, in 1933 as a lieutenant colonel, and I was nearby in Augusta Arsenal. We saw each other several times at the 4th Corps Area headquarters in Atlanta, but soon he was called to General Staff duty at Quarry Heights, Panama, first as G-3, and later as G-4, of the Panama Command. Returning in 1936 as a colonel, he commanded Fort Crook, Nebraska, and the 17th Infantry in the last depression years until 1939, assisting the CCC Camps, the Flood Relief, and many local matters in the Nebraska area. Again, he was detailed in the Inspector General’s Department as Inspector General of the 1st Division, first at Fort Hamilton, New York, and then under Major General E. L. Daley at San Juan, Puerto Rico was a pleasant assignment with a grand classmate—until the summer of 1940. He was promoted to Brigadier General and sent back to a new command. By then, World War II was reaching an intensity in Europe and it was apparent that the U.S.A. would eventually have to prepare itself for future participation. Abe became Asst. Commander of the 5th Division at Fort Custer, training that organization for its part in World War II. After the Pearl Harbor attack by Japan, the war effort increased rapidly. Abe was sent to Europe as Chief of the Counter Intelligence Corps of Military Intelligence in the European Theatre of Operations until 1943, when he reached the age for retirement and was returned to the U.S.A., in July, being assigned for convenience to the Replacement Training Center at Camp Croft, South Carolina. After being retired from active service, and in spite of his impaired health, Abe was returned to active duty until December 31, 1943, and was finally retired for physical disability. This concluded his long army career—a very interesting one, of wide travel, an intervention, a border patrol, two world wars, and many tasks of peace well done. General E. L. Daley, his commander in Puerto Rico says of him; ‘‘He was my right arm in a military sense and Maude was of great assistance, socially, as I was living alone with my aide. There was no bigger heart nor better mind than Clyde Abraham’s.”</p>
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Abe and Maude were a fine army team, and Polly, their daughter, grew up to make a good military trio. Maude made a lovely home in St. Petersburg after Abe’s retirement, reminiscent of their tropical service in Hawaii, Panama and Puerto Rico. But Maude developed an illness that caused her death in 1950. Polly married Commander W. F. Cass and went to Washington, D.C. Abe, left alone, sold the home and took an apartment in Washington to be near them. Their four children, two sons and two daughters, were Abe’s greatest joy. Two of them, the boys, attended the funeral ceremony in Arlington. A few years before his death Commander Cass was ordered to command the Coast Guard Cutter, Castle Rock, with home port in Boston, Massachusetts, where he now remains, with Polly and the children at Marblehead, Massachusetts. Abe was left alone with his books and his diminishing list of old army friends. Finally his old heart stopped, and his classmates and friends buried him beside his beloved Maude in a lovely shady plot in Arlington. His sister, now Mrs. Crow, of Union town, his old home, and whom many of us knew in cadet days, long ago when she visited Abe, joined, Polly, her husband and children and many classmates and friends at the final ceremony.</p>
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Many merry moments of army and cadet life rush in to find a place in Abe’s short biography—but they are often far too intimate for public reading. However they do mark that intensity of friendship that has made army life and class association so wonderful to remember.</p>
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With his grand laugh and his genial greeting, his even temper under the provocation of dirty football or low intrigue, his steadfastness of purpose and his full blown patriotism in the service of our country, Abe won a great place in all our hearts. He was a great reader, especially of our struggle for unity in the great civil war. He knew all the Northern and Southern leaders intimately from his books and spoke of them with deep interest and affection, as though they were his personal teachers,—as indeed they were.</p>
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As the years gather and 1906 becomes smaller from our losses, how much more precious are those who are here, and how much deeper the wound when they, too, pass on to their reward. So is Abe’s passing, out of the little group that gathered monthly at the Army and Navy Club, out of the less frequent special meetings of his classmates, and out of the card groups where he played, another time of sadness and recollection. Another good son of West Point, a great soldier and a very proud one too, lies at rest in Arlington, until we meet again.</p>
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<em>—Charles G. Mettler, Earl McFarland</em></p>