Casual
BARNES, FRED
Casual AN OFFICER AND A GRANDPA The cadets at West Point didn't get a "be no." It's shorthand for the announcement cadets most love to hear: "There will be no parade today." Bad weather is usually...
...Exams are coming up...
...The centennial of that class was the reason for the parade and for a day of activity honoring the 54 graduates (the class of 2002, by contrast, has nearly 1,000 members...
...It was 1942 and World War II was raging...
...Retirement, however, was a "be no...
...Every Tuesday or Wednesday during football season I'd get a letter from him with the New York Times story on the Army football game enclosed...
...He doted on his five grandchildren...
...Then came World War I, in which he fought in the Argonne Forest and at St...
...His son, Troup Jr., was a West Pointer, class of 1930...
...But he died at age 77 in 1957...
...Douglas MacArthur was class of 1903...
...As a young officer, he was introduced to a beautiful young woman from Atlanta named Alice Coffin...
...Still, regulations required retirement after 40 years...
...Miller was one of seven in the class of 1902 who was promoted to general...
...Postwar, he was assigned to the staff college at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, teaching Dwight Eisenhower among others...
...Roosevelt as "Major Pants...
...We talked about his becoming the oldest living graduate of West Point and my becoming a cadet...
...Bad weather is usually what prompts a "be no...
...Anyway, Troup Miller's daughter Rosa, just out of college, joined her parents in Monterey, met the lieutenant, and married him in 1937...
...He was proud to belong to the Long Gray Line...
...Mihiel...
...Don't you know, Mr...
...He played cards with his grandkids, though never on Sunday...
...Then he was ordered back to active duty, staying through 1945 as inspector general of the Eastern Defense Command...
...They are my parents...
...Then there was his grandson...
...FRED BARNES...
...My grandfather spent two tours in the Philippines, which the United States had acquired in the Spanish-American War...
...The weather was fine...
...Troup Miller was a man who knew his own mind...
...If your date cancels, you got a "be no...
...My grandfather, Troup Miller, was a 1902 grad, a young man from Macon, Georgia, who joined the National Guard out of high school and set his sights on West Point...
...I made your pants...
...The cadets surely had better I things to do...
...And it made sense: the handsome military man and son of a respected Macon judge and the oldest daughter of a prominent Atlanta family...
...My grandfather planted the West Point tradition in me...
...If he'd lived on, I suspect I'd have wound up, one way or another, at West Point...
...President," the tailor said...
...I was his only grandson, so I got special attention...
...He began a West Point tradition in his family...
...He was a wonderful storyteller...
...There was no harshness in him, yet he had a commanding presence—erect, firm, reserved in speech...
...Retirement lasted one day...
...The phrase has also become cadet slang for something that won't happen...
...Roosevelt then introduced him to Mrs...
...His daughter married a graduate...
...Or as therapists might say today, he was in touch with his feelings...
...His granddaughter, Judy, married a class of 1954 West Pointer, Dan Tobin...
...But for the descendants of the West Point class of 1902 sitting in the reviewing stand, there was no place they'd rather have been...
...Only it was a "be no...
...One of the lieutenants under his command was a West Point graduate in 1934, a fellow who, like my grandfather, didn't think the advent of the tank meant the end of the cavalry...
...He was a great fungo batter, hitting fly balls for me to catch for hours...
...I was 14...
...He took us to drive-in movies...
...He fell in love with one of Alice's four sisters, Rosa, and married her instead...
...But the way things worked out, that was a "be no...
...Last week, late in the afternoon, and solely for the benefit of myself, my wife Barbara, seven of my relatives, and about 150 other folks, the i cadets marched...
...His great-grandson, Steve Emmons, altered the tradition a bit by going to the Air Force Academy, class of 1989...
...My grandfather was not a stereotypical Army officer...
...He spent most of the 1920s in Washington, and in the late 1930s he commanded the cavalry post at the Presidio of Monterey in California...
...Many of the stars of his class served in the Corps of Engineers after graduation, but my grandfather joined the cavalry, the horse cavalry...
...Next to his family, Troup Miller's great love was West Point...
...The idea was marriage...
...I never heard him utter an unkind word, and I spent a lot of time with him...
...As they do today, American officers after the turn of the century served all over the world...
...His favorite involved the appearance of Teddy Roosevelt's tailor in a White House receiving line...
Vol. 7 • May 2002 • No. 35
