Nate Boone’s yearbook photo in the 1952 Mirror.

As he and his fellow Marine Corps veterans prepared to receive the Congressional Gold Medal in June, Nathaniel Boone ’52 recalled for the media his experiences as one of the first black U.S. Marines.

Twenty thousand African-American Marines, including Boone, went through basic training at the racially segregated Montford Point facility at Camp LeJeune, N.C., between 1942 and 1949.

To honor their pioneering achievements, Congress presented Boone, a retired lawyer who lives in Manchester Center, Vt., and his fellow 367 surviving Montford Point veterans the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Congressional Gold Medal, on June 27.

Sixty-six years ago, Boone was a Marine recruit traveling by train from his home in Englewood, N.J. to Washington, D.C. There, in the nation’s capital, Boone entered the segregated, Jim Crow South.

Nate Boone stands outside his home in Manchester Center, Vt. Photograph by Patrick McArdle/Rutland Herald.

“I knew what was going to happen because my mother and my aunt, her sister, were born and raised in Georgia,” Boone . “They told me what to expect and told me I would have to get in the back of the bus when I reached Washington, D.C., which was true. That’s where the segregation started: In our nation’s capital,” he said.

From there they headed to the Montford Point facility, which was more like a “rattlesnake-infested swamp,” Boone tells CBS affiliate WCAX-TV in Burlington.

The rattlesnakes weren’t the only ones hostile to the black recruits.

As he tells Manchester Journal staff writer Brandon Canevari, “The whites were suspicious of you…. And there was a point where if you wanted to go on liberty, you had to be escorted by a white officer.”

The indignities of racial segregation didn’t sway him from his goal: a college education via the GI Bill, and with it a better life.

that “I had made up my mind that no matter what the circumstances were, no matter how badly I was treated, no matter how badly I might have felt, I had a mission. And the mission was to go to college,” he says.

Listen to Nate Boone articulate his life mission for WCAX:

He tells the Rutland Herald that “I had made up my mind that I was going to take whatever the South gave me. Whatever the Marine Corps gave me I would endure, because it meant so much to get to college.”

It was a risk-reward gambit Boone knew would turn out right.

“I don’t regret any moment of it because of the fact that it allowed me to do what I wanted to do,” he said.

At �ֲ���ý, he met his wife, Harriet Howell Boone ’52. (Nate and Harriet’s daughter Daryl ’82 is an alumna, as is Nate’s brother David ’62; his wife, Carol Huntington Boone ’63; and their daughter Karin ’87.)

Marine Col. Stephanie Smith ’87 poses with her father, Ernest Smith Jr., and Gen. John Amos, commandant of the Marine Corps. Photograph by Aimee Smith-Bywater.

�ֲ���ý has yet another connection to Montford Point in Marine Col. Stephanie Smith ’87. Her father is a Montford Point Marine, and she is collecting oral histories of the veterans in her capacity as a special project officer for the Montford Point Project.

• View CNN highlights of the Congressional Gold Medal ceremony.

Catherine Winne '41 poses in front of a Piper Cub in November 1940. Winne is believed to be the only �ֲ���ý woman who learned to fly through the Civilian Pilot Training Program. Photograph courtesy of the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.

From high in the sky, Maine looks like “a land of lakes, all within a stone’s throw of each other,” wrote Catherine Winne ’41 in the Oct. 30, 1940, issue of The �ֲ���ý Student following her pilot training flight.

Winne is believed to be the only �ֲ���ý woman who learned to fly through the government-sponsored Civilian Pilot Training Program. She’s seen here in November 1940 standing in front of the program’s training plane, a two-seat Piper Cub, at what is now the Auburn-Lewiston Municipal Airport.

“We knew it was a pre-screening thing for military pilots.”

Begun in 1938 to increase the number of civilian U.S. pilots, the CPTP gave flight training to hundreds of thousands of men and women, mostly college students. The program is specifically credited with creating a path for African Americans to eventually become military pilots, notably the Tuskegee Airmen. �ֲ���ý, Bowdoin, Colby, and UMaine offered chapters in Maine, as did several high schools and American Legion chapters.

Women were given 10 percent of the slots, which meant two spots among 20 at �ֲ���ý, though they were excluded after the U.S. joined World War II. Winne, who died in 2007, was one female �ֲ���ý trainee; the late Pauline Giles ’41 attended classroom sessions but it is unclear if she ever flew.

The CPTP’s military importance was readily known, especially after Germany invaded Poland and France. “We knew it was a pre-screening thing for military pilots,” says retired Marine Col. Armand Daddazio ’42, who was a CPTP trainee as a �ֲ���ý student. After graduating, Daddazio saw active duty in air defense artillery in the Pacific.

He was on Tinian when the USS Indianapolis delivered the atomic bomb destined for Hiroshima. “Headquarters called to ask for officers for a work party,” Daddazio recalls. “We pointed out that officers don’t go on work parties. The reply was, ‘Well, they do on this one!’ For security, they wanted officers to unload the bomb.”

Now living in El Paso, Texas, after a career in financial services, Daddazio did not fly during or after the war. Initially interested in the Army Air Corps, he instead chose the Marines. “The casualty rate ended up pretty bad for the flying services,” he recalls. “Maybe the dear Lord didn’t want me to fly.” — HJB

Admission is $6 for the public and $3 for �ֲ���ý faculty and staff, senior citizens and non-�ֲ���ý students. The performance is free to �ֲ���ý students and WWII veterans. Performances will be held in Schaeffer Theatre, 305 College Avenue.

Written by Linda Thorsen Bond, William Repicci and Charles Busch, Swingtime Canteen is inspired by the films and personalities of the 1940s that reflected the state of mind behind the U.S. war effort against the Axis Powers in World War II. It premiered in 1995 and tallied more than 300 performances off Broadway, earning The New York Times’ description “a pleasure.” It has been performed all over the United States, in Canada and in London.

This upbeat, interactive play follows movie legend Marian Ames and her friends from the Hollywood Canteen while they put together a musical act to entertain the troops in London in 1943. Music abounds as these archetypal film characters of the 1940s sing more than 30 vintage classics from those heady years, including: “Don’t Fence Me In,” “I’ll Be Seeing You,” “Sing, Sing Sing,” “How High The Moon,” “I Don’t Want To Walk Without You,” and a 12-song Andrews Sisters medley.

Audience members become the troops at a canteen show, and at least one viewer can expect to find himself on stage dancing along with the actors.

Director Kuritz chose the play for both its musical content and emphasis on female roles, which provided a nice contrast with the male-dominated production of Hamlet last fall.

Although the play has the potential to make war look rosy, Kuritz insists his production makes no such statement. “The challenge, the great temptation, is to make a comment about the current war,” he says. Kuritz has tried to resist this temptation, choosing to let the audience decide for themselves by creating a performance that makes available “every possible point of view.”

The entertainment community’s response to World War II was markedly different from the current situation, he says, “and the question people can think about is, why?”

Victoria Stubbs, of Poland, Maine, is guest musical director for the production, working here through the Mellon Learning Associates Program in the Humanities at �ֲ���ý. Stubbs has worked with Mad Horse Theater and teaches at the Portland Art and Technology High School. She has been vital in helping students master the close harmonies of the Andrews Sisters medley, Kuritz says.

For reservations or more information about the �ֲ���ý College production of Swingtime Canteen, call 207-786-6161.

Berube’s work pays close attention to the experiences of working-class people and to the intersection of politics, cultural expectations, work conditions and gender roles in their lives. His current project is an oral history and analysis of the Marine Cooks’ and Stewards’ Union, which organized the service workers on the passenger liners and freighters in the Pacific from the 1930s to the 1950s and was among the most racially integrated unions in the U.S.

He has received several honors, including a Rockefeller Residency Fellowship and the Community Service Award from the Bay Area Physicians for Human Rights. Berube, who studied at the University of Chicago, was named a MacArthur Fellow by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1996. The Creative Approach to Public Policy lecture series invites four MacArthur Fellows to share insight and perspective on current public policy issues.