First Day of School

At 4:45 one. morning last week, Valmore W. Bourque, 20, of South Hadley Falls, Mass., lugged a suitcase up to Patrick Hall on Denver's Lowry Air Force Base and reported to a sleepy master sergeant. Said Bourque: "I figure it would be something to tell my kids I was the first air cadet in the U.S." Sixteen hours and 45 minutes later, Bourque and 305 other members of the first class at the U.S. Air Force Academy were sound asleep after a double-timed day that included drill, a dedication ceremony, physical examinations (one cadet had measles), lectures, assignments, hazing, uniform issue and an allowance ($3 for the rest of July).

Visiting parents got official memos: "When your son reports ... his time will be fully occupied throughout the rest of the day and the summer training period." To make sure it was, the Air Force picked 69 young lieutenants to simulate upperclassmen. Also on hand to catch new academy "lingo" and traditions at their roots was an English instructor with a Government Issue tape recorder.

While the cadets were hastily building traditions, politicians in Washington were lustily attacking the anything-but-traditional buildings planned for the new Air Force Academy campus at Colorado Springs. Sensitive to the fact that glass, steel and aluminum were the key materials in Air Force blueprints, Democratic Congressman John Fogarty (onetime president of Rhode Island's Bricklayers Union No.1) roared: "Glass and metal are alien to American monumental design-even to European." Picking up his lead, spokesmen for pressure groups, including the Allied Masonry Council, representing brick, limestone and marble companies and for the Bricklayers, Masons and Plasterers' International Union of America, charged that the modern academy design was unAmerican, un-Christian and unaesthetic.

In this spirit, the House of Representatives voted to cut off appropriations for the buildings. Across the Capitol, Indiana's Republican Senator Homer Capehart was waiting in the same mood. After a talk with Air Force Secretary Harold Talbott, Capehart boomed: "He told me nothing was settled--no designs agreed upon. I told him the building should have lots of masonry work. I was fearful it would be made out of steel, aluminum and glass. I come from Indiana, and we have a lot of limestone there. Indiana Limestone Company produces it."

At the Pentagon, Air Force officers answered that, at 1955 prices, it might cost four times the $126 million they have asked for their modern academy to build a new West Point or Annapolis with conventional stone and brick.

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