Wallace G. Nyweide Notes (Records of the NU NROTC)

As part of his naval training, Nyweide participated in two educational summer cruises sponsored by the federal Navy Department and took copious field notes on both excursions. His duties aboard the ship required that he assist in making navigational calculations, like those seen in his ledger on page 59 (a June 27, 1929 entry partially titled “Bermuda”), which correspond to his ship’s return voyage from Bermuda to Boston.

The Records of the NROTC, Notes of Wallace G. Nyweide consist of one ledger of lecture notes from 1928-1929 that documents Nyweide’s classes and observations from two NROTC summer cruises on the USS Wyoming, one in June 1928, the other in June of 1929.  The ledger also contains many hand-drawn illustrations and diagrams of various ship components like anchors, guns, and compartments. Every entry has an annotation like “Very Good,” “Excellent,” or a number in a different hand, pencil, or color at the end, which are presumably the grades or evaluations given to each assignment by the professor of the course, probably Commander E.M. Woodson. The page numbers of the ledger are stamped in top right corner, and only the first 69 pages contain any writing or diagrams. Either pages 35-38 are missing or the original author mislabeled the page numbers after page 35. A detailed list of the notes and diagrams can be found in the inventory folder in the University Archives. The two cruises are described in greater detail below.

Nyweide was one of about fifty Northwestern NROTC students who undertook the 1928 cruise (June 21-July 4), which was orchestrated by the Navy Department and also included NROTC students from Harvard, Yale, and Georgia Tech. The USS Wyoming had been specially “reconditioned and modernized the previous year—as noted on the first page of Nyweide’s notebook. The Northwestern students, led by Commander E.M. Woodson (Naval Sciences), left Evanston on June 19, 1928 by Pullman car and stopped over in Montreal on their way to Boston. Once in Boston, they sailed from the Boston Navy Yard to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada on June 22. The second leg of the trip took them from Halifax to Portland, Maine on June 29, and the last leg of the trip took them back to Boston from Portland on July 3. The students were allowed shore leave at every port and were formally disbanded for the summer on July 4. The Daily Northwestern proudly noted in many articles that the Northwestern cohort had made the highest average grades of all the cohorts on the cruise.

The second cruise, June 21- July 11, 1929, took a different path. Due to an increase in the number of student participants, the four university cohorts were divided between two ships, the USS Wyoming and the USS New York, both of which were recently modernized by the Navy. The Northwestern and Harvard cohorts sailed on the Wyoming while the Georgia Tech and Yale cohorts sailed on the New York. The ninety Northwestern students left Evanston on June 19, visited Montreal en route to Boston, and arrived in Boston on June 21. Once again, they were led by Commander E. M. Woodson, but were also accompanied by two NU faculty members as well—Baker Brownwell (Medill) and Norman Bradish (Philosophy). Both ships left Boston on June 22, arrived at St. Georges, Bermuda on June 25, and sailed from Bermuda to Havana, Cuba. They arrived in Havana on July 2, after which they sailed back to Boston on July 11, 1929.