By Dan Patrinos
George Ambrose Parkinson is the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society’s 2021 honored Founder.
He was a patriot, a civic leader, an educator.
He served as an enlisted apprentice seaman in World War I and as a commander of a destroyer group hunting enemy submarines during World War II, later attaining the rank of vice admiral in the Naval Reserve. When the threat of hydrogen bomb attacks hung over American cities, he was tapped to helm Milwaukee’s civil defense planning. He was instrumental in forming the Naval Reserve Officers Training program at Marquette University, and later at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
When government officials needed someone to tackle politically thorny and technically complex metropolitan issues such as tax revenue distribution, water rights, traffic and transportation systems, and social issues involving housing and education, they named him to blue-ribbon committees, commissions and agencies.
As an educator, he was the decade-long director of the Milwaukee Vocational School, which became the Milwaukee Area Technical College, at a time when employers increasingly required technically skilled workers. Before that, he was vice-provost and director of business affairs at the brand new University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the child of the recent merger of the UW Extension Division in Milwaukee, and the Wisconsin State College-Milwaukee. He led the Extension.
In 1959, George A. Parkinson was among a group of prominent business and civic leaders with interests in maritime history who formed the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society, with a workroom desk at the downtown Milwaukee Public Library.
The initial trustees of the Society, including Parkinson, were Edmund Fitzgerald, board chairman of Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co.; Eliot G. Fitch, president of the Marine National Exchange Bank; Ralph T. Friedmann, president of Schuster’s Department Store; Roger D. McIntyre, Northwestern’s assistant counsel; Charles A. Harris, Marine Bank’s senior vice president; Harry C. Brockel, director of the Port of Milwaukee; Richard P. Herzfeld, retired board chairman of the Boston Store; Andrew E. Jackson, president of the Edward E. Gillen Co. a marine construction company; Robert C. Johnson, president of Siesel Construction Co.; Richard E. Krug, director and librarian of the Milwaukee Public Library; attorney George H. Likert, Jr.; and attorney Louis Quarles.
The Society held its organizational meeting at the opening of the Herman G. Runge Marine Collection at the Library on February 19, 1959. The collection is the foundation of the Society’s and the Milwaukee Public Library’s large archive of maritime information and photographs.
BORN IN OHIO
Parkinson was born January 22, 1899, in Columbus, Ohio. After taking six weeks of teacher training at a normal school between his junior and senior high school years, he qualified to be the principal of a two-year high school in Reynoldsburg, Ohio. He was only 17, earning seventy dollars a month. He told a Milwaukee Sentinel reporter years later that he accepted dinner invitations to meet expenses.
“Being a teenage principal sounds ridiculous now,” he said.
He received a bachelor’s degree in education from Ohio State University in 1922, a master’s degree in astronomy from the same school in 1923, and a Ph.D. in pure and applied mathematics from the University of Wisconsin in 1929. He began teaching math on the Madison campus in 1923.
NAVAL CAREER
Parkinson was a deep-dyed, public-spirited Navy man.
He started his naval career in 1918, when he enlisted at the lowest rate, an apprentice seaman, and was mustered out in 1919 as a quartermaster 3rd class. According to the Milwaukee Journal, when the US Navy was seeking leaders in 1923, Parkinson said he proposed signing on if he could qualify as an officer. Within ten days he was appointed an ensign, the lowest grade.
He was promoted to lieutenant junior grade in the Naval Reserve in 1927 when he arrived in Milwaukee to teach math at UW’s Extension Division. A year later, he was in charge of one of the city’s two Naval Reserve units.
In 1940, when world war came a second time, the government called Lieutenant Commander Parkinson to active duty, charging him to recruit naval reservists in Wisconsin and Upper Michigan. Among those he sought were machinists, boilermakers, plumbers and metalsmiths, newspapers reported. At the time he was assistant director of UW’s Extension in Milwaukee.
After his recruiting stint, he was assigned executive officer of the USS GILMER, a 314-foot, World War I destroyer, a “four piper.” He left Milwaukee for service at sea in December with the eighty-five men and four officers in his reserve unit. Later that year he took command of the USS ST. AUGUSTINE, a 272-foot, steel-hulled patrol gunboat, built in 1929 as a yacht owned by a relative of the five and dime store magnate F. W. Woolworth. Next, he took command of the USS EDWARD C. DALY, then the USS DUFFY, both destroyer escorts, in 1943. Each had a crew of 220 men.
Mementos of his naval career later decorated office walls of his civilian life. At the Vocational School was the photograph of one of those escorts signed by the crew to “Bloodhound.” A reporter said the moniker was appropriate since Navy records showed that he was “adept at sniffing out enemy submarines.”
In May 1942, the Milwaukee Journal ran a photo of Gussie, the cat, which had seven toes on each front paw. Parkinson, who took the photo, said he promoted the feline to ship’s cat, first class, and assigned it duty as assistant morale officer of his escort ship. “Gussie never gets seasick and has never been ashore since birth, six months ago,” he wrote describing the picture.
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In 1944, Captain Parkinson led escort vessels against a concentration of nineteen German submarines. Two U-boats were sunk, for which he received the Bronze Star. After his ship sunk two more submarines that year, he was awarded a Gold Star. For an offensive action in April 1945 he was given the Legion of Merit for “outstanding leadership and sound judgement” in directing the vessels in his antisubmarine group. The citation added that his “skill, initiative and foresight enabled the group to conduct a series of effective attacks and resulted in the probable sinking of an enemy submarine.”
Back home in the Naval Reserve, now a rear admiral, he was a brigade training officer from 1949 to 1953. At Marquette University he directed one of the three experimental naval reserve officers training programs. By 1959, there were more than one-hundred such programs in the nation.
In 1956, he was appointed to the Advisory Committee of the United States Coast Guard in New London, Conn. The committee advised the Coast Guard Academy on courses of instruction.
He hung up his gold epaulets in 1959. On the occasion of his retirement from the Naval Reserve, the Milwaukee Journal, with no little irony, reported that now that he had retired his list of major community activities would be reduced to directing the Vocational School, serving as acting chair of the Metropolitan Study Commission, and planning for the city’s civil defense.
What wasn’t said was that he was leading a school with more than 30,000 students, heading a commission in the thick of politically sticky issues, and working on plans for the exodus of 700,000 people in the event of a hydrogen bomb or missile attack on the city!
COMMUNITY LIFE
Sandwiched between his 36 years’ service with the Naval Reserve and his long career as an educator with the UW system and the Milwaukee Vocational School, government officials and charitable organizations relied on him to help resolve area-wide issues, fundraise, and bring attention to their causes. One newspaper said he belonged to more than 30 civic, professional and patriotic organizations. **
One of his earliest assignments was to help plan for the civil defense of Milwaukee. From the late 1940s into the sixties, grave concern of nuclear attack hung over metropolitan areas across the United States. Milwaukee Mayor Frank Zeidler, and later Mayor Henry Maier, tasked Parkinson to make plans to evacuate the city’s population in the event of an attack. Parkinson and members of his organization, working with police and fire departments and city agencies, came up with plans that included mapping street escape routes, recruiting neighborhood wardens, promoting home shelters, stockpiling survival kits, advising families on what food rations to carry with them, and setting up emergency feeding stations, welfare services, and housing.
A communications network with sirens and arrangements with commercial and amateur radio operators and telephone and telegraph companies was set up.
City waterworks employees signed loyalty oaths. The police department trained block wardens. Forty billboards in the city asked: “Who’s YOUR Block Warden?” A newspaper advised its readers outside of the city, “The Reds may never drop an atomic bomb on your community, but if they do will you and your neighbors be as ready as the people of Milwaukee?”
Americans, Parkinson said, should not be misled by “present peace propaganda” into neglecting an adequate civil defense program. When the recruitment of block wardens and public interest flagged, he proposed that civil defense could be a project for service groups, veterans’ organizations, and parent-teacher associations.
“There are people who are afraid to prepare shelter areas or take first aid courses or assemble emergency equipment simply because they might be scoffed at by their friends and neighbors,” he said. “If clubs or neighborhood groups undertook such preparations, they could enter into friendly competition and make a game of it and at the same time accomplish something worthwhile.”
He said the “limited shooting” phase of a third world war had begun in Korea and that the conflict would “undoubtedly erupt into full dress war” in the near future. He blamed “confusion in Washington” for the failure of the American people to meet a war challenge. “They tell us on the one hand that we’re winning,” he said, “and on the other that we’re losing. They warn us to be ready for atomic attacks, and then fiddle-faddle with civil defense legislation in congress.”
As he mustered support from political leaders and residents, he predicted that if an attack came, the result would be “panic, tragedy, confusion and death to more people than has been conceived in the minds of our strategists in years past.” Another time, when a proposed cut was made to requested funds for civil defense, he said, “We’re way behind other cities. Once Milwaukee was ahead. That isn’t so anymore. We’re among the major target cities, but Milwaukee has consistently had one of the lowest budgets.”
As the public became more aware of the destructive force of a hydrogen explosion, he declared that “log jam of public apathy” had been broken.
In 1954, the city health department came up with a model survival kit for a family of five for seven days. It weighed forty-three pounds, the contents cost about thirty-seven dollars, and would keep for two to four years. The food stuffs included powdered eggs, tomato concentrate, grated cheese, shortening, sugar, salt, baking soda, powered coffee, raisins, sardines, Vienna sausage, and Spam. A day’s food for one person would provide nine hundred and seventy-seven calories.
That year Milwaukeeans were discussing the proposal to install radar-guided, anti-aircraft missiles to protect the city. The defense system, called Nike Ajax, eventually was installed at the old Maitland Field, now the site of Summerfest.
In May, 1955, the Milwaukee Journal quoted Parkinson saying there was no better life insurance in the atomic age than the automobile ready to move. “Nobody is going to order you to move out in case of an attack. Whether you go or stay is your own decision.”
CAREER IN EDUCATION
An outspoken champion of education, he was described as a personable, jovial man who laughed easily. Newspapers depicted him as politically skillful, determined, influential, self-confident, quiet, and forceful.
After five years of active duty, Parkinson returned to Milwaukee as director of the UW Extension Division.
The Extension essentially was a two-year education center in the UW system. A large part of its enrollment in pre-World War II years consisted of the children of working class people who couldn’t afford to go to Madison. When the war ended, the Extension was flooded with veterans taking advantage of the GI bill. Parkinson could empathize with their problems. It was during his tenure when political pressure was building to create a public, four year university in Milwaukee. Parkinson and Mayor Zeidler floated the idea that Milwaukee should consider forging a “city college” through an alliance of the Extension, the Vocational School, the Milwaukee Public Museum and the Milwaukee Art Institute.
In 1956, the Extension and the Wisconsin State College-Milwaukee, primarily a teachers school, merged to form the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Parkinson became UWM’s director of business affairs and vice-provost, and J. Martin Klotsche was named provost, the chief administrative officer of the new university. Klotsche had held the same title at the State College.
Two years later, Parkinson was offered the post of director of the Milwaukee Vocational School, He took it. After thirty-five years of being connected to the University of Wisconsin, first as a math teacher, then as Extension director, and finally as vice-provost of the UWM, he took his own advice. He told a newspaper reporter that he had always advised students never to be afraid to seize a new opportunity.
The Milwaukee Sentinel commented that his decision meant a loss to UWM, but a great gain for the Vocational School. “The Vocational School occupies a unique place in the city’s educational program and its importance as an educational institution can hardly be overestimated. It is good to know that a man of Dr. Parkinson’s rare intellect and splendid human qualifies is at the head of it.”
“I can hardly wait for Aug. 1 so I can get to work,” he told a reporter, anticipating the start of his new job. “This is new. It’s exciting. It’s wonderful.”
His tenure at the Vocational School — from 1958 to 1969 –– coincided with the great wave of change buffeting education in the United States. Part of that upsurge was the growing need for young people to be technically trained for jobs being transformed by automation; part of it involved the need to train high school dropouts; another aspect was the requirement to retrain working adults.
He said that pupils who left school before graduation were contributing to “one of the greatest tragedies of our age. There are fewer and fewer opportunities for the untrained and unskilled.”
These challenges were reflected in the school’s name change to the Milwaukee Technical College in 1967, and a year after he retired, to the Milwaukee Area Technical College. During this time, the student body increased, curricular offerings proliferated, and the number of buildings and the budget of the school grew.
Parkinson wrote that there was an “awakening consciousness” on the part of American people during the 1960s. “They suddenly became aware of the fact that the educational system which they had created and of which they were so proud was not meeting the needs of the greatest portion of the young people passing through our secondary schools.”
Nor, he said, was it meeting the needs for “training and upgrading of production workers and for self-fulfillment which is so necessary to the growth of all mature adults.”
With the combined force of federal, state and local governments, Parkinson said the school began to develop programs and courses that followed a simple principle — “that the school should and could serve disadvantaged youth or functionally illiterate adults, and educate and train them for employment below the professional level.” At the end of their training the school helped them find a job.
He retired on his 69th birthday in 1968.
DIED IN 1983
Even though retired he continued working part time on special civic and educational projects. After describing his life-long work as an educator, civic leader and naval reserve officer, a reporter wrote that Parkinson had taken on a new career — tree planter on his eighteen acre evergreen farm near Oostburg, Wis. This had been his hideaway where he retreated weekends with his wife Mildred. For years he had refused to have a phone installed there, but now agreed for the “sake of emergency.”
He died June 2, 1983, at the age of 83, leaving Mildred, a daughter and a son. Another son had died in an accident.
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** Footnote
George A. Parkinson believed in the importance of volunteer organizations because they promoted “a climate of individual responsibility.” Among the groups he belonged to, often holding officer positions during the 1950s and ’60s, were:
The Association of University Evening Classes; Wisconsin Society of Sons of the American Revolution; Milwaukee Metropolitan YMCA; University Clubs of Milwaukee and Madison; Governor’s Committee on Children and Youth; Committee for Emergency Operations of the Port of Milwaukee; Wisconsin State Advisory Committee on Selective Service; Governor’s Committee on Milwaukee Water Supply; Governor’s Metropolitan Study Commission; Mayor’s Committee on Tax Revenue Distribution; Christmas Seal Committee; Greater Milwaukee Committee; American Red Cross; Social Development Commission of Greater Milwaukee; Wisconsin Association of Directors of Vocational and Adult Education; Navy League; Reserve Component Policy Board; Milwaukee County Brotherhood Week Committee.
Dan Patrinos is a retired journalist. He is a member of the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society and lives in Milwaukee.
