Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
Cadet Kem met with Congressman Ralph Harvey, who had
appointed him to West Point, in the Hotel Willard after marching in
the Eisenhower inauguration parade in January 1953. Harvey
represented Indiana's 10th Congressional District.
He was 10th District congressman. I told him I was interested and he sent me a note, told me
what the process was. It started off with an exam at the post office in Richmond during the
summer of 1951, and that would have been between my junior and senior year in high
school. I took the exam. I still wasn't necessarily motivated for West Point, but now I was
starting my senior year where I would start looking toward college and universities. I applied
to Purdue and to Indiana and continued the process toward West Point.
Sometime, perhaps the fall, I was notified by him that I would receive his second alternate
appointment. Later that fall, probably around December, he told me that I was now his first
alternate, that one of the two had for some reason declined, so I should plan to take the
official entrance examination now. The previous exam at the post office was only for
assisting Congressman Harvey to rank order his people.
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