Rogers named to National Guard Hall of Fame

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March 17, 2012 - 12:00 AM

Harvey Rogers was turned down nearly 60 years when he tried to join the Kansas National Guard and turned down an enlistment opportunity when the Guard came calling.
Then, after a plea from Dave Conderman, an Iola attorney and Guard officer, and counseling from wife Beverly, Rogers reconsidered, joined the Guard and served 26 years.
On April 29 in Salina, Rogers will be inducted to the Kansas National Guard Hall of Fame.

AFTER ROGERS graduated from Iola High School in 1953, he won a scholarship from Fort Scott Junior College to play football and run track. He had established himself as a whiz-bang athlete at IHS and, in no small concession to his blazing speed, was the first black athlete ever to play football in the Southeast Kansas League. He broke the league’s color barrier during the fall semester of 1949.
“The Korean war was going pretty good when I graduated (from IHS) and I tried to enlist in the National Guard one weekend when I was home from Fort Scott,” Rogers recalled. “They told me it (Iola’s unit) was all filled up. I didn’t think about segregation” being the culprit in the turn-down, even though “I had been aware of it all my life.”
A week or two later, home again on a weekend, Rogers was faced with a couple of disparaging revelations: Some white friends mentioned how they had just joined the Guard and Jane Lane, a draft board member, gave Rogers shocking news.
“She said they’d been looking for me, that my name came up” for induction into the Army. No matter that Rogers was in college, his country was calling and he soon reported for two years of active duty, which included 18 months in Korea.
After his discharge and a short time in California – “I didn’t like it there; it just didn’t feel like home” – Rogers, wife Beverly and daughter Lachel, born while he was in Korea, were at home in Iola.
“Not long after I returned, Col. Conderman came to our house,” Rogers said. “He said they were thinking about getting some Afro-Americans into the Guard. They had looked at my records and liked what they saw.
“Even though I knew I was obligated to six years of reserve duty, I told him no.”
Rogers’ previous experience with the Guard had left a bitter taste. He knew if he had been accepted when he first applied, he would have been home when his daughter was born and wouldn’t have missed a year and a half with her and Beverly.
He and his wife talked and, Rogers allowed as usually was the case, what Beverly had to say made sense.
“She told me, ‘Get in there, do a decent job and it might help some other black kids get into the Guard.'”
He became the first black soldier in the Iola Guard unit, then attached to an artillery brigade, and several years later would become the first black first sergeant in the Iola Guard company.

COOKING HAD been among Rogers’ duties in Korea and that was his assignment with the Guard, “mainly because they didn’t know what else to do with me. They didn’t want me in the mainstream.”
It didn’t take Rogers long to make his mark.
In his first summer exercise at Camp Guernsey, Wyo., Rogers was put in charge of a four-man cooking detail and when the unit returned to Iola, he was promoted to E-6 and given full responsibility for the unit’s kitchen.
In Korea the Army “had cooking trucks, but the National Guard didn’t. No one had seen one,” Rogers said.
He and another local soldier constructed a mobile kitchen for Iola’s unit, which led to Rogers receiving a plaque from the state command for his innovation.
“We showed it off when we went to camp” for several years afterward, he said.
With a three-year hiatus, Rogers spread his 26 years in the Guard over 29. When he re-upped, Rogers worked in the motor pool with Iolan Tom Cellars.
Times were changing and having blacks on board no longer was unusual. Also, Rogers’ expertise and dedication in many areas were recognized by officers. He was sent to the Presidio in San Francisco, where he was schooled in counseling. The next two years Rogers worked with recruitment and retention of soldiers before being named Iola’s first sergeant in 1975, a position he had for 9 1/2 years until he retired in 1985.

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