I also learned, by the third or fourth month of my course work at Penn that my parents really couldn't afford to send me to university and my sister also; I had one younger sister, younger by about a year and a half. So that when I went... when I learned this, I also learned that the, what we call the GI Bill, existed in the United States at that time and that the war legally, legally, was not over in the United States until 15th May of 1946. My 18th birthday, I now recall, was on the 20th May, five days after the war legally ended, which meant that I could have escaped the draft. The draft was still ongoing, it was… it was fading out, but I would have been drafted on 20th May... I'm sorry, on... on 20th May, but because the war ended on 15th May, I could escape. But I chose not to, because the GI Bill was very appealing. It would... It was an 18-month enlistment in the Army; it would then provide me, after that period of time, with a full four year scholarship, if you will, actually payment, to the University of Pennsylvania. And it would relieve my parents of that obligation, allow my sister to go to university and also in some way, I suppose, make me a bit more mature for the company that I would then have at the university.
And that's exactly what I did. I received a leave of absence, which allowed me to return when I finished my military obligation, and entered the military with a rather uneventful career.