July 25, 2016

National Museum of the American Sailor

On July 3, 1911, the very first recruit arrived at Naval Training Station Great Lakes to report to the newly opened boot camp in Great Lakes, Illinois. Joseph Wallace Gregg was a slender seventeen-year old from Terre Haute, Indiana. He later recalled, "I was a little shy, homesick and didn't cut too much of a figure in my new Navy uniform,"