Elwyn C. Hopkins, to me, was Uncle Hoppy, my mother’s sister’s husband. As a child growing up in Nashua, NH, I spent a lot of time with him and my aunt, Celia, better known to everyone as Aunt Cece. I was just a tyke, and he was already retired. Quite often, I would have dinner with them at their apartment on Tyler St. Sometimes we would have biscuits, and Uncle Hoppy would talk about “Making biscuits for the troops… hundreds of biscuits at a time.” Or, if we were having mashed potatoes, he would say, “I used to make mashed potatoes for the troops in huge buckets, about the size of a trash can – real potatoes – and none went to waste.” That was the only inkling I ever had that he was in the military. He didn’t talk about it other than that. And being just a kid, I never thought to ask. At that age, military service was something you saw on a TV program like Combat! or Gallant Men, or a John Wayne war movie. Uncle Hop passed away in 1974, and I never thought about his military service until starting this project profiling NH veterans.

I had a few family photos of him and even had a few with him in a uniform, but no other documents. I sent away to the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, MO to see what they had. Here is the reply I got: “We are unable to locate a record with the information provided in your original inquiry, or the record needed to answer your inquiry was lost in the July 1973 fire that destroyed millions of records at the National Personnel Records Center. The records stored in the area that suffered the most damage in the fire were those of Army veterans discharged or deceased between November 1, 1912, and December 31, 1959.” How unfortunate!

Later, I received another notice from the Records Center. I guess somebody dug a little deeper. Based on that, and some personal information that I had, here is what is known:

Elwyn C. Hopkins was born on November 12, 1893, and grew up in Nashua, NH. His parents were Elwyn Sr. and Minnie Jane Cowan Hopkins.

He entered the US Army on December 7, 1917, enlisting in Boston, MA. (The US entered WWI on April 6, 1917.) At some point, he rose to Sergeant 1st Class and served in the Quartermaster Corps, and as such, based on his stories of biscuits and mashed potatoes, worked in a mess hall. It is not known if he worked on a US military base or in a rear mess operation in France.

He was honorably discharged on September 12, 1918, at Camp Jackson, South Carolina, enabling him to accept a commission as a 2nd Lieutenant, again, in the Quartermaster Corps. His discharge document notes that he was “honest and faithful and had excellent character.”

(Author’s Note: Camp Jackson, later known as Fort Jackson, was founded in 1917 as the US entered World War I. At the conclusion of World War I, Camp Jackson was shut down, and the Camp was abandoned on 25 April 1922. It was reactivated for WWII and was supposed to be shut down at war’s end. However, due to the outbreak of the Korean War, the camp remained open and is open yet today as an Army basic training center.)

World War I ended on November 11, 1918. Hopkin’s final discharge was on September 14, 1919. There is no record of him receiving hazardous duty pay. There was no record of any medals he may have earned. No record of his going overseas. However, I have been told that given his date of final discharge, he may have served as part of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in Europe. Many Quartermaster units stayed behind after the November 1918 Armistice to manage the massive “roll-up” and shipment of equipment back to the States.

It would appear that he earned $20.40 per month in the Army, and his final pay for a partial month stated that he was owed $13.80, minus fifty cents owed to the US government for “post laundry,” giving him a final paycheck of $13.30.

Returning to Nashua, NH, he married Celia Maynard of Ayer, MA, and secured a job at the Johns-Manville Company in Nashua, maker of a variety of asbestos products. He may have started, as many J-M employees did, unloading rail cars full of raw asbestos – an extremely hazardous job in the days before OSHA laws for personal protective clothing and breathing apparatus. Eventually, he moved on to the administrative office, then located on Bridge St.

At one point he and my aunt lived on Franklin St. in Nashua but early in their lives, moved to a large apartment in a tenement building at 8 Tyler St. They never owned a house, but Uncle Hop always had a new car, either a Buick or a Pontiac purchased at Tulley Buick-Pontiac when they were on the corner of Main and Bowers St. in Nashua.

After retirement, in the summertime, they would rent a small cabin at the NH end of Great East Lake, right on the water. They had their own dock and a 12-foot open rowboat with a 10HP Evinrude engine that went along with the cabin. Uncle Hop and I spent many hours fishing in that boat. And never once did he talk about his military service. But we continued to have biscuits and mashed potatoes on occasion.