Roads to the Great War: A Primer on War Communications During World War I

Roads to the Great War: A Primer on War Communications During World War I: Marine Signallers in World War One From the National Museum of the Marine Corps From the very beginnings of military warfare communication o...

Wednesday, August 2, 1922. Death of Alexander Graham Bell

 On this day in 1922, Alexander Graham Bell died on his estate in Nova Scotia.

Bell was born in Scotland and later immigrated to Canada with his family.  In his early inventive years, he lived in the United States and obtained American citizenship after his marriage.  In his later years, he kept residences in the U.S. and Canada, but tended to favor his home in Nova Scotia, which had originally been a summer home.  He was 75 at the time of his death.  He is, of course, most famously noted for the telephone.

Saturday, July 15, 1922. Flat tire.

The Saturday Evening Post hit the stands and mailboxes with a classci Cole Phillips' illustration of a woman beset by a flat tire.

The Japanese Communist Party (日本共産党 or Nihon Kyōsan-tō) was formed by three former anarchists, proving that one goofball crackpot body of thought can easily yield to another.  It would be outlawed, but wouldn't really go away, in 1925, and then be allowed again following Japan's defeat in World War Two.

The first fully automated telephone exchange appeared in the United Kingdom.

Monday, December 12, 1921. Ham radio reaches across the Atlantic.

On this day in 1921 Amateur Radio (HAM) started transatlantic broadcasts.

100 Years of Amateur Radio Transatlantic Communications

1921 Transatlantic Tests

Ham radio isn't as big of deal as it once was, due to cell phones and the like. But at one time, it was a pretty big deal.

Monday Morning Repeats. From the Week of June 11, 2011. Communications and Road Miles

This entry was actually the only post for June, 1911.  This blog used to have big intervals between publication.

Communications and Road Miles

April 11, 1921. Glass Arm Eddie, First Broadcast Lightweight Boxing Match, 67th Congress, Transjordan, Cigarettes in Iowa.

Eddie Brown.

On the same day that Eddie Brown, Centerfielder, was photographed, the first radio broadcast of a lightweight boxing match may, or may not have, been done:

Old Radio: April 11, 1921: The First Lightweight Boxing Match...: April 11, 1921: The first lightweight boxing match on radio between Johnny Ray and Johnny Dundee was broadcasted live on this day ...

Pity the poor blogger on something like this. . . 

On this Monday of April, 1921, the 67th Congress was sworn in.

The United Kingdom established the Emirate of Transjordan, which today is the Kingdom of Jordan. Abdullah, the future king, was the Emir.  His grandson is the present king. 

The kingdom has been in the news recently as it may be that a case of sibling rivalry has popped up, and is even potentially dangerous.  

Iowa lifted a prohibition on the sale of cigarettes, a retrograde act that shows the could happen.  

Indeed, cigarette prohibition was an early 20th Century thing that shows the dangers of tobacco, while not really fully understood, weren't completely unknown either.  Prior to Iowa three other states had banned the sale, and even the possession, of cigarettes.

World War One, however, hadn't helped matters.  Indeed, while the Great War had helped push alcohol over the top in terms of being passed, the same factors were somewhat at work.  Thousands of men had been exposed to young drinking during the war and to societies in which, at that time, alcohol was simply part of life and a matter of routine daily consumption.  And cigarettes had poured into the trenches during the war in no small part due to the stress of the situation, and the fact that cigarettes were easier to smoke than their competitors.

1919 cigarette advertisement with  youthful smoking veteran.

For whatever reason, cigarettes really are more dangerous than pipes or cigars, health wise, which doesn't mean any of them are safe.  Lung cancer rates would start to spike in the 1930s due to them.

It's odd to think that my father's father, who was from Iowa originally, was a lifelong Camel cigarette smoker, albeit "life long" is deceptive as he died in his 40s.

On the same day, telephone service was established from Florida to Cuba, and as that lays on the path to cell phones, it was also a retrograde movement. A look at somebody in a distant land, from what seems to be the distant past:

April 11, 1921: 'Abdu'l-Baha at Pilgrim House

The Aerodrome: Blog Mirror: US Post Office Airmail Radio System: 1921

The Aerodrome: Blog Mirror: US Post Office Airmail Radio System:...:   US Post Office Airmail Radio System: 1921

Monday Morning Repeat for the Week of November 8, 2009.

 Again, the only post that week, and posted a bit late this week.

The Telephone

August 4, 1920. Resolving disputes.

Conbro Clothing in Washington D. C.  August 4, 1920.

The US and the UK entered into a strange conflict as the Navy was ordered to block the British ship Colonia from laying an underground cable for Western Union from Miami to Barbados. The US had not licensed the cable.

The dispute would drag on for two years.

In Mexico, President de la Huerta, having learned a lesson his predecessors had not, removed all military officers from his cabinet, save for his minister of war, and sent them overseas on diplomatic missions.

Communications, Church, and COVID-10

When the Pandemic first started, I published this item on one of our companion blogs*:

Churches of the West: The Church and Pandemic.: St. Mary's Cathedral, Diocese of Cheyenne Wyoming. When this particular blog was started back in 2011 its stated purposes was...

I understand our Diocese's orders, to a degree, during the pandemic.  The Diocese had to close the door to public Masses.  It had no other humane choice.  Catholics are obligated to attend Mass on Sundays and Holy Days and our community, where Catholics are a minority, has a grand total of at least ten Catholic Masses per weekend. That's a lot.  A lot of those Masses are heavily attended.

Added to this, during normal period on the liturgical calendar there are still things going on in the Church or Parish as rule.  Confessions are held weekly more frequently than that.  There are meetings. And there are Baptisms and Marriages.  So a lot is going on in a Church.

During Lent, even more is going on.

So those voices that proclaim that nothing should have been done to disrupt normal Parish life are flat out wrong. 

Which doesn't mean that the critics don't have a point.

Those critics, of course, have to be understood in the context of the Catholic (the word means "Universal") Church being global, but the churches being local.  That is, the local Bishop of a Diocese impacts the daily lives of average Catholics a lot more than the Pope does.

And that's where, at least to some degree, legitimate criticism can be levied.

The response to the pandemic has varied from diocese to diocese around the globe and from diocese to diocese around the country.  And it is not uniform in any sense, nor would we expect it to be.  So any criticism about the Bishops doing this or that are incorrect from the onset.  A person probably only really grasp what the Bishop of their Diocese is doing, although quite a few of them have done very similar things.  Our Diocese took one of the most extreme, if a person cares to define it that way, approaches.

All the sacraments were cancelled save for Confessions where there was a risk of death.

I'll be frank that I feel the order went way too far from the onset.  In a discussion with a very Catholic friend, he posed the question of "well, what if priests had become ill and died?", which is a highly legitimate point.   And I'm not arguing that we should have ignored the state's order and simply charged on as if nothing was happening.  But shutting down all the sacraments was simply too much.  As I pointed out to my friend, what about those who were to be married and simply shrugged their shoulders in our era of weak fealty and started keeping house, something we observant Catholics regard as a mortal sin?  And what about people who would have gone to Confession and simply took Pope Francis' suggestion of "perfect contrition" lightly, and figured they were good to go. Some likely have passed and some who don't study such things will simply assume that perhaps that counts from here on out and they don't have to observe the Church's laws in regard to at least an annual Confession?  And what about those who have simply accommodated themselves to televised Mass or no Mass at all, violation of the Church's canons though they are in normal times.  Everyone has met people who have allowed their consciences to become elastic to accommodate their personal desires or laziness. 

Indeed, the Church, as opposed to Protestant Churches, has at least in part kept a set of canons requiring participation for that reason.  Catholics regard it as a mortal sin not to go to Mass, if they can, on Holy Days and Sundays not because it's in the Bible, but because its a law imposed by the Church.  Indeed, Protestants rarely grasp that Catholics don't regard Protestant failing to observe Catholic Canons as committing serious sins, which is not to say that there aren't serious sins everyone is to avoid.  I.e, Protestants aren't expected to observe Catholic Holy Days for instance.

None of which, again, is to suggest that the Church should have ignored the virus and kept the public Masses.

But it is to say that the cancellation of everything else, where it occurred, and it occurred here, was a mistake.  Baptisms could clearly have been handled with low risk and there was never any sort of state order requiring them to be cancelled.  Marriages could have been too if the couples were willing to go forward with hardly anyone in attendance.  That anyone would consider that in this era would surprise many but I personally know a young couple who were married of their own volition in just such a way, and I myself recall stepping into the Church years ago on a Wednesday night when there was a marriage going on, elaborate white dress and all, with less than ten people in attendance.

Likewise, people being brought into the Church as adults could have been.

Confessions under some circumstances should have been allowed.  Yes, I don't want a line to the Confessional on Saturdays going on right now but cancelling all private Confession in a time of crises was not the right thing to do in my view.  There were ways to accommodate that.

And failing to grasp communications in this modern era is, in my view, an enormous failure.

A friend of mine who is a devout Catholic in Oklahoma tells me that in his archdiocese they are getting weekly emails from that archdiocese.

We aren't.

Now, to a degree, that doesn't surprise me.  Catholic parishes are large and no doubt the diocese doesn't have hardly any of our email addresses.  But it goes beyond that.

Our Bishops original orders expired on Thursday, April 30.  That should mean that a continuation of them in some form should have been widely distributed prior to that.

Nothing was.

What happened instead was a press release.

Now, most people don't get press releases and the Diocese doesn't even publish its own press releases, for the most part, on its website.  Checking it this morning what remains as the case is that there's a press release from back in January regarding the Diocese's actions in regard to a Bishop who served long, long ago.  While that story is real news and while the Diocese took the proper and strong action regarding it, most Wyoming Catholic probably didn't live in the state back then or weren't alive back then.  It's the sort of attention headline grabbing story that deserves to be an attention grabbing headline story, and which if the Press applied its  focus more broadly, would show up a lot more in regard to other institution, particularly schools.

But as far as the lives of average Catholics go, Mass closures matter a lot more.

And we're learning the status of that on the second page of the Tribune, with a headline reading, if you just read on line:

Cheyenne diocese says it will continue to suspend Mass through mid-May

Or, if you read the e-edition or print edition:

Mass Closures To Continue

Now, in fairness, the proactive Priests of the diocese will contact those that they can, or answer questions from those who pose them, and post an announcement to their online bulletins, or make a Youtube or Facebook announcement.  So it'll get out that way.

But is that good enough?

I'm submit it isn't. 

Indeed, delivering a press announcement in 2020 in a state where we're a large minority means that most people are left without anything unless they're proactive.  Most people don't read the newspapers anymore.  And an announcement delivered so late that it comes out the day of the vigil of Sunday is not going to get to most people.

In an earlier time, when a lot of Catholics lived in the Catholic Ghetto in the United States, or in Catholic communities, or where most Catholics in communities like ours where Catholics are a minority, had a means by which such news traveled pretty quickly, and often by the parish priest.  Parish priests weren't moved much, if at all, and they knew their parishioners.  Indeed, even here, it would have been the case that a lot of priests would have been in a community for decades, would have eaten frequently at parishioners homes, would have gone to their high school sporting events, and would have stopped by the Knights of Columbus, where a lot of the men would have been members, nightly to make sure that things were in control at the bar and people were heading home.

Some of that still occurs, but I frankly think it's a lot less than it used to be.  There are indeed still small parishes, or even large ones, where parishioners are really tight with a priest, but as Americans have lost connection with their own communities, which they have, that tight bond isn't there to the same degree, in my view.  Indeed, I don't think that tight bond is there with anything, which is why a writer like Wendell Berry would write a book called Becoming Native To This Place.  It's one of the huge holes in modern American life.

So, circling back, how does an oilfield worker from Texas get the news?  What about a junior accountant who moved up from Colorado?  You get the point.

Indeed, at this time a lot of Catholic parishioners are in the category of "vagabondi", moving from parish to parish as convenient, which is acceptable in the Church.  They donate where they go, but they aren't really listed anywhere, and they probably aren't being contacted.  Indeed, as far as I can tell, written communication around here has been pretty limited during the closure.

An assumption that on a Saturday morning most people are going to read the news in a newspaper and then call anyone they know who doesn't get it is flat out wrong, if such an assumption was made.  Simply waiting until Friday to say anything at all is likewise not a very good way to communicate anything to a group of people who are morally bound to attend Mass if they can.  It makes no sense at all.

The same news also informs the readers, most of whom will  not be Catholic, that Confessions by appointment are now resumed, which is a good thing, and that Masses after the 15th will be resumed but the present restrictions on public gathering, which actually will expire on that date, will also be observed.  I'm not sure what that means, but the size of gatherings is now very limited so, if that holds, and means what it says, logic would presume that the requirement to attend Mass will remain suspended as there's no earthly way to do that for all the Catholics in most parishes, even if Masses were run all day long on Sunday, which they can't be as Canon Law restricts the number of Masses a Priest can say in a day.  Perhaps that latter restriction makes sense, but we're still being informed of this in a very poor way.

As noted, every Diocese is different and this isn't applicable everywhere.  But rising to his crisis does not appear to have been done very well in Cheyenne.

If this seems to be asking for too much,and I'd strenuously argue it isn't, other institutions haven't been similarly lacking. The courts, for example, have been excellent in sending out information.  And the Diocese, in this modern era, does have a website where an announcement could have been placed front and center.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*I debated posting this comment at all as I'm not disloyal, and I also wasn't sure if I should post it first here, or on that blog.  Ultimately I decided to post it, and here, as it is a local item for one thing, and a communications matter, at least in part, secondly.

Technological Acclimation and Mystic Pizza

Sometimes you don't realize how acclimated you've become to technology until you experience it in an odd fashion.

The other night I was flipping  though the channels and hit upon the movie Mystic Pizza.  I've seen it before. It's really not worth watching and I knew that when I hit on it.

For those who haven't seen it, don't bother.  A synopsis of the plot, or rather plots, is as follows, as it plays into what I've noted here as the theme of this entry.  The movie follows the lives and loves of three young Portuguese American women, who all  work at a pizza restaurant in the Connecticut seaport town of Mystic.  They characters are Kat Araujo, played by Annabeth Gish (no relationship to the great silent screen star Lillian Gish), Daisy Araujo, played by the then up and coming Julia Roberts and Jojo Barbosa, played by the Lili Taylor.

Note that none of the actresses are Portuguese Americans.*

Anyhow, the basic gist of the film is that Kat and Daisy are sisters, and Kat is bound in the near future for Yale, while Daisy is wild and not bound for Yale.  Jojo is tied up in romance with a Portuguese American fisherman and the film starts off with their wedding, which is interrupted for most of the film when she collapses during the ceremony, burdened with the thought of the seriousness of the obligation she's embarking upon.

None of which has all that much to do with what I'm noting, but two parts of the plot do, and they both involve telephones.

Daisy has met a "preppy" (this 1988 film was made during the preppy era) who is a failed law student. His booting out from law school hasn't interrupted his wealth somehow, to we have the Townie/Preppy romance thing going on, a theme that dates back in various ways to the silent film era.  Kat is not only working at Mystic Pizza, but is also baby sitting the daughter of a young architect whose wife is off in England.  Yeah, you can probably see how all these plots develop from there.

Anyhow, in once scene the Daisy character is supposed to go to dinner with Preppy dude and meet his parents, but Kat, who is supposed to fill in for her at the pizza joint, doesn't show up.  Daisy tries to call her but the handset has been kicked off the phone at the Architect's house where Architect, daughter and Kat are watching television.

That struck me there simply because now you'd call on your cell.  If nobody answered you'd text.

It didn't disrupt me watching the film, and indeed I didn't have much invested in it anyhow, but that just struck me.

More significantly, however, late in the movie Architect and Kat arrange to go to a giant 18th Century house he is working on Halloween night as the house is reputedly haunted.  Note, I didn't say this movie was good.  While there, the predictable happens.  Jojo, meanwhile, has agreed to participate in this evil by watching daughter, whereupon she discovers her love for children in a weakly developed part of the film which in turn will lead to the resumption of her nuptials.  Anyhow, just like a silent film, Wife returns from England and Jojo is forced into making up a strained lie as to the missing husband and babysitter.

At that point, automatically, a modern viewer will think, as this takes place in world not all that long ago and otherwise pretty much like ours, "why doesn't she call Kat on her cell phone or text?".  It's literally impossible not to.  Of course, she can't.  They didn't exist.

That's actually my sole point in noting this movie watching experience.  I'm now so used to cell phones that my first reaction is "why doesn't she use her cell phone?", and the thought keeps repeating as you are watching these scenes.

Okay, while on this, why did I watch this, again?

I don't really know.  I know that the first time I watched this movie on television it was a few years after its release as a fellow who was in law school at the same time I was, and who was from a somewhat well heeled family in Connecticut, took enormous offense to the movie at the time it was released.  I recall him asking me if I'd seen it one day at law school.  I didn't watch very many movies while in law school (maybe none) and I'd never heard of it.  I recall his view was that the movie maker, whom he knew, knew nothing about Portuguese Americans in Connecticut.  At the time, and upon the first viewing, I was pretty surprised that he'd be so wrapped up in that as he certainly wasn't a Connecticut Portuguese American either.

None of that justifies watching this film again, but there was nothing on and I was on the verge of falling asleep so I just left it on.  Having seen it now, I think I agree with the critic noted.  Everything, including the Portuguese nature of the protagonist, is pretty underdeveloped.  You only know that they're Portuguese as somebody says something about it now and then and their being Catholic is mentioned a couple of times and oddly inserted a couple of times.

FWIW, there really is a Mystic Pizza.  Most of the people who have seen this film apparently like it, as opposed to me, who does not, and following the film, the real Mystic Pizza was redone to look like the one in the move, which provides an odd example of art following life following art, I guess.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Alma Temple, Denver Colorado

Churches of the West: Alma Temple, Denver Colorado:

Alma Temple, Denver Colorado

I know absolutely nothing whatsoever about this structure, or about the the institution that apparently owns it.  It belongs, apparently, to a Protestant group that maintains a radio station in addition to some sort of services.  The structure has an obvious Greek Revival style and was built in 1923.

Boo hiss 9th Circuit

Tuesday, September 10, 2019

Ninth Circuit Strikes Montana's Political Robocall Ban

February 12, 1919. Lincoln's Birthday. Returning heroes, Women and radios, Highways in Wyoming, Worker's Compensation and Villa not dead.

Black soldiers of the 369th Infantry, New York National Guard, who had won the Croix de Guerre in France.  February 12, 1919.

Returning black soldiers were photographed returning to New York.  The link posted in above details their heroism and their later lives, something I always find interesting.

Women radio operators of the U.S. Army, February 12, 1919.

Women were brought into the service in the Great War in substantial numbers for the first time.  Among their roles was that of radio and telephone operators.  As with other soldiers, some stayed on in Europe after the war, where their services remained in need.

I'll have a post on something in the 2019 genre that is related to the above, but the winds of change were blowing in the state as evidence by the article that the State was getting into highway funding in a major way.  $6,600,000 was a huge amount of money in 1919, and it was going into highway construction.

The automobile era had arrived.

A renewed war scare was building as well as it appeared that Germany was about to rearm.  It would have had a really hard time doing so in 1919, but the fear was understandable.

And surprisingly, there was discussion in the legislature about adding agricultural workers to the Workers Compensation rolls.  They were exempted when the bill passed a few years earlier, and they still are.  Such a suggestion would get nowhere today, but then there was a higher percentage of the population employed in agriculture in 1919 than there is in 2019.

And Villa was reported dead again, but the paper was doubting the veracity of that report.

And at Kooi Wyoming, a mining camp near Sheridan Wyoming, thirty five miners were arrested for assembling.

Intel, the semi conductor company, was founded

as NM Electronics by former Fairchild Semiconductor employees Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore on this day in 1968.

The rumblings of the computer revolution were beginning to be heard.

In Canada, the mailman wasn't being heard as the employees of Canada Post went on strike. For businesses near the US border this meant compensating by renting post office boxes in nearly by US locations.

Alexander Dubcek went on national Czech media to inform his people that he'd continue his democratic reforms as Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia in spite of pressure form the Soviet Union to stop it.

And Atlantic Richfield and Humble Oil announced the discovery of oil in Alaska's Prudhoe Bay, which the companies had made some months prior.

It was a busy day.

Mexico back in the headlines, May 25, 1918

Cuba and Mexico, it seems, were not getting along.

And former President Theodore Roosevelt wasn't getting along with the Postmaster General.

Poncho Villa was making the front page again.

And the nation might need old soldiers who hadn't faded away.

Costa Rica had entered the fray.

And snow was predicted.

May 25, 1918.

Blog Mirror: May 11, 1917, EO 2617 Calls for Enlistment of Women Telephone Operators into Army Signal Corps

May 11, 1917, EO 2617 Calls for Enlistment of Women Telephone Operators into Army Signal Corps

Wednesday, May 11, 2016 - 4:43am

Jon Harrison

Blog: 

Red Tape

Categories: 

History

Military & Veterans

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During World War I, around 7000 U.S. and Canadian women telephone operators volunteered, but only 447 were selected, to serve with the Army Signal Corps in France and England, becoming the Army's first female combat unit.

The cell phone outnumbers the landline.

 LoC Caption:  "The Story of the Telephone. Speeding the spoken word. Scene from the new American Red Cross motion picture, "Speeding the Spoken Word," in which the romance of the telephone is graphically portrayed on the screen".  1920.

The number of mobile-phone users in the U.S. surpassed the number of conventional land-based phone lines in the second half of 2004, the government said Friday.

By the end of the year, there were 181.1 million cellphone subscribers, compared with 177.9 million access lines into U.S. homes and businesses, the Federal Communications Commission said in a biannual report.

Los Angeles Times.

A person has to be careful with statistics as they can lead to incorrect assumptions.  For one thing, this may tend to lead to an erroneous assumption that the number of households with landlines is outnumbered by the number with cell phones only, which would be erroneous.  For example, our house has a landline, but all three of us who live here have cell phones.  In contrast, my son, who is in college, lives in a house in which there are no landlines in use.  There might be for internet service, but no actual landline phone. 

The point is, however, that sheer number of cell phones doesn't equate with households served only by cell phones, although that day is coming.  Indeed, the tyranny of the cell phone is at the point at which a lot of homes have one landline but a lot of cell phones.

Good, bad?

Well, both, I suppose.

FWIW, I'm actually surprised it took this long to reach this point.

Edwardina L. Lavoie, bugler, 1st Artillery, New York National Guard

Edwardina Lavoie, a female New York National  Guard bandsman, April 26, 1917. 

These photographs are interesting for a variety of reasons.

Unlike the Navy, which had just authorized regular female recruits, the Army had a longer history with women in service.  It's somewhat muddled, quite frankly, and its subject to misinterpretation, but as its muddled and subject to misinterpretation I won't go into it.  Be that as it may, what these photographs depict is definitely out of the norm.

Being a bugler was a combat role. 

And a vital one.

Radio had just made its appearance in the US Army in the field in the Punitive Expedition and field phones hadn't gotten too far as of yet, although they were definitely in use.  Buglers, therefore, going into the war, remained a critical field signaling role.

Not the only one, we might note.  Field phones, of course, have already been mentioned.  And dispatch runners, some mounted, some on foot, were very common.  But, at least in theory, it remained the case that a large variety of military signals were sent by assigned bugle calls.

It was a very dangerous combat role.

Maybe she was a bandsmen?

Well, the captions from the Library of Congress don't say that.  I trust, therefore, that she really was a bugler with the New York 1st Artillery.  But let's take a look at bandsmen for a second.

Being an Army bandsman wasn't the same a century ago as it is today, although being a National Guard bandsmen might have been, oddly enough.  In the 19th Century Army, much of the military culture of which remained at the start of World War One, being a bandsman was a field occupation.  That is units all had bands, at that time, they took them to the field.  The scene depicted in Little Big Man, for example, in which the 7th Cavalry Regiment's band plays Garryowen as the 7th charges at Washita is actually correct.  The 7th really did have the band strike up Garryowen in that frozen horror, which tells us a lot about how bands were treated at the time.

Not everything about them, however.  One thing that's commonly not noted about military bandsmen, except by some astute historians, is that they were used as stretcher bearers as soon as the need arose.  So they didn't just hang around and provide stirring music for the carnage.  They helped carry the wounded off, a job which we might note which was extremely hazardous.

I don't know when that practice ended.

Note, as we circle back to the bugler role, that she's dressed in a male uniform.  Artillery was a mounted service, along with cavalry, and she's wearing leather leggins and male breaches.  She's dress for riding, in other words.

A very interesting photograph.

I'm certain she didn't deploy with the New York National Guard to Europe.  But by this date she would have been mobilized (she likely wasn't yet Federalized, that oddly took quite a bit more time to occur in World War One than it would in later call ups requiring Federalization).  I suspect, but don't know, that her role with the Guard ended with Federalization.  She wouldn't be the only one, I'd note.  Federalization of Guard units, pretty much up to the World War Two call up (but not much after that) entailed a weeding out and reassignment process.  Men unsuitable for military service in the opinion of the U.S. Army were weeded out at that point, units that were one thing in their state assignments became another in the Army.  I don't know what happened to Pvt. Lavoie, but I suspect her role with the New York National Guard ended at that point.

The Casper Daily Tribune for April 7, 1917. No panic here.

The Casper Daily Tribune is almost a shock compared to other papers in the state this week.  It didn't seem that worked up about the war.

It was starting off with the bold declaration that Casper, in the midst of the World War One oil boom, was "the city wonderful".  It predicated a population of 15,000 in the next few years, which may or may not have been a pleasant thought to long term residents, but as things would play out, it's prediction was in fact lower than that which the city would rise up to in the near future.  The refinery depicted in the photo on the bottom of the front page was much of the reason why.  Already, as the paper noted, residents who were returning to the town after an absence were shocked to see how much it had changed.

Major Ormsby, that was his name, not his rank, was interviewed in the paper about radios.  Ormsby was a local rancher who is remembered today for a road north of Casper that takes people to a rural subdivision, although it might be more recalled by some as it goes past the oldest of Casper's two strip joints (shades of what 1917 would bring in there).  At the time, however, that was all rural land and apparently Ormsby had a radio set there.  He was interviewed due to a rumor that his radio was going to be taken over by the Navy, although the article notes he'd heard no such rumor.  He also hadn't listed to his radio for a long time, apparently.  The paper noted that the nearest commercial station was in Denver, which was true, that being the very early predecessor to KOA, which is still in business.