US Coast Guard

[W. Gray]

Trivia:

In 1959 when I took a trip there, Kansas had a U.S. Coast Guard station at Leavenworth.

Not sure when it closed.

[larryJ]

From the Kansas trivia..

Established in 1827, Ft. Leavenworth is the oldest continuous military post west of the Mississippi.  The Coast Guard maintains a recruiting office at Ft. Leavenworth.

Larryj

[W. Gray]

I see where Leavenworth at one time had a Coast Guard recruiting station at 100 Dakota Street, but it is closed now.

In 1959, and probably much earlier and later, the Coast Guard was operating cutters out of a Coast Guard station apparently at 50 Dakota Street at Leavenworth.

In 1965, the Leavenworth Times reported a new cutter assigned to the Leavenworth Coast Guard station was undergoing sea trials on the Missouri River.

In 1979, the Coast Guard Cutter Scioto sank in the Missouri River near its home port of Leavenworth. The cutter was re-floated one year later and eventually put back into service.

[W. Gray]

Something else I did not realize about Kansas and the Coast Guard.

The US Coast Guard Pay and Personnel Center is in Topeka.

Serves 42,000 active duty and some 8,000 civilian employees and 8,000 reservists.

The Coast Guard has 211 aircraft, 1,400 boats, and perhaps 60 cutters.

A CG boat is 65 feet or smaller and a cutter is over 65 feet long with living accommodations.

The CG is now a part of Homeland Security. When I was a kid, it belonged to the Treasury Department and then the Transportation Department.

Old timers might remember "Don Winslow of the Coast Guard" Sunday comic strip in the Wichita Eagle. There was also a 15 chapter movie serial with the same name, which I recall seeing a chapter here and there at the Plaza Theater in Independence, Mo.