Army Sergeant E5 Ronald D. Schultz stands near his engraved name on one of the several monuments at this Veterans Memorial Park in Merrill, IA. Schultz is the father of Tami Mullenix, an Architect in SGA’s Sioux City office.

Schultz was drafted into the military in 1964 with basic training in Fort Leonard Wood, MO. He was sent to Fort Knox to learn Morse Code - a communication system used to transmit letters and numbers through electrical pulses. He was one of 30 top men in his unit who was sent to Fort Gordon, GA, to learn radio teletype school. He finished his service in 1966 with the 5th Infantry Division in Fort Carson, CO, running the teletype rig.

The teletype was the quickest form of communication in the 1960s. This devise was an electro-mechanical typewriter used to send and receive typed messages. Schultz’s teletype rig was mounted to the back of a truck, where he monitored the Army network. Out on training maneuvers, they hauled the teletype with a generator in a trailer, while he and his fellow soldiers were to sleep in a two-man tent.

Instead, the men decided the makeshift trailer camper was a better accommodation. They unscrewed four bolts in the trailer, moved the generator out to the ground and they slept in the trailer instead.

Schultz was fortunate to have access to the Associated Press (AP) news, and he would print it off for his fellow soldiers to have news to read. The AP utilized the teletype for decades until the 1980s when computers and the internet took over as an expedient form of communication. Today, Morse Code and the teletype are almost obsolete and rarely used.