PFC Ekroth — Vicenza Missile Command

An October 1959 Army public-affairs release, published in the Evening Telegram, provides the most detailed military record available for Loren Ekroth’s service years. Army PFC Lauren E. Ekroth was serving as a clerk in the Headquarters Company of the 1st Missile Command in Vicenza, Italy. He had entered the Army in October 1958, completed basic training at Fort Carson, Colorado, and arrived in Italy in March 1959. In mid-October 1959, he participated in Operation Top View, a joint NATO exercise with the Italian Army in the northern Italian Alps designed to test Southern European NATO defenses.

The notice identifies him as a 24-year-old clerk, a 1952 graduate of Superior Central High School, holder of a master’s degree from the University of Minnesota (conferred 1958), and a member of Alpha Psi Omega. The detail about his fraternity affiliation — he chose to be identified by his theater credentials — says something about how he understood himself even in uniform. His role as a headquarters clerk, processing paperwork for a nuclear-capable missile command, was a significant mismatch with his academic and theatrical background, and it was apparently the base education director who noticed: according to Ekroth’s own account in a 2014 interview, the director reviewed his master’s degree and invited him to teach university-level classes through the University of Maryland’s European Division while still on active duty. His first UMUC class had twenty students; the highest-ranking was a lieutenant colonel who also ran the office where PFC Ekroth worked by day.

Operation Top View — a Cold War deterrence exercise in the Alps involving nuclear-capable Corporal missile systems — placed the former Superior theater star in one of the most consequential military postings of the era. The contrast between the stage at Superior State College and the northern Italian Alps in 1959 marks the distance his twenties had taken him from Wisconsin.