Oscar was my grandfather. He was a biologist and educator, returning to his native California after the war to play a key role in the creation of and promotion of Junior Colleges as an affordable way to achieve higher education and learn key trades and skills. He served as President of Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut California from the mid 1950s until his retirement in 1969.

During the war, he served as a major in Panama and the South Pacific. He was one of a team of medical and scientific experts trying to come up with a way to treat Marines and Soldiers who were contracting malaria in the jungles of the Pacific theater. Disease was taking many more men out of action than were combat injuries. They had platoons a guinea pig enlisted men whom they would expose to mosquitoes in Panama and then try different treatments on them to see what would work both as a quicker remedy and an innoculation. Nobody died, to my knowledge, but there were plenty of sick troops, that's for sure.

Submitted 26 December 2014

William C. Edinger, San Antonio, Texas

Oscar Edinger (1904)