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Another Person In Corregidor Photo Identified

Scot Walker '90 March 27, 2017 12:23 PM updated: March 27, 2017 5:40 PM

 

Bill E. Porter is the latest person to be identified in the iconic Aggie Muster photo taken at Corregidor in 1946.

Porter did not attend A&M, but after the war, he would father William Y. "Bill" Porter, who would go on to join the Corps of Cadets, graduate from Texas A&M in 1978 and then serve 30 years of active and reserve duty in the U.S. Army, retiring as a colonel.

Col. Porter contacted The Association of Former students on March 27 to let us know his father was in the famous Corregidor image taken by James Danklefs '43. He said he was a student at Texas A&M when his father told him that he had once appeared in a famous Aggie photo.

Porter's roommate at the time was Mark H. Johnson '78, who is now an engineering technology professor at A&M.

"Mark and I went out to eat one Sunday night exactly 40 years ago, back in the spring of 1977, at a steakhouse down on Texas Avenue in Bryan, and they had that photo on that wall," Porter recalls. "I told him, 'My dad just told me he was in that picture.' Mark asked me which one he was, but I didn't know that yet, so we starting looking through the faces. And Mark was actually the one who spotted my dad, peeking out from behind that guy's shoulder."

Porter said his father had attended the University of Texas before being drafted into the Army just after World War II ended and becoming an officer (his lieutenant's insignia can be seen in the picture), and he would go on to graduate from UT's pharmacy school after the war. He said his father was stationed in the Philippines in 1946 as part of a post-war salvage unit. Porter said he wasn't sure why his father decided to get on the boat headed to Corregidor with a bunch of Aggies that day in April 1946. "Maybe it was just because his friends were going, so he decided to go, too," he said.

Porter's presence at that Aggie Muster played a role in another photo from that day, a photo also taken by Danklefs but one that is much less well known. "After they took that first photo," Porter says his dad told him, "they told everyone from the University of Texas to stand up. And then they told all the Aggies to--"

Well, let's just say the Aggies were directed to assume a position that reflected their opinion of the rival school in Austin:

 

Decades after the events of April 1946 at Corregidor, Danklefs' family donated a box of his photos and documents Texas A&M's Cushing Memorial Library and Archives. Several additional photos from that famous day at Corregidor were included, and the rear-view photo above was among them, just as Lt. Bill Porter remembered it. He can be spotted on the left, facing the camera, while his Aggie comrades point a different part of their bodies at Danklefs' lens.

Col. Porter said his dad was about 22 in that photo. He is approaching 93 now.

The identification of Bill E. Porter brings the number of identified persons in the photo to 113, and brings the “unknowns” down to 14.

The Association's efforts to identify every man in the photo began in earnest in March 1996, as part of preparations to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1946 Corregidor Muster. The photo was published in Texas Aggie magazine with an overlay naming 32 people we could identify, and we asked readers to contact us if they recognized any other faces. Some readers contacted us after they recognized family members or Aggies with whom they had served; several men spotted them themselves in the photo.

Results of that initial 1996 effort resulted in the identification of 109 of the 127 people pictured, and it has taken more than 20 years to get four more confirmed.

If you can help us identify any of the remaining unknown faces in the photo, please email us at web@AggieNetwork.com.

 More outtakes from Danklefs' images of April 21, 1946, at Corregidor can be seen here (pdf).



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