Ding Patton ’49B: “VMI Is So Unusual”
Published on October 14, 2026
In the early years of World War II, while the walls of the Pentagon rose at a fevered pace of construction near the banks of the Potomac River, Herndon, Virginia, was a small farming community where dairy cows grazed and many people made their living from agriculture. In town, a teenager quietly worked at his father’s grocery store, breaking up 100-pound bags of potatoes and putting them into 5- and 10-pound bags for shoppers to buy.
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