Does anyone here remember ERPI Classroom Films? ERPI Classroom Films were the ultimate when I was a kid in the Thirties in East Texas. We would assemble in the auditorium and the latest "ERPI" would flash on. They were exceedingly grainy, black-and-white, jerky motion picture shows, featuring stirring tales about "our nation's" past, and Grade D actors and actresses enacting scenes therefrom... the Signing of the Constitution (of course), and Washington Crossing the Delaware, and so on. And (best of all) Daniel Boone discovering the Cumberland Gap and standing on a "remote mountain top in the wilderness" in his coonskin cap - and sighting ever Westward (Ho!) - while in the background you could plainly see a farm and silo and cows grazing on distant hills... Sigh. Then he would fire his long rifle and the resultant cloud of smoke would completely block out the screen.

Was the best they could do back in the Thirties.

And the Forties, too - for when we were in Basic, ERPI (or its successors) movies and movie clips were the way to go! For in Basic, we had movies just about every other day. There was an endless series on "Why We Fight" - and this was replete with erudite political analyses (lost on the most of us) and depictions of historic events that had brought us to where and why we were all here in the Georgia boonies: the Munich Beer-Hall Putsch, the Annexing of the Sudatenland, assorted derelictions of one Josef Stalin, and - best of all! - Pearl Harbor! - and legions of buck-toothed Japanese infantrymen, with thick bottle-bottom glasses and bayonets ever at the poke in the Rape of Nanking and other perfidies...

And then there was Venereal Disease... A favorite! Always sure to get rapt audience participation even, and catcalls in the darkened room that (of course) infuriated the vigilant Sergeants ever-seeking miscreants and trouble-makers from their platoons...

Time and again we were shown the vices waiting for us outside the Post gates and on weekend fuloughs. Winsome young lasses in provocative attire were shown leading recruit after poor recruit astray. (Whistles! Catcalls...). The snares of small talk with women on the street, the "picking up" of dates in bars, and the eventual slide into ruin and venereal disease sure to result from all these liasons were depicted, at times, in quite graphic display.

At this juncture, the films would segue to "prophylactic kits" and how to use them. The multiple benefits of condoms, etc. But if you think that is where the Army left it, you are wrong!

For it was the rule at Wheeler, on weekend nights when the troops who had had leave were coming back from town, that they "check in" at the Medics or with their Barracks Sergeants for "Peter Parade."

Now Peter Parade was Universal. That is, it didn't matter if you had been to Macon that night or not. You could have been on KP, or extra-duty or locked up in the Stockade - but when Peter Parade was called, you snapped to in front of your footlocker and opened your fly and pulled your penis out on display. Depp and the other Sergeants, often with a Medic or an Officer, then passed down the line eyeballing all and through some mysterious alchemy known only to Sergeantdom, deciding who was "suspect" and who not - and what judgment was be handed out on the spot.

In time it came to matter not: every short-horn had been laughed at anew each time ("Stand close to the urinals, Soldier, the next man may be bare-footed!") and Uncle Remus had been aclaimed "winner" of this Blue-Ribbon Show over and over. I remember it all sixty years later... Damn!

Thus, Peter Parade.

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