An undated studio portrait held by the family shows Schmoll in United States Navy enlisted dress.19 The photograph is direct evidence that he served in the Navy; it does not by itself establish his dates of service, rating, or duties.
His apparent age in the portrait suggests a sitting in roughly 1949-1953, which would place his service in or around the Korean War period. That falls inside the otherwise undocumented years before the June 1960 Parachutist listing, and it would make naval service the earliest datable episode in his adult life.
The record to request is his Official Military Personnel File (OMPF), held by the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. Two circumstances make this an unusually promising line of enquiry:
- The 1973 National Personnel Records Center fire destroyed large numbers of Army and Air Force files. Navy personnel records were not part of that loss.
- An OMPF becomes archival and publicly requestable 62 years after the date of separation. Service ending in the early 1950s is well past that threshold.
A located file could establish:
- his full name and service number as recorded at enlistment;
- date and place of birth;
- next of kin;
- home of record at enlistment;
- enlistment and discharge dates;
- rating, training, and duty assignments;
- any parachute, aircrew, or survival-equipment qualification;
- decorations; and
- his address on separation.
Several of these bear directly on other open questions in this profile. The birthplace and parents currently rest on secondary genealogical material alone. More significantly, any parachute or aircrew training recorded here would supply a plausible origin for the rigging expertise plainly evident by 1965, and would help explain how a man of 27 came to be a club’s published national contact in 1960.
Priority: High. The request is well defined, the records are likely to have survived, and the file would document a period for which nothing else has yet been found.
References
- 19 Undated black-and-white studio portrait of Harry Wayne Schmoll in United States Navy enlisted dress, held in family possession and reproduced on the front page of this site. The photograph carries no date, unit, or studio attribution; the estimated 1949-1953 period is inferred from his apparent age against his August 1932 birth date. — ↩