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09/05/2018 08:30 AMHoward Rohloff has offered his services at home and abroad both as a serviceman and a civilian. At the age of 98, he’s been a radar operator, a scoutmaster, an engineer, and he served on the Board of Police Commissioners for North Haven.
Before his service in the Second World War, Howard was a scoutmaster for the Hamden Plains Boy Scout troop.
“I thought it was very important to train the boys,” he says. “The boys required a lot of attention. You take them out on hikes and whatnot and they’d walk in the puddles.”
He says it was important to teach the boys to get along with each other, to bring them up well—and to keep out of those puddles.
Howard studied electrical engineering at the University of Connecticut. It was a professor there who convinced him to volunteer for the Signal Corps.
“They picked up probably 30 or more college graduates who’d had courses in radio engineering,” Howard says.
Howard’s partner during his training had been a sergeant who spotted the first aircraft coming into Hawaii, for which he earned a promotion to lieutenant.
From there, Howard was on the move again. The Signal Corps was sent to Camp Murphy in West Palm Beach, Florida, where the group worked on an actual radar unit sent over from England.
“We learned exactly how the radar does function,” Howard says.
With their training finally completed, the Signal Corps was split up and Howard was sent off on a number of small assignments that introduced him to his first American-made radar systems.
“At the end of that time, I didn’t see very many of my old friends,” says Howard.
He became the only person assigned to radar operation at any one time.
Though Howard joined the military as a part of the Army, his work with the Signal Corps eventually led him to work primarily with the Air Force.
“I was really part of a Navy-Air Force group—they cooked my lunch every day,” Howard says.
For a while, Howard was stationed in Louisiana with a radar post under his command. Howard had managed to compress his radar unit into a size that would fit into a 2 ½ ton truck or a freight plane. This way, he could move throughout the country to bring the radar technology to other military bases.
The military would also use his system to diagnose and repair radar systems used overseas and to test a more advanced radar system.
“This new radar that they were working on would pick up an incoming shell and train the guns to fire back at the initial location,” Howard says.
Howard did that for a year and a half before he was sent overseas to Panama City and on to the Galapagos Islands, where he was in command of four radar units.
“It was nice,” he said. “A little different. My main source of transportation was a tugboat. I had a tugboat in my command!”
Of course, the boat was mainly for delivering rations to the radar stations. Since the boat would only come in at dawn, this sometimes meant Howard had to sleep on the tugboat.
“I slept 13 miles south of the equator,” Howard says. “I lost my hair in the war, in the hot sun.”
When his service was over, Howard was able to return to his job in the engineering department of the telephone company, from which he retired in 1973.
Like many soldiers in training, Howard elected to marry before he shipped out so that he would have time with his wife-to-be. He returned home to his wife, Alice. They would have three kids, Robert, Brett, and Deborah.
Originally from Hamden, Howard was asked to join the North Haven Board of Police Commissioners only a few years after he came to town more than six decades ago.
At the time, the police station staff was made up of many volunteers. The headquarters was still located in the basement of Town Hall. During his time with the commission, the station moved to its current location.
With all the memorable contributions Howard has made to the town, one stands out for him. When Alice died, Howard donated a new window to Saint John Episcopal Church in her name.
“It’s the prettiest window there,” he says.