50 years later, Card reflects on maturation in the military

If there was trouble to be made around Aplington, Parkersburg and New Hartford in the late 1950s and early 1960s, you could bet your bottom dollar that Louie Card had some involvement in it.

“I was probably more of a James Dean kind of a character. I ran with the hoodlum types,” he said from his suburban Orlando home. “Drinking beer, stealing watermelons and getting in fights.”

It got so bad that Card was actually expelled from Aplington High School during his senior year over altercations with multiple teachers, and after a skirmish in New Hartford a few months later, the Butler County Sheriff offered a warning pulled straight from the lyrics of Merle Haggard’s classic “Mama Tried.”

“He came and talked to my parents and said I was on a perfect track to be dead or in prison by 21 years old,” Card said.

But lo and behold, there was a way out. Card could wipe his slate clean if he signed up for the military in 1966, just as the Vietnam War began to escalate.

He jumped at the opportunity, and somewhere along the journey he finally saw the light.

Read the full story in the January 24 edition.