CLINTON S. ROUNDS, LCDR, USN

Clinton Rounds '27

Date of birth: September 7, 1903

Date of death: June 8, 1942

Age: 38

Lucky Bag

From the 1927 Lucky Bag:

Clinton Stlllwell Rounds

Interior, South Dakota

"Hank"

"HANK" was born in Interior, South Dakota, where he spent his summers working (?) on his father's ranch, besides attending school at Interior and graduating from High School there. Later on he completed two years at the Dakota Wesleyan University, where he attained the "moral" foundation upon which he has developed his career at the Naval Academy.

His vehement and impetuous nature has manifested itself in countless arguments and scraps, from which he always emerges with a broad grin. Being quick of apprehension and somewhat gay, he has a strong natural tendency for practical joking. He possesses a determination and will to win that will brook no opposition. When he sets his mind on attaining an end he does it with steel-jawed grimness. Even the elusive female has not been able to withstand his ardent nature. He is a connoisseur of women, but to the extent, as he often expresses in his attitude, "Be she fairer than crocodile or turtle dove, but if she be not for me, what care I how fair she be."

In athletics and activities "Hank" is prone to carry things to the last extreme. We see him working hard at football, wrestling, and track, as well as all things he undertakes to do. However, no one who knows him can help liking him and as a shipmate he will be the finest of them all.

Football: B Squad (3, 2) Class (4) Navy Numerals (3, 2) Class Numerals (4); Wrestling: A Squad (2, 1) Navy Numerals (2): Lacrosse: A Squad (3).

Clinton Stlllwell Rounds

Interior, South Dakota

"Hank"

"HANK" was born in Interior, South Dakota, where he spent his summers working (?) on his father's ranch, besides attending school at Interior and graduating from High School there. Later on he completed two years at the Dakota Wesleyan University, where he attained the "moral" foundation upon which he has developed his career at the Naval Academy.

His vehement and impetuous nature has manifested itself in countless arguments and scraps, from which he always emerges with a broad grin. Being quick of apprehension and somewhat gay, he has a strong natural tendency for practical joking. He possesses a determination and will to win that will brook no opposition. When he sets his mind on attaining an end he does it with steel-jawed grimness. Even the elusive female has not been able to withstand his ardent nature. He is a connoisseur of women, but to the extent, as he often expresses in his attitude, "Be she fairer than crocodile or turtle dove, but if she be not for me, what care I how fair she be."

In athletics and activities "Hank" is prone to carry things to the last extreme. We see him working hard at football, wrestling, and track, as well as all things he undertakes to do. However, no one who knows him can help liking him and as a shipmate he will be the finest of them all.

Football: B Squad (3, 2) Class (4) Navy Numerals (3, 2) Class Numerals (4); Wrestling: A Squad (2, 1) Navy Numerals (2): Lacrosse: A Squad (3).

Loss

From Find A Grave:

Ensign C. S. Rounds, USN, was designated Naval Aviator #3675 (lighter-than-air) in 1930. Graduated U.S. Naval Academy, Class of 1927.
Lt. Cmmdr Rounds was one of nine servicemen and three civilians killed when two blimps (G-2 and L-1) collided at night off the New Jersey shore during an exercise to test an experimental photoflash bomb that would be used to illuminate submerged submarines. There was one survivor, Ensign Howard Fahey.
LCDR Rounds had survived the crash of the dirigible USS MACON off the Calif. coast in 1935. He left a widow and six-year old daughter, Carmella.

Clinton was piloting L-2.

Other Information

From researcher Kathy Franz:

Clinton was born on the Stillwell Ranch, Valentine, Nebraska.
He married Gretchen Holland in the Little Church Around the Corner in New York City on July 29, 1930. Gretchen was an actress who graduated from the Major School of Dramatic Art and had a role in the movie “The Thirteenth Chair.”
Clinton left the dirigible Shenandoah shortly before it crashed in Ohio in 1925, and he left the Akron a week before it crashed in 1933. He survived the Macon disaster of 1935.
On December 8, 1939, The Rapid City Daily, South Dakota, published his picture in the newspaper as commander of the J-4, U. S. navy blimp used for tests in life-saving and refueling off New Jersey.
In 1941, his assignment was on the destroyer USS Trippe that convoyed the first Americans from Iceland to Ireland.
Clinton had four inventions for improving lighter than air craft and an invention for rescuing, by plane, floating survivors of ship or plane disasters at sea.
His father tried to get Clinton to forsake the air service. After Clinton’s death, his mother said, “He was just a ranch boy, but he wouldn’t give up the navy’s lighter than air service for anything.”
His mother was Mary, a postmistress, and his brother was Neil. His father Julius C. died the previous December and was a Badlands pioneer rancher and one time president of the old Interior State Bank.
His little sister Cress drowned in a water tank on the Stillwell Ranch in Valentine, Nebraska.

He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He was survived by his wife and daughter, Pamela. (Information from March 1959 issue of Shipmate.)

Photographs

From the Rapid City Journal on December 8, 1939
From the Rapid City Journal on December 8, 1939
From the Rapid City Journal on December 8, 1939

Navy Directories & Officer Registers

The "Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers of the United States Navy and Marine Corps" was published annually from 1815 through at least the 1970s; it provided rank, command or station, and occasionally billet until the beginning of World War II when command/station was no longer included. Scanned copies were reviewed and data entered from the mid-1840s through 1922, when more-frequent Navy Directories were available.

The Navy Directory was a publication that provided information on the command, billet, and rank of every active and retired naval officer. Single editions have been found online from January 1915 and March 1918, and then from three to six editions per year from 1923 through 1940; the final edition is from April 1941.

The entries in both series of documents are sometimes cryptic and confusing. They are often inconsistent, even within an edition, with the name of commands; this is especially true for aviation squadrons in the 1920s and early 1930s.

Alumni listed at the same command may or may not have had significant interactions; they could have shared a stateroom or workspace, stood many hours of watch together… or, especially at the larger commands, they might not have known each other at all. The information provides the opportunity to draw connections that are otherwise invisible, though, and gives a fuller view of the professional experiences of these alumni in Memorial Hall.