Edwin A. Roginski papers

Edwin A. Roginski was a serviceman from New Jersey during the Korean War who worked in the Army Finance Corps.

Born in 1928, he grew up in Sayreville, Middlesex County with his mother, father, and sister Florence. He went on to attend Rutgers University New Brunswick, graduating in 1950 with a degree in Finance and Economics. The following year, he was drafted into Army to fight in the Korean War. Roginski received basic training at Fort Dix, located in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Because he had been educated in a useful field, Roginski managed to avoid "the pipeline" (a term he uses in his memoir Reporting for Duty to refer to the whole process of training and deploying to the front lines in Korea) and was assigned to the Army Finance Corps headquarters in St. Louis, Missouri.

As per the recommendation of legislators, the Women's Army Corps would take over a significant portion of the functions previously done by men at the Finance Center. Roginski was among those cut, and was now back in "the pipeline." He crossed the ocean aboard the USS General H.B. Freeman to Camp Drake in Japan (which was still occupied by the United States at the time).

Here again, Roginski manages to avoid "the pipeline," and is placed in the Army Finance Corps at Camp Drake, where he worked in disbursement operations. He was later transferred to Camp Fuji, where he worked for the P and C (Purchase and Contracting) Office, responsible for buying materials for the camp.

Roginski was an avid hunter and angler throughout his life, as demonstrated by his vast journal entries recording the fish and the mammals which he came across. The entries start in his adolescence, before he was drafted, and continue into his post-Army later adult years.

Roginski passed in 2020.