Frederick Dale Vincent Jr.

MAJ in 23rd Headquarters Co

ASN#322976

Born 1913 in PA, Died 1999

Other residence(s): Kingston, PA; Cambridge, MA; Fairfax County, VA; Stoneham, MA; Ipswich, MA; Greenville, ME

United States Army, European Theatre of Operations

College education before the war: Yale, Harvard

Notes: final rank LTC

Source: Roster of 23d HQ officers, from family of Oscar Seale; Pine Camp roster, 18 Dec 1945; photos courtesy of Fred Vincent

Dale Vincent was born on October 7, 1913 in Wilkes-Barre, PA. He was an only child; his father was a lawyer.

He graduated from Wyoming Seminary in Kingston, PA in 1930 and went on to get his undergraduate degree from Yale and his law degree from Harvard.

Courtesy of Fred Vincent

After law school he practiced law in Cambridge, MA, and appears to have joined the National Guard since he was observed with the rank of LT at the US Engineers Camp at Fort Belvoir, VA in the summer of 1936 (while he was still in law school). By the fall of 1940 it looks like he was in the Army full-time, on his way to the School for Instructors at Fort Belvoir, where he was in "the camouflage department.”

He married Margaret Miller Barton on December 14, 1940 and they settled in Alexandria, VA, becoming the parents of a daughter named after her mother, Meg.

He had earned a promotion to CPT by 1942, and became part of the 23rd Headquarters Company of the Ghost Army. His son Fred reports that he was "the HQ Engineer." By the end of the war he had been promoted to the rank of MAJ, and when he retired from the military he had earned the rank of LTC.

A Personals column note in the Wilkes-Barre Record noted in December, 1945 that he was moving to the Washington, DC area, and the small family settled in Fairfax County, VA. The same Personals column noted in 1950 that he was a lawyer in Langley, VA, and flew his Piper Cub up for the day to visit his parents.

Shortly thereafter he returned to Boston, where he served on the legal staff of James J. Reynolds, Jr. and was a member of the National Labor Relations Board. In January, 1951, he was loaned to the staff of the office of regional counsel for New England of the Office of Price Stabilization.

Throughout the rest of his career, he served as a lawyer in private practice and also as an Assistant Attorney General under two well-known Massachusetts Attorneys General--Edward Brooke (who later became a Senator from Massachusetts) and Elliot Richardson (who later served in the cabinets of Presidents Nixon and Ford).

He and his family settled in Ipswich, MA, but sadly his wife died in 1959, leaving him with a teenage daughter.

He remarried again in 1961 to the much younger Barbara Ann "Blaze" Berg, and they had four children: Jennifer, Hannah, Frederick, and Alexander. He became active in Ipswich politics, serving in the 1960s as a member of the town's Finance Committee, and as Town Counsel in the 1970s.

In 1967 he was part of a group of Massachusetts men who formed the Irish International Bank, and became one of its 12 directors.

He and Barbara retired to Greenville, ME. He died there on November 5, 1999 and is buried at the Greenville Cemetery.