Theodore Raymond Kruse
CPL in 3132nd Signal Service Co : T&M Platoon
ASN#42045704
Born 1912 in PR, Died 1974
County of residence at enlistment: New York County, NY
Other residence(s): Puerto Rico; Dominican Republic; New York, NY; Bloomfield, NJ; Belleville, NJ
United States Army, European Theatre of Operations
Occupation before the war: radio operators
Ted Kruse (birth name: Teodoro Ramón Kruse) was born on December 11, 1912 in Salinas, PR. He was the elder of two children; his father had been born in St. Thomas (Ted's grandfather had emigrated there from Denmark) and his mother in Puerto Rico. His father worked as the superintendent of a sugar plantation in the Dominican Republic.
When Ted was ten years old his father died, and his mother brought her two young children to New York from the Dominican Republic because she wanted them to get a US education.
Ted was a 17-year-old high school student in New York City when he left school to take a job in the NBC mailroom. He knew he wanted something to do with radio, and a year later he enrolled at the RCA Institute night school to study radio operation and broadcasting. During the day he served on the page staff, and later in the engineering department and production division as an office boy and receptionist.
After seven years at NBC, he got his first radio engineering job there when he was offered a position in the engineering maintenance division. By 1939 he held a first class radio telephone operator's license and a second class license for radio telegraphy, and was a full-fledged member of the engineering staff at the network.
Ted registered for the draft on October 16, 1940. Two years later, on December 17, 1942, he married Mary J. Cadwalader in Manhattan. He enlisted on October 8, 1943 and was, not surprisingly, assigned to the 3132 Signal Service Company as a radio operator.
He served in Europe with the unit, and was discharged from the Army on November 25, 1945, returning to his job at NBC.
Ted and his wife appear to have been living in New Jersey after their marriage through at least 1950, but by the time of his death Ted had returned to New York City, living in the Jackson Heights neighborhood.
He died suddenly of a heart attack on February 3, 1974; he was still working in the engineering department at NBC—he had spent a total of 46 years at the network.
He is buried at Forty Fort Cemetery in Luzerne County, PA, near his wife's hometown of Edwardsville, PA.
Sources:
1914 shipboard manifest Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico
https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/258052:2257?ssrc=pt&tid=152121363&pid=352444134122
1919 US Consular registration application (from his father)
1923 shipboard manifest San Juan to NYC
1925 NY state census
1939 NBC Transmitter (in-house employee publication; scroll down to February 1939 issue, pp. 12-13)
1940 census
1940 draft card
1942 marriage record
1943 enlistment record
1950 census
1974 Social Security death index
1974 VA death record
1974 Find a Grave record
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/73621700/theodore-r-kruse
1974 obituary in The Times-Leader (Wilkes-Barre PA)
https://www.newspapers.com/image/397409188/?match=1&terms=theodore%20kruse
1996 Find a Grave record for wife