How This Started

I'm making this page so I don't have to tell every new Pershing Rifles H-7 Alumni and CAPER Alumni we find about how this wonderful adventure of starting a University of Oklahoma Pershing Rifles Alumni group got started! 

It will also explain why a CAPER is doing this!!  (Part of that is that I always felt like a part of Pershing Rifles.)

I'm Linda Grissette who was the CAPER National Commander for the 1970-71 school year.  From 1966 until 1972, the CAPER National Headquarters was at OU (that's for H-7 Alumni who weren't from that period).

In 1999, I finally found something about CAPERS on the internet (read the whole story).  That made me want to find CAPERS and PRs.  In 2000, I finally received the OU alumni directory that I had ordered some time before.  I contacted quite a few CAPERS and PRs, but only got an e-mail response from a few (that's something I've now learned is quite common when you first start to form an alumni group....and that really wasn't what I was doing them).  For some reason, Pete McIllwain and I have stayed in touch ever since and he's always been trying to get me to organize a reunion!  I really thought that the guys wouldn't accept me doing this.

As I was starting the website for CAPERS, I realized that I had to have on for H-7, too.  So it got added!

Then I started looking for CAPERS and for links to the CAPER site.  I got the attention of the new alumni organization, Federation of Pershing Rifles Alumni Associations (FPRAA).  I am now the leader of the CAPER Advisory Team for FPRAA.   While doing all of this, I found out how CAPERS ended.  During the late 1970's, both ROTC enrollments and PR memberships declined.  In 1980, the PR constitution was changed to allow "civilian" members (non-ROTC cadets).  Pershing Rifles national wrote an order telling all PR companies to take their CAPERS into their PR company.  Because of that, the two organizations merged and CAPER alumni are considered PR alumni.

So I decided that it was time to get us all together....and everyone we have found thinks it is great!!!