Commentary: At ease permanently. The SoCal military academies that thrived and then folded their tents

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Ten-hut, L.A.All right, at ease.And listen up.Until lately, the all-volunteer U.S.

Army had been having recruiting problems, and one way it chose to combat them was to raise the enlistment age last month, from 35 to 42.It also is now willing to overlook one conviction — just one, mind you — for possessing marijuana.

And the Iran war has given the military’s ranks a burst of new recruits.Back near the cusp of the new “American Century,” the 20th, the nation had no problem muscling up its military.Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders charging up San Juan Hill worked powerfully on the national imagination as the country undertook the policing of its new empire: Hawaii, and, from the Spanish-American War, control of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba, along with a robust overlord mercantilism in Central America.There’s nothing coincidental in the fact that military schools also rose up around then, and that they kept multiplying past the first world war and up to the second one.An astonishing number of them opened here, in Southern California, although you would be hard pressed to find many nowadays.

Back in the start of the century, they advertised in newspapers from the Midwest to Hawaii, and they put uniforms on boys as young as 6.Los Angeles is a complex place.Luckily, there's someone who can provide context, history and culture.

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The Page Military Academy for boys 6 to 14 — known as “The Big School for Little Boys” — offered the pledge that it “does not enroll students with vicious tendencies or who have been und...