Honoring veterans—including a WWII-era MPS student whose diploma was granted this year

Robert T. Hackl was 18 and just a few months from graduating from Casimir Pulaski High School when he was drafted to serve in World War II, in the Pacific Theater. Although he joked that his “senior trip” was to Japan, it troubled him that he never received his diploma.  

That diploma came this year—80 years after he was sent to war—when the Milwaukee Board of School Directors awarded his diploma posthumously to his family. A Wisconsin statue allows high school diplomas to be awarded to veterans who left high school before graduating to join the armed forces during wartime.  

His daughter, Sue Bosman, accepted the diploma from the school board in June on behalf of the family, which includes a second daughter, Nancy Loth.  

Bosman said her father grew up at 2247 S. Muskego Ave., living in the apartment over the family’s bar, Hackl’s Tap. He would help tend bar at night and go to Pulaski during the day, she said.  

After the war ended in 1945—just a few months after he was supposed to graduate—Hackl continued his service in Japan. He came home to work for Wisconsin Gas Company afterward, staying there for his entire career, and started a family.  

In 2012, he and his wife, Pennie, died within weeks of each other. Almost until his death, Hackl would say, “They never gave me my diploma,” Bosman recalled. 

“I’m happy now,” she said after the school board’s ceremony honoring her father. 

In honoring Hackl, the board proclaimed, “We honor Robert by awarding his high school diploma to his family—a small but meaningful tribute to a life of quiet service and enduring strength.”   

The diploma bears the names of the MPS superintendent at the time Hackl attended Pulaski, Lowell Goodrich, and the Pulaski principal in 1945, Justus C. Casteman. 

Other criteria for awarding a veteran a diploma, according to the state statute, is that the veteran is at least 65 years old (or at least 55 with a disability stemming from service) and received an honorable discharge. 

Bosman said she learned it would be possible for her father’s diploma to be issued when talking with a writer from OnMilwaukee and pursued it.  

Veterans or their families who are interested in pursuing a diploma as Robert Hackl’s family did should reach out to MPS’s Office of Board Governance at governance@milwaukee.k12.wi.us or (414) 475-8284, or to MPS Central Records in the Department of Student Services, (414) 475-8033.