This is a newspaper article on John Alcala and his father Abel G. Alcala of Topeka. Abel Alcala, a veteran of World War II, had a draft number of 25. This likely made him the first Mexican-American drafted in the United States. The 1966 book "Among the Valiant" by Raul Morin, however, cited Pete Aguilar Despart with a lottery number of 158 as the first drafted Mexican-American. Fourteen years later, John Alcala contacted the book's publisher and the Topeka Capital-Journal to set the record straight.
