It All Counts On Twenty: My Life While Serving In the US Navy, 1941–1961

By John R. Burgoon Jr.

John R. Burgoon Jr. was never one to turn down an adventure. He joined the US Navy at age seventeen and pursued a career in the aviation branch of the navy. One of his first assignments was flying anti-submarine missions from Panama during World War II. Burgoon carried out his work with distinction, and his radio, radar, and electronic skills did not go unnoticed. He became an instructor—even teaching other instructors how to teach. His twenty-year career was never dull, and included a stint in Guam, where he improved upon a shortwave radio station and relayed servicemen’s calls to the United States; he also had an assignment as a legal officer in San Diego, where he never lost a case. Burgoon’s exciting off-duty life included being an amateur radio operator, a proficient chess player, an impressive hypnotist, and a certified gemologist. In between everything, his good looks managed to get him in trouble with the ladies; this memoir shares all the good stuff in It All Counts on Twenty.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Jan 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483406060

Book preview

IT ALL COUNTS ON

TWENTY

My Life While Serving in the US Navy, 1941–1961

JOHN R. BURGOON JR.

Copyright © 1989, 2014 John R. Burgoon Jr

Cover images courtesy of the National Naval Aviation Museum and the Naval Historical Foundation.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-0605-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-0606-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013922975

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 01/20/2014

To Alicia.

This is her book.

She asked me to write about an amusing adventure

that happened to me at Annapolis. My never being

at a loss for words turned her birthday request

into a book.

When I was a sailor, things got rough once,

and I heard an old salt say, It all counts on twenty, kid.

He was referring to the twenty years required for retirement.

Contents

Introduction

1.   Newport

2.   Jacksonville

3.   Annapolis

4.   Norfolk

5.   Panama

6.   Panama

7.   Wildwood

8.   Norfolk

9.   Corpus Christi

10.   Memphis

11.   El Centro

12.   San Diego

13.   Guam

14.   Okinawa

15.   Memphis

16.   Newport

17.   Norfolk

18.   Olathe

19.   San Diego

Epilogue

Introduction

usher.jpg

I n October of 1940, I received a school discharge from the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) at Camp Ole Bull in the mountains of north-central Pennsylvania. After returning to school, I was voted Most Likely to Succeed and elected junior class president. At about the same time, the Columbia Theater hired me as an usher when Gone with the Wind was packing the house.

As class president I was very popular, but as a student, I was a disappointment to the teachers. No doubt my social success was turning my head and contributing to a lack of interest in schoolwork. Being the most popular guy in the class was a new experience for me. I was used to being way down on the totem pole.

My job at the theater was seven days a week. Working all day on weekends and till 11:00 p.m. on weekdays didn’t leave any time for doing homework—not that I wanted to. The only school activities that got my attention were extracurricular. At about midyear, one of the few teachers who tried to understand me brought in a copy of the October 1940 Life magazine that had a pictorial feature article about the navy. She suggested I might find myself in the service.

One of the sons of a new jeweler in town told me that the senior class advisor saw to it that the jeweler was the exclusive source of the seniors’ school rings each year, and she was well rewarded for her cooperation. But the rings the old jeweler sold were flimsy and uninspiring, so I took a day off of school and hitchhiked to Pittsburgh, where I went to see a manufacturing jeweler and got an estimate for a newly designed school ring.

The school’s art teacher held a contest for a new ring design. The winning design was accepted by the manufacturer, and he quoted a great price. The manufacturer tried to bribe me to influence the ring committee to go ahead with the contract, and I flatly refused. No telling if Miss Zentz was taking a bribe, but it seemed to be customary in the business.

In any case, the teacher who brought me the Life article told me that Zentz intended to make things very difficult for me in my senior year. Actually, I was flunking a couple of subjects, so I would not likely be a senior the next year unless I went to summer school. I played hooky and hitched a ride to New Castle, which was the closest town with a navy recruiting office.

The recruiting office was in the post office building. When I entered the lobby, a marine recruiting poster caught my eye. The challenge of being a marine fired my imagination, so I asked for the marine recruiting office. I was told to see the postmaster. He took one look at me and asked how old I was. I said I was seventeen and mentioned the new policy permitting seventeen-year-olds to enlist with parental consent. He asked if I had graduated from high school, and when I said no, he told me to go home and come back next year.

The navy recruiting office was upstairs, where an old chief petty officer, who looked like an admiral, sized me up through his bloodshot eyes. He had a gold rating badge on his right arm and a sleeve full of gold hash marks. He told me there was a long waiting list because of the Depression; everyone wanted to join the navy. I told him I still wanted to fill out an application. While he was at the filing cabinet getting the application and the aptitude tests, I became fascinated and thrilled by the framed pictures on the wall.

One showed two white cage-masted battleships steaming at flank speed with a bone in their teeth and black smoke streaming back from their white stacks. The other showed a flotilla of white navy ships at anchor in a tropical harbor with palm trees in the foreground.

I excitedly filled out the application and took the IQ-like aptitude tests. When the chief saw my test scores, he told me there was a very good chance I would be selected. A few weeks later, a consent form came in the mail for my parents to sign. My father was working in Weirton, West Virginia, at the time because the local steel mills were almost shut down. He came to see me and said he wouldn’t stand in my way as he had wanted to get into the service himself during World War I but had been too young. Mom and Dad were probably both glad to get rid of me; they were several months behind in their rent and wanted to move to a less expensive part of town.

At school, my final responsibility as class president was to organize the junior-senior prom. A naval decorative theme seemed like a good idea. Decorations were purchased at a carnival supply house in Youngstown. They had white sailor hats for sale, so I gambled and bought several boxes of them. They were the hit of the prom; the girls loved them. It was a very colorful dance, and the principal, who had been a navy lieutenant in World War I, was delighted. In the end, I had put on a great going-away party for myself.

Chapter 1

Newport

July 1941–August 1941

T he war was going badly for our friends in Europe. Roosevelt’s thinly disguised lend/lease maneuvers and the increasing confrontations between our ships and the German subs made it pretty obvious that we were likely to enter the war against the Germans at any time. I figured I’d have time to get to a navy radio school before the fur began to fly. There wasn’t too much concern about the Japanese being possible adversaries. They had been throwing their weight around in China for years, but their grandiose plans for the Pacific were not so obvious to the guy on the s treet.

A transportation and meal voucher came in the mail along with a letter directing me to report to the naval receiving station at Pittsburgh for a physical examination. Only one change of clothes would be required.

I boarded a shabby and gritty Pennsylvania Railroad car for the trip to Pittsburgh. The seventy miles or so of scenery that the train tracks followed along the rivers kept me glued to the window. The narrow Shenango flowed into the Ohio, which was wide enough for river boat traffic. The railroad yards at Conway had acres of tracks and maintenance facilities. I could see hundreds of cars being switched and reassembled into trains with different destinations.

Pittsburgh was as grimy as ever, and the recruiting station was in the shabbiest part of town. I spent the first night in an aging YMCA near the station. Early the next day, the physical examination started. About thirty of us shivering, naked, boots-to-be were herded around in a barren old building to be poked and prodded and questioned. Finally, we were sent out to lunch. When we returned, we were lined up and sworn in by a tobacco-chewing, red-faced boozer of a chief petty officer.

I became an apprentice seaman, US Navy, service number 250 65 56. For some reason, the chief made me an acting petty officer in charge of the draft of enlistees—probably because of my having been in the CCC.

We were taken to the train station in an old gray navy bus. I deputized Floyd Barkley to help me keep the group together. Floyd was tall and as thin as me but had dark hair and a pockmarked face. One of the guys had a trumpet with him, so I asked him to blow reveille in the morning to roust the gang from their upper and lower berths on the Pullman.

I had been given vouchers to cover the cost of the meals in the dining car. Getting the guys together to go to breakfast was an incredible hassle. When we got to the diner, I was told we would have to wait until everyone else had been fed. Then, they gave us a meal that was okay, but we had very little choice of what we got and how it was cooked. The breakfast wasn’t so bad, but lunch and dinner were third rate. The worst of it was the arrogant attitude and rudeness of the Negro stewards. While they fawned over the regular customers, they treated us like a bunch of orphans. I don’t know if it was because they knew we had no tip money for them or because they enjoyed the opportunity of being on the other end of the stick as far as rudeness was concerned.

It was an overnight trip to New York where we changed trains at Grand Central Terminal to the Hartford and New Haven line. None of us had been to New England before; we were all fascinated by the sights as we rolled along. The submarine base at New London, Connecticut, caused a rush to one side of the car to see a submarine moving up the river as we crossed it.

At Providence, Rhode Island, we were met by a navy bus and taken to the boot camp on Goat Island at the Newport Naval Training Station. As we offloaded from the bus, bald-headed recruits (boots) hung out of one of the barracks windows and yelled, You’ll be sorry! and You’re gonna like the shots and the dentist! and Wait till the barber gets your golden locks!

We were arranged into a sloppy formation and marched directly to the barber shop. It pained me to see my full head of curly hair falling to the barbershop floor. When I got outside to wait for the rest of the guys, my head felt the cold wind coming off the Narragansett Bay. It has been said that the summer in Newport lasts for three days—the Fourth of July and the previous and following days.

The next line was formed at the sick bay, where we received four or five shots. I don’t believe the corpsmen spent much time sharpening their needles. They had to push them in hard; it was enough to make us wince. One of the bunch fainted just before it was his turn to get punctured. The next day, we had sore arms and I was slightly feverish. I would always have strong reactions to navy tetanus shots.

The next stop was Small Stores, where we would receive our canvas seabags, which we filled with uniforms, and small ditty bags, which contained toilet articles and a bone-handled jackknife. We carried our newly issued clothes to the second floor of our barracks, where we were provided with name stencils and were shown how and where to stencil our names in black or white on our uniforms. Our black socks were marked with our initials.

After the clothes were stenciled, we picked up our blankets, mattress, and hammock. At that time, sailors were still using hammocks instead of bunks. We were taught how to tie each end of our hammocks to the pipes, called hammock stays, about five feet off the floor. Falling out of a hammock in the night and landing on one’s head was the hard way of getting out of boot camp. Taps or lights out was at nine o’clock, which from now on would be known as 2100 hours, the twenty-first hour of the day. Midnight was either 2400 hours or 0000 hours, depending on your point of view.

By the time we climbed into our shaky, cocoon-like hammocks, we fell sleep immediately. We were exhausted from the day’s activities.

The next morning, we were roused at 0600 and marched to chow at the mess hall. The food was served cafeteria style. If we wanted something, we held out our aluminum, compartmented trays, and the mess cook would clack in the food with the appropriate serving implement. The menu was very much like the one at the CCC Camp, which I expect was an army menu. It was wholesome and nutritious food. Every meal did not necessarily satisfy everyone, but neither did Mom’s cooking.

Our barracks were in a fenced-in area called the detention unit. It would be our confined home for the first month in boot camp. The day’s events were governed by a strict, by-the-minute schedule from dawn till dusk. The company chief was a wiry little chief gunner’s mate. His uniform, as a drill instructor, differed from the other chiefs’ in that he wore leggings over his trousers and, while we marched in formation, he wore a sword. He was as tough as nails but fair minded, and he knew all of the answers to any questions we might have. He wasn’t above cussing out an errant boot, but unlike the CCC Camp squad leaders, he didn’t physically abuse anyone.

During the first week, the chief selected a mail orderly/company clerk and four platoon leaders. The company was composed of four platoons. Also, there was an assistant company commander. We were issued worn-out rifles for drilling and manual-at-arms training. It was a good thing the rifles were old and beat up as they were frequently dropped while practicing. Hours of drilling and marching were performed each day until we responded to the commands without thinking.

For clothes washing, a kiyi (scrubbing brush), saltwater soap, and clothes stops were provided. The clothes stops looked like heavy white shoestrings. They were threaded through holes like small, round buttonholes in the uniforms and then tied to the clotheslines (with square knots, of course). Each morning after breakfast, the chief would line us up in formation and conduct a personnel inspection.

He would even examine our undershirt necks to be sure they had been put on clean that morning. Cleanliness was a fetish as it was believed that if a sailor’s clothes and body were clean, the chances of infection from battle wounds would be minimized. Anyone who did not take a shower every day was likely to be taken to the shower by his shipmates and scrubbed down with a kiyi and saltwater soap.

One of the platoon leaders was a former army corporal who had decided to join the navy. He was kind of a cocky character, and he rubbed a tall Frenchman the wrong way. Frenchy had come to this country to join our navy. He was a cheerful, pleasant guy, but the corporal got to him. Fighting wasn’t permitted, but they decided to go out to the drill field after dark and have at it. Frenchy came back with his hair in place; the platoon leader came back with a bloody nose and some obvious signs of distress. From then on, the former soldier was a gentler soul in the performance of his duties. The ex-soldier was a pretty good scrapper, but he had never learned to cope with le sabot.

On Saturday mornings, we had a formal personnel inspection and formation marching on the grassy parade grounds. A navy band marched with us, and we passed in review before a reviewing stand, which was crowded with officers and their ladies. Each company paraded its company flag. A special rooster flag was awarded to the company that earned the most points for the appearance of its uniforms and its marching skills. Our chief took this very seriously and was anxious for us to win a rooster; we didn’t, not the first few weeks. After the Saturday inspection, we were free to relax and take it easy.

I devised a penny-pitching game using an inverted white hat for the target. The pitcher who got his penny in the cap got to keep the tossed pennies. I did quite well, until the others tired of the game.

The high points of the day were smoking breaks and mail call. We hid packs of cigarettes in our socks so we were always ready for a smoke. My father smoked Camels, and I did too, probably because I developed a taste for them by snitching one or two from a pack he might leave lying about. If a guy didn’t smoke in those days, his manhood was suspected by his peers.

Mail call was an exciting high or a depressing low. Ginny (my high school sweetheart) and I corresponded regularly. I would get her portrait out of my seabag to look at when I wrote to her. While in Pittsburgh, I bought a couple of naval postal covers with colorful cachets picturing the special event they were created for. This inspired me to make pen-and-ink drawings on the envelopes and stationery, which I colored with pencils.

Ginny.jpg

We could tell who had received letters from a girlfriend for they always sniffed the envelopes before opening them. Those who were lucky enough to get letters would retreat to their bunks or the head to read them in private.

We usually did our marching in the mornings. In the afternoons, depending on the weather, there were various indoor and outdoor classes, including courses in naval customs and etiquette. We were taught how to tell a commodore from a warrant officer and how and when to salute them, who got into a motor whaleboat first, and who was first to leave. We became acquainted with the Bluejacket’s Manual, the ultimate sailor’s handbook.

Knot tying was a fun class. I had never been a Boy Scout, so it was all new to me. We learned how to splice manila lines and steel cables. The marvels of naval gunnery were explained to us—how sixteen-inch-diameter shells could be lobbed to distances beyond the horizon and how the scouting planes from the battleships and cruisers could observe gunnery results and correct the azimuth and elevation of the guns until they were zeroed in on the targets.

Naval history and the exploits of John Paul Jones, Farragut, and Perry and all were related to us. I guess you could say boot camp was a traditionally developed brainwashing operation. It worked well on me. I was proud to be a bluejacket and talked a few friends into joining when they graduated from high school.

Two of the outdoor classes didn’t appeal to me in any way. Jujitsu was no fun for the trainee but much fun for the trainer. We didn’t have enough practice to protect ourselves from the tossing around the instructor gave us. I’ve never been convinced a good boxer wouldn’t annihilate a jujitsu expert.

The other class I didn’t like was bayonet fighting. After having the mechanics of the bayonet explained, including the blood gutter, the fine points of removing a bayonet from an opponent’s chest were conveyed. A bayonet stuck between the ribs could be hard to withdraw. The recommended method was to put your foot on his chest and pull the trigger. The kick of the gun would pull the bayonet out. Once again, there was too little time to practice, and the instructor enjoyed whacking us with the side of the bayonet or the gun stock.

* * *

One Saturday, a salty sailor came into the barracks and offered a dress-white jumper for sale. The white jumpers that had been issued to us had plain white collars and no cuffs, but the one he wanted to sell had blue stripes and stars on the collar and blue cuffs with stripes around them. It was a fair fit on me, so I bought it. I had no idea that it was an obsolete uniform item and that wearing it was against regulations.

The sailor was from a battleship anchored in the bay. I believe it was either the Pennsylvania or the New York. We were encouraged to go aboard any of the ships anchored in the harbor. On the next Sunday afternoon, I and a few others got permission to go aboard the battlewagon and the heavy cruiser anchored within sight of the station.

It was a choppy and damp ride in the motor whaleboat used to transport the crews from ship to shore. After saluting the flag and the officer of the deck, we were given an escorted tour. The bridge and the gun turret were very interesting, but we were more impressed with the soda fountain. Our guide treated us with milk shakes on the house. I looked enviously at a few young seagoing marines who walked by in their blue and gold uniforms. Their landlocked brothers wore drab green uniforms.

I accepted an invitation to climb the mast of the heavy cruiser that we boarded. It was pretty scary, as the higher I climbed, the more noticeable the swing of the mast became as the ship rocked to the rhythm of the swells in the bay. Unlike Ensign Keith in The Caine Mutiny, however, I didn’t find it necessary to use my hat as a barf bag.

One morning, I woke up with aches and pains and a slight fever. I got in line for sick call at the sick bay. The corpsman gave me an envelope of APC pills, which were the navy’s cure-all for most anything that didn’t require surgery. I got the point that a slight fever wouldn’t buy a light-duty chit or a berth in the sick bay. However, the next morning, my fever was 103, and they sent me to a contagious ward.

The diagnosis was cat fever, which is short for catarrhal fever. I suspect it would be called flu today. In spite of my fever and shivering, the first thing they made me do was strip and take a shower. Then I was put into a bed with cold, starched sheets. I guess that’s one way to cool off a fever. On the third day, I was feeling pretty good and was able to walk out of the back of the building to the water’s edge to enjoy the morning sun. A tidal pool with starfish, anemones, and other sea creatures reminded me of a colored illustration of a similar scene in an old encyclopedia that my grandparents had.

A few days after I was back to the business of being a recruit, we were taken to the large gymnasium, which also housed the swimming pool. Most of us passed the mandatory swimming test of two laps of the pool without stopping. Those who didn’t pass were required to take swimming lessons until they did.

Incredibly, in one part of the gym, there were eight or ten dentist chairs. I knew I was in big trouble because my teeth seemed to be cavity-prone, and I hadn’t been to a dentist for a few years. The young dentist attacked me like he was settling an old score. No Novocain! He filled about six teeth in record time by drilling until the teeth smoked. I could smell the burning pulp. I was soaking wet and my muscles ached when I wobbled out of the chair. It took me years to get over the fear of having teeth filled. Just for the record, navy dentists usually do use Novocain. Maybe there was a shortage or something.

While we’re on the subject of ordeals, I might as well talk about the gas chamber. At some time, years ago, someone convinced the military that it would be a neat idea to do something painful to a person so they won’t be so fearful of it in the future. We were given gas masks and shown how to put them on and how to blow air into them to detect air leaks. Then we were led into a small shack that was a gas chamber. The instructor turned on the gas and told us to take our masks off, take a deep breath, put the masks back on, and then leave the chamber.

Blinded and in fear of suffocating, we found our way out of the shack through the exit door, which had been cut about a foot shorter than the average guy. A few sailors got knots on their heads from rushing to get out of the shortened door. After that ordeal, we would no doubt relax if we saw a mustard gas cloud approaching.

At about this time, our stay in the detention unit had expired, and we were given more freedom, including the privilege of going on liberty. At last, we could explore the town of Newport and its surroundings. Whatever we did had to be inexpensive; our pay was only twenty-one dollars a month, and the pay office was withholding most of that to be sure we’d have enough money to go home on boot leave at the end of our training. If it were up to Eleanor Roosevelt, we wouldn’t get even that much. It was claimed that she said sailors didn’t need any pay; they should be given a carton of cigarettes every month.

The main gate of the training station was at the edge of a small bridge that crossed over to the mainland. Down the road and around the corner, there was a graveyard where we would hide our white leggings (boots), which gave away the fact that a sailor was a recruit, because among the navy-ordered rules in town was a ban on selling drinks to boots. A bar wouldn’t let you in if you had boots on. I had no plans for hanging out in a bar, but I preferred not to wear the awkward leggings while on liberty. The lacing hooks on the leggings made dancing kind of tricky. A fancy step might find you with your feet hooked together. I don’t remember how we ever managed to find our own boots on the way back to the base as there were always at least fifty of them draped all over the place.

Newport was a small town with rather narrow and winding streets. It was full of sailors as there were a number of navy installations in the vicinity, and there were usually a number of ships at anchor and others tied up at the piers. An exploratory walk of the business section took about ten minutes. The most interesting part of the downtown area was the yacht harbor and a few boat-building yards. Some of the classic sailboat hulls were built there.

On Saturday nights, there was a USO dance in an old building on a back alley of the town. A rickety wooden staircase led from the alley to the dance hall on the second floor. The place was jam packed with sailors and girls. It was interesting to meet and socialize with the New England girls. The Massachusetts border was close by, and many of the girls at the dance were from Fall River, a manufacturing town that was once one of the many bustling, manufacturing mill towns along the cascading rivers of New England.

Few of the Newport girls had a New England accent, as their parents were mostly navy or former navy people. But the Fall River girls did have accents and some mannerisms that, to a newcomer, made them seem tough and independent. I guess they reflected the traits that their ancestors needed to survive the hostile colonial winters and the rugged, rocky land and ocean.

The best dances were held on Sundays in a park near the enigmatic Viking stone monument. At that time, the rest of the world doubted that the Vikings had actually built it, but it’s pretty well accepted today. The twenty-eight-mile Narragansett Bay must have been a welcome harbor for the Viking explorers.

The pavilion where the Sunday tea dances were held was in a pleasant, wooded park. It was sponsored by a girls’ social organization that included well-to-do young ladies. Some of them lived in mansions on the park-like 17-Mile Drive, which doubtless predated the one near Carmel, California. Floyd Barkley made friends with one of the wealthy girls at the dance. Barbara was not a pretty girl, but she had a very pleasant personality and was a great dancer. Floyd was a pretty aggressive guy when it came to boy/girl relationships. I’m sure that was why she turned from him. Barbara and I became good friends in a platonic way.

On several occasions, Barbara drove the family car to the base to pick me up. It was a very impressive new La Salle, which she parked at the barracks. Invariably, windows would open and my shipmates would whistle and remark about the girl and the car. One Sunday afternoon, she took me to meet her parents in their sumptuous home. They were both very cordial, as you might expect of cultured folks.

Later, she and I sat alone before the fireplace in the living room. She told me about her dad’s having been a midshipman at the Naval Academy and his having been given a medical discharge when they removed one of his lungs after a severe confrontation with pneumonia. Now they had an interest in hard-coal (anthracite) mines in Pennsylvania.

The activities at boot camp became less strenuous and more enjoyable the last few weeks. We had a great time learning to row whaleboats and in racing them against one another.

I had mixed feelings about the rifle range. The old Springfield rifles we were taught to shoot were rough and noisy compared to the small bolt-action, single-shot Remington .22 with which I had become a sharpshooter in the woods at home.

We’d march to the rifle range at the far end of the island, where the wiry chief gunner’s mate delighted in teaching us about the piece and how to shoot it. We would take turns firing on the line and then go to the target pits to raise and lower the targets, show the hits with a black disc on a pole, and patch the holes with paper and paste.

The whizzing bullets made us pretty nervous even though we would duck under a protective barrier while the others fired. On the final day on the range, we were given the opportunity to qualify by firing a given number of shots while in the prone position. I had hoped to qualify for the sharpshooter or marksman medal, but I didn’t even come close. I’d like to think the rifle was at fault, but it’s not likely. I probably had the same problem with a high-powered rifle that I did with the Colt .45 automatic. The noise spooked me. I couldn’t hit the side of an aircraft carrier from fifty feet with a .45.

One day, we were marched to the beach, which was a stretch of dirty-looking sand and rocks near the rifle range. The water was cold and filthy with refuse. Some of it, without a doubt, was sewage and bilge water. In those days, swimming in cold, dirty water was a good way to get polio.

Marching formations on the way to the beach or the range were pretty casual. Although Floyd and I were taller than most, we were at the rear of the ranks. As the company went around a corner, Floyd and I kept going straight, just like in the movies. We hid out in a little cove and looked for driftwood until they came marching back. As they passed the corner, we rejoined the formation. I enjoyed carving anchors out of the wood with my new navy knife. I managed to sell two or three for a quarter each. It was fortunate that we weren’t caught; anyone who got in trouble at boot camp got the book thrown at them.

During the last week of boot training, we were given a bunch of written tests. One of them, the General Classification Test, or GCT, was correlated with the Stanford-Benet IQ test. After the test results were scored, we were interviewed by specialists in career counseling.

After reviewing my test results, my counselor told me about the Naval Academy Preparatory School at Norfolk, where a certain number of enlisted candidates were sent each year to prepare for the Naval Academy. I was excited about this program, but it was explained to me that one of the requirements was a year of sea duty. The counselor pointed out that I’d have to go aboard ship as a swab jockey, and even then I couldn’t be sure I would be recommended or selected.

He suggested submarine duty or aviation. My test scores would guarantee the trade school of my choice. The things I had heard about submarines didn’t appeal to me, so I chose the aviation radio school. Airplanes had dominated my childhood fantasies, and radio circuits had intrigued me as a teenager. The combination of radio and aviation excited me. Floyd made the same choice. We would be sent to Jacksonville after we got back from boot leave.

We were all pretty excited, a little homesick, and eager to get back to tell our friends and family about the adventures that we had had. And we were all puffed up with pride at having survived recruit training. On the train back to Pennsylvania, I recalled the unruly bunch of clowns I had shepherded on the way to Newport. I looked around at them then and saw a homogenous group of proud young men who had been polarized with a sense of direction.

The leave went by in a blur of activity—mandatory visits with too many relatives, up till the rooster crowed with Ginny, and sea story sessions with old buddies. It seemed like I got on the train one day at Providence and back off the next.

The last few days at boot camp were pretty relaxed. The detention unit barracks had been typical army-style, two-story wooden barracks, but our new barracks were brick, were much larger, and had much nicer facilities. Several companies were under one roof, and so were the mess hall and the recreation facilities. I got my turn at being a mess cook and enjoyed it. I had to get up at 4:00 a.m. to help prepare breakfast, but it was nice to be free to walk around the base in the off-duty time between meals. And, as a dedicated chow hound, it was great to eat before the rest of the troops with no holds barred on seconds or dessert.

One afternoon, I saw the Augusta, the cruiser that had taken FDR to rendezvous with Churchill, in the mid–Atlantic. On another afternoon, the HMS Rodney came into the bay. She was a sleek, modern battle cruiser; we had nothing like her in our navy. She came in for repairs after having been mauled by the Bismarck in the battle in which the unsinkable German dreadnought was sunk.

Floyd and I were sitting on the lawn talking one evening after dark when an incredible display of the aurora borealis appeared in the sky. It was an undulating light show in pink and bluish-white colors. I had occasionally seen the aurora in the wintertime at home in Pennsylvania, but it was usually low in the northern sky and not so spectacular. A few nights later, an imitation display was put on by the antiaircraft searchlight batteries all around the Newport area.

Just before we left Newport, we were killing time in the barracks when someone produced one of the two-inch-by-four-inch dirty comic books that were popular in the 1930s. I borrowed the Blondie and Dagwood comic and made a copy of it with pen and ink. I made four or five dollars that day renting it out at ten cents a look. There were no Playboy or Penthouse magazines in those days, so a prurient cartoon story captured the interest of the young sailors.

Finally, we received our written orders and travel vouchers to Jacksonville and boarded the train at Providence for the two-day trip to Florida. Since overnight travel was involved, we were given Pullman compartments.

Once again, it was exciting to be on the way to a part of the country I had never seen. Two fantasies were often part of my daydreams as a kid, particularly when there was a lazy fall of snow outside of my school windows. One was to build a raft and take it down the Shenango River to the Ohio and the Mississippi to New Orleans. The other, as I got a little older, was to start on Route 1 in Maine and hitchhike down the East Coast to Florida. Well, I figured now I’d be going a good part of the way by train. I had seen New England—now for the South.

Chapter 2

Jacksonville

August 1941–January 1942

T he Naval Air Station at Jacksonville was located on the west bank of the St. Johns River at the south end of the city. The river’s width and depth provide the city with an excellent protected harbor. The natives like to tell the newcomers that the St. Johns flows northward to the sea, which it does.

A busload of us was dropped off in front of the duty office for the trade schools. It was the end of August, and we stood there with our heavy, woolen, dress-blue uniforms soaking up the noontime Florida sun as we were called into the office one by one to be logged in. The thick, humid air exacerbated the heat of the day.

There seemed to be a continuous stream of roaring and sputtering planes overhead. We were directly under the landing pattern for the field, which was part of a very busy advanced training center for newly gilded navy and marine pilots. The radio school and its barracks were located just inside the main gate at the air station—rows of gray, two-story buildings on each side of a narrow street. The buildings were U-shaped with dormitories on either side. The center section on the lower floor had the master-at-arms shack and the mail room. The upper center section had the toilets, washrooms (heads), and laundry rooms.

We arrived just after lunch. There were groups of sailors marching down the street on their way back to class. A few of the groups wore heavy gray uniforms I didn’t recognize. However, the stiff, arm-swinging march indicated they were British troops. Someone said they were Royal Air Force.

My class had one wing of the top floor of the barracks. One side of the wing had already been occupied by students who had arrived before we did. It turned out that they were all from the South. They told us their side of the wing was Rebel country and that any Yankee who was found there would be taken care of. Welcome to Dixie!

We were organized into sections, section leaders were appointed, and we were given the afternoon off to unload our seabags and stow our personal effects in the tall lockers in front of our bunks. I had managed to get used to sleeping in a hammock in boot camp, but I was very happy to see a conventional bunk. A hammock would be an oven in this hot and humid weather. The bunks were uppers and lowers. I was not savvy enough to pick a top bunk. I soon learned that the lower bunk is a too-convenient seat for everyone.

The trade school area had the essence of a small town. There was an administration building (city hall) and the duty office (the police station). There was a combination chapel and movie theater, a sick bay that could care for a few confined patients, a boxing ring between the barracks, and a gymnasium. There was also a drill field, and behind the duty office was a gravel parking lot called the grinder, where I would wear holes in my shoes marching as punishment.

A navy bus service circled the sprawling base. Some of the buses were crude, tractor-trailer affairs that had been used at the New York World Fair. Actually, I think that the New York fair had gotten them from the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition. The trailer part had longitudinal bench seats, and its sides were open with rolled-up canvas curtains that could be lowered when it rained. They were dusty, bumpy, and noisy; we called them cattle cars. There was also a municipal bus service that ran from the main gate to the center of town.

During the first week of school, most of our time was spent in code class. Before we started learning Morse code, we had to learn to print the navy way so that we would not be hamstrung by inefficient printing habits as we tried to build up our code speed. After half a day of printing practice, we started learning the code.

At first, like first graders learning the alphabet, we would say, A, dit dah. E, dit. I, dit dit, and so forth, until we were good and sick of it. Later, we would put on earphones and listen while the instructor drilled us by sending the code letters with a code practice oscillator.

Our instructors were old-time radiomen who had spent years sending and receiving continuous-wave transmissions aboard ships and at communication stations. Some of them seemed a bit punchy, but they could copy code in their sleep. A few times, we talked them into giving demonstrations. The code machines had code punched on large reels of paper tape, and the code speed was continuously variable. One chief radioman turned up the machine to fifty words a minute and would type the code transmissions on an old communication typewriter, which was all capitals. Then, as he warmed up, he would lay down the cans (headphones) so he could still hear them, walk to the coffee urn, pour a cup of coffee, return to the typewriter, and catch up with the tape.

Typing classes started at about the same time. Since I had taken typing at the CCC camp and in high school, I was able to do the required fifty words per minute as soon as I got used to the communication typewriters, which had a few keys placed differently than conventional ones.

After dinner on weekdays, there were evening classes—remedial work for those having problems and code practice for the rest of us. I had a small chess set with pegged pieces that fit in holes in the board. It was small enough to hide in a notebook and too small for the instructor to notice. It was not hard to find a willing player who didn’t need the code practice. We also enjoyed playing Battleship.

After a few weeks, I received an automatic promotion to seaman second class, which included an increase in pay from twenty-one to thirty dollars a month. Many of the sailors received money from home and were in good shape. I didn’t, so I was always broke. I started a small laundry business to help bolster my empty wallet. I would scrub and bleach uniforms for a price and then iron them. Most every payday, I owed money to the young shylock who was also a section leader. He loaned two-for-three or three-for-five which, of course, was usurious and a court-martial offense, but no one complained. I was glad to pay the price as I was invariably broke before payday came along. In those days, we were paid once a month.

The first weekend that I was able to take the bus to Jacksonville, I found myself wandering around all of the wrong places. I bought a small vial of orange-blossom perfume for my girlfriend at home and a miniature crate of oranges (fake ones) for my parents. At least I didn’t buy a gaudy, imitation silk, embroidered pillow-cover saying Sweetheart or Mother. Then again, who needs cheap orange blossom perfume or rinky-dink orange crates with mailing labels?

Like any sailor walking the streets alone, I became lonely. This was the wrong neighborhood to be a USO. There was music coming from second-story windows on a side street. They were painted with Dime a dance signs. Up a rickety and narrow stairway, I found a dumpy-looking broad selling dance tickets. I bought the required minimum and walked into a dance-floor area with fake palm trees and faded crepe paper decorations. I spent my tickets dancing with a bored woman who reminded me of one of my distant cousins. She was a thin country girl from Kentucky who had a sad, sweet face. Had the lights not been so soft, it would have been a sad, hard face.

Having blown a good part of my money, I left and wandered down the street to a place from which music and laughter were radiating. Inside the dingy joint, there was a small bar crowded with soldiers. The side of the room was filled with crude booths, also crowded with soldiers and tough-looking women, all of whom were pretty well oiled. A few soldiers looked up as I walked in and gave me the impression that they didn’t much like sailors. I walked out and wandered back toward the center of the city, away from the slums along the river.

It was Saturday night and close to midnight, and I had only about two dollars left. I sat at the counter of an all-night hamburger joint and, in a conversation with the waitress, asked about places to stay in town that were not too expensive. Aside from the twenty-five-cents-a-bunk places by the river, there were a couple of locker clubs.

Since we were still at peace, it was okay to wear civilian clothes while ashore on liberty. A locker club provided a locker where a suit of civvies could be stored along with toilet articles and perhaps a jug of booze. A shower and a bunk in an open dormitory were also provided. I couldn’t afford the monthly dues, so I gave up that idea. Someone told me about a place on the edge of town where Camp Blanding, a nearby army base, had set up temporary buildings in a park for their draftee soldiers to use as a dormitory on the weekends.

I went there, was given a khaki towel, and was assigned to an army cot with a khaki blanket. The place reeked of whiskey and cheap, sour wine arising from the soldiers who had gotten bombed early and turned in. I was pretty tired by then from exploring the town on foot, so I took off my shoes and got in the cot with my clothes on. It was a noisy, sleepless night for a sober person. All night long, drunken dog faces staggered in and out of the dorm, banging into bunks, cursing, and slamming the doors. Some found the latrine, and some didn’t. I kept the blanket up to my chin as I didn’t want them to see the white uniform of a skinny sailor.

I survived the sleepless night, got up early, and went to the washroom to wash my face. I scrubbed my teeth with a finger and combed my hair. Not having much of a beard at that time, a shave was not essential. I wandered back downtown and had an egg sandwich at the all-night joint, and then I headed back toward the park. I had seen some churches in the vicinity and was curious. Having been raised a strict Catholic, I had never been inside a Protestant church.

The church that I entered turned out to be congregational. It seemed more like a schoolroom than a church. It did have pews, but the lavish collection of icons, candles, stained glass, and incense that I was accustomed to was not there. I had been in the choir at home and enjoyed singing the hymns, so I felt at home with the congregation, singing together from the hymnal. Although they didn’t have a rib-rattling pipe organ to sing with, the swell of the vocal chorus was pleasant. As I left the church, the young preacher was at the door greeting his flock. He stopped me, and after shaking my hand in welcome, he asked a few friendly get acquainted questions and told me about the social programs for servicemen that began after lunch at their recreation hall beneath the church. He invited me to enjoy the fellowship there. As I walked down the walk, a man and his wife came up and insisted that I have Sunday dinner with them. The pretty girl with them didn’t detract from the offer.

The family had a nice home in a good part of town, and they did their best to put me at ease before the early dinner was ready. The daughter was busy helping her mother prepare the meal, so her dad and I sat on the porch. When he found that I was a stranger to Jacksonville, he enjoyed telling me about the town, and I found it interesting. One of the things that I enjoyed hearing about was that one of the very first movie colonies was in Jacksonville. The mild climate and bounteous sunshine had attracted movie makers to set up shop there.

The dinner was a classic Southern Sunday dinner with fried chicken and all of the trimmings. The wife was gracious and attentive to my needs at the table. Her husband told some fascinating stories about his experiences as a young soldier in the First World War. He had entered the army before the armistice but had not been sent overseas. Nevertheless, I found his experiences enlightening, and some were amusing. After dinner, he took his family and me on an introductory drive around Jacksonville. He was proud of the growing city and its rapidly expanding resources. After about a half-hour tour, he dropped his daughter and me off at the recreation hall in the basement of the Sunday school.

The place was well attended by clean-cut young sailors, soldiers, and very attractive girls. It was always surprising to me how consistently pretty young Southern girls were, and their voices and demeanor always seemed so feminine. This church-sponsored social club was to become a happy experience that I looked forward to each week, particularly the Saturday night dances. The cellar was quite large and well equipped with enjoyable activities for young people. The girls brought in cookies, punch, coffee, and snacks. There were card tables, ping-pong tables, and a lounge for social conversation, and for the loners there were jigsaw puzzles, magazines, and books to read.

The cellar had a large kitchen equipped for cooking and could serve a good-sized gathering. There were always a few mothers on hand to act as chaperones and to be sure everyone was made comfortable and that they were introduced around. It was mandatory that the girls not concentrate their attention on any one fellow and that they make it a point to get the shy guys to join in on group activities. I was pleased with my discovery and looked forward to taking advantage of it.

When I got back to the barracks, I met Floyd in the head. He was soaking a washcloth in scalding hot water and applying it to his face in an attempt to treat the acne that was scarring him. He had found a new girlfriend on the weekend. She was an army colonel’s daughter who lived in the most fashionable part of the city. Floyd seemed to have a nose for money.

I took a shower in the morning and noticed that my testicles looked flushed. Several times over the previous few days they had been quite itchy, but I dismissed it as my having failed to rinse all of the soap or bleach out of my shorts. I went to the sick bay and told the corpsman my problem. He said I had jock itch and gave me a can of Whitfield’s ointment to kill the fungus. He didn’t warn me of the potency of the salve. I went back to the barracks and liberally applied the ointment, and in about ten seconds, I was ready to yell. I got in the shower, but that only aggravated the burning. It sure fixed the jock itch; in about two days, it was gone—along with a layer of skin off of my balls. I walked kinda bowlegged for a while. Another unfriendly creature that abounds in Florida is the chigger. They’re too small to see, but their bite gets painfully itchy. They must be the same breed as the no-see-ums that Alaskan hunters have told me about.

At school we began to practice semaphore, signal flags, pennants, and blinker. At first, I couldn’t understand any practical purpose in aviation for these methods of communication, and it was explained to me that we might have to receive messages from ships while on scouting or patrol missions. I still couldn’t get enthused. I hated semaphore and didn’t care for blinker. Signal flags were more interesting, and I made up little memory crutches to help me recognize them. We were taught to call out the alphabet using the navy’s phonetic system. Later, we had to learn a new international system. L as in love became L as in Lima. A as in able became A as in alpha. I managed to pass all of the required tests in spite of my lack of interest.

At lunchtime, we had an hour off, which gave us some time for socializing. I was curious about the Royal Air Force guys and struck up a conversation with one of them. Paul Phillips was from Birmingham, England, which was an industrial city, as was my hometown. He told me that he and all of the other RAF fellows going to our school had flunked out of some phase of flight training in England. Their radiomen and gunners were salvaged from flight-training failures. I would guess that in the summer of 1941, they had so few planes in the RAF, they could afford to set high standards for their pilots.

Paul took me into the RAF barracks and introduced me to some of his friends. They were rather aloof, and I got the distinct impression that they weren’t much interested in having Yank friends. That was okay with me as I wasn’t much impressed by them. Aside from their arrogance, they seemed to be a coarse lot, and they obviously weren’t as fond of showers and clean clothes as we were. I was told they always pleaded poverty and loved to mooch cigarettes and drinks. Although they held us in contempt, I knew that many of them had seen or would see some pretty rough times, and I wanted to like them. Paul and I remained casual friends but didn’t have too much in common.

We had some characters in our class. We did in boot camp, too, but the Drill Instructors succeeded in knocking the individuality out of us there. A short, stocky sailor of Scottish descent was a belligerent atheist, and he loved to poke fun at Jews and Christians too. He got a kick out of shocking us with blasphemous statements, songs, and ethnic jokes. Scotty must have had good karma as he received a medal right after we graduated for his efforts as the radioman/gunner in a plane that got credit for sinking a German sub.

Another character was Goff, a New York denizen. He was a short, well-tanned, and very muscular Russian. To put it mildly, he had no respect for anyone or anything. He enjoyed intimidating anyone he could. Most of us tiptoed around him. Almost every Sunday evening, he would come into the barracks bragging about the queers he had beaten up and robbed on the weekend. According to him, he would lure them into taking him to an out-of-the-way place, and then he would beat them up and take their money and jewelry.

One rainy Sunday evening, he came in after lights out, got into his bunk, and began to brag to all who might listen about his latest queer episode. About that time, the duty officer and the petty officer of the watch came into the dormitory. The PO told Goff to pipe down. The PO didn’t know our people, so in the dark he didn’t know whom he had ordered to shut up. Goff’s response was, Fuck you, sailor! At that, the PO turned on the lights in the dormitory. The duty officer demanded to know who had made the remark. Goff didn’t reply, nor did anyone else. We were ordered to pack our seabags and to fall in in front of the barracks. As we walked out of the barracks, one of the Southern country boys said, Lordy, it’s rainin’ like a cow pissin’ on a flat rock! It was indeed.

We were marched to a grassy field behind the barracks that had been cleared out of a piney woods. The duty officer halted us and said we would be marched in the rain until the wise guy, or one of us, told him who had made the remark. He said he had to be up all night anyway, so it was up to us. We marched in the mud and rain until midnight. At that point, the duty officer felt sorry for us, I guess, for we were marched back to the barracks. Goff had no friends in the class from that day on. I don’t think he much cared.

One day, I was sitting in the bleachers by the boxing ring watching a couple of sailors spar when Goff came up to me and said something. His rapid-fire Brooklyn accent didn’t register, and I asked him to repeat what he had said. He was muscle bound, but he struck like a mongoose. Lucky for me, I had excellent reflexes. I ducked, but his open hand hit my white hat and knocked it about