Tales of Trade Winds, Beaches, and Blue Waters

By Randall McCord

In this semi-biographical work, R. D. McCord uses fifty-two loosely connected stories that document leaving a 1957 Northeast Alabama sharecropper farm for duty with the US Naval Security Group on the island of Oahu. The coming-of-age vignettes center on Hawaii’s last year as a territory and first as a state. Passing through the pages is a hodgepodge of twenty-odd characters that manned Bravo watch at radio station Wahiawa. For the better part of four years, the young sailors brought humor, camaraderie, romance, and adventure to the island, making the Navy and Hawaii a better place. The publication coincides closely with the sixty-second statehood anniversary of the paradisiacal islands.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662430596

Book preview

The Boys of Bravo Section

I wish I could tell you about the… Pacific. The way it actually was. The endless ocean. The infinite specks of coral we called islands. Coconut palms nodding gracefully toward the ocean. Reefs upon which waves broke into spray and inner lagoons, lovely beyond description. I wish I could tell you about the sweating jungle, the full moon rising behind the volcanoes… But whenever I start to talk about the Pacific, people intervene. The people intervene…¹ Phil, Dickie, Wasi, Dee, Bobby, Bill, Pat, Cy, Charlie, Randy, Zimm, John, Ed, Curly, Dan, Jimmy, Vinnie, Alfred…they will live a long time, these men of the… Pacific. They had an American quality.²

My favorite author, James A. Michener, wrote eighteen intertwined stories that became his 1947 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Tales of the South Pacific. Let me state now that I make no claim to that distinction, for I am more of a recorder than a writer, although there is an earnest attempt to push a noun against a verb in the proper order. Besides, did you know that the Hawaiian Islands are in the North Pacific?

All told, there were about twenty of them. They came from small towns across America—Roseburg, Lead, Phelps, Dothan, Sharon, Tuscaloosa, Concord, Grand Prairie, Midvale, Peoria, Edgewood, Muskogee, and Centre. All of them were born before December 7, 1941. At various times in 1957 to 1958, each graduated from the Naval Security Group’s training center located in Imperial Beach, California. Upon receiving orders, most flew out of San Francisco westward to Pearl Harbor where they boarded the daily shuttle truck bound for a small radio station located in a Dole pineapple field at the base of the Ko’olau Mountains near Wahiawa, Oahu (they quickly named the base Navy #85 after its Fleet Post Office number). By chance, the Navy placed these characters randomly in watch section Bravo where they worked and bonded together as Hawaii moved from territorial status to the nation’s fiftieth state.

Because they were not shipboard sailors, in many ways, the section became their family. Every four days, the crew assembled for evening chow and then walked to windowless building 108 for an eve-day-mid forty-hour watch rotation to perform top-secret code word intercept, code machine operating, and electronic maintenance. They carried out these duties on time, faithfully and patriotically. A few succumbed to the pressures of Cold War watch standing and transferred out or were medically discharged; however, after coming off the mid, the resilient ones enjoyed fifty-six hours of rest and relaxation. Being young, handsome, energetic, and smart, these young men made the island take notice. Many immersed themselves into the local culture. The courting of local girls, Mainland coeds, and pretty tourists produced an abundance of romances in paradise. All the while, they beach-combed, enjoyed fried rice and eggs, kalua pig, snorkeled at Hanauma Bay, practiced Karate in Wahiawa, sang along with the Kingston Trio in the Banyan Court of the Moana Hotel, took classes at the University of Hawaii Manoa, and worked at part-time cleanup jobs at Honolulu’s Pacific Club and Joe’s Italian Restaurant. They danced the hula on Kalakaua Avenue when Hawaii became a state and watched the area skyline grow almost overnight from a few classic hotels to scores of multistory, rainbow-colored vacation havens. As the days of military service grew short, several reenlisted (shipped over) and made the Navy a career. The others scattered across the homeland to pursue their life’s work. The ensuing thirty years saw limited contact between the former shipmates. But as their children and careers matured, the shipmates reached back to the friendships of Navy #85. Fortunately, the electronic age, along with the improved economy of air travel, provided them easy access to each other. Visitations and small gatherings soon followed, highlighted by a formal reunion in Rome, Georgia, on Memorial Day weekend in 1998. Nine original members of Bravo were present, along with spouses. Now the section has crossed the octogenarian plateau. Several of the original twenty have passed from this earth, yet those remaining show little signs of old age. The memories are still vivid of that special time when they patrolled Waikiki wearing flip-flops and Bermuda shorts while carrying beach mats, coconut oil, and transistor radios. And they can still hear the distant clacking of the rotors, the dinging of the bells, and the warbling of an R & R tune sung by a sleepy midwatcher.

It is not my goal to make us more than we were. Quoting popular phrases, It is what it is or we are what we are. Today, most now walk where we used to run and move carefully where we used to leap. Joyce Anne thinks my bald spot can be seen on Google Earth. I can see a time when we will no longer be physically able to travel and visit with each other; thankfully, there are cellular phones and electronic mail for communications. And when all have passed from this life, perhaps my grandchildren or great-grandchildren will open an antiquated e-mail or the old proverbial attic trunk, and they will discover and read these vignettes about the boys of Navy #85, and they may exclaim that Pop lived an active life in an interesting time. No, we were not of the Greatest Generation who stormed the beaches of Iwo Jima. We were not brash baby boomers with Calvin Klein written on our underpants. We did not endure a Great Depression or have a Summer of Love. We were what legendary University of Alabama football coach Paul Bryant would call tweeners, a term he used frequently to describe many of his players. We might not have been rock stars, but we were not without some ability or life accomplishments.

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¹ James A. Michener, Tales of the South Pacific, The Macmillan Company, New York: 1948, page l.

² Ibid.

A Coming to the Island

This is, I hope, a lighthearted tale about Hawaii and a young man from an Alabama farm coming to the island of Oahu in the late 1950s. The events span its final year as a territory and first of statehood. I consciously planned to publish the narratives in 2019, marking the sixtieth year of statehood. The next several pages present a remembrance of a beautiful island and the many friends that made it even more special. We were all nineteen and twenty years old at that time, and I recently read that these years are some of the most vivid in an individual’s life. Indeed, my coming to and time spent there seems closely connected to George Lucas’s nostalgic film, American Graffiti. The movie revealed unforgettable characters, songs, movies, sights, and smells of a 1962 cultural moment in his hometown of Modesto, California. My memories are of a similar time but dissimilar places. Our coming-of-age locale was Waikiki’s Kalakaua Avenue and its nearby beaches rather than main street Modesto.

The shipmates came to the island for military service in the United States Navy Communications Security Group. We were billeted at a small radio station located near the small town of Wahiawa in the central plains. This was preferential to duty in Pearl Harbor, which quartered several thousand and more if the fleet was in port. Permanent inshore-based sailors enjoyed a significant advantage because sufficient time and space were available to become familiar with the peoples and locales of Hawaii. The standard tour at the base was two and sometimes three years, and if individuals applied themselves and assimilated into island society, the island could be a very pleasant place to live. Many of the young men at Navy #85 (so called because the name referred to our Fleet Post Office number) did become absorbed into the local culture, while others did not. There are individuals who tend to shrink in new places or environs, so to them, Hawaii was foreign. James A. Michener wrote about the islands: If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you might better stay home. Oahu was certainly more appealing than an Alabama cotton field or the hot and wet Republic of the Philippines, which was my last duty assignment in the Navy. Yet the first rule in reminiscence is truth. I realize that not all of my time in the islands was idyllic and understand that we tend to remember the past, as it gives us pleasure, and tend to forget unhappy times. But these pages contain the truth as remembered.

Personally, writing must be personal and physical. I learned this demanding lesson from Dr. Lucille Griffith, professor of history at the University of Montevallo, located thirty miles south of Birmingham. I could not please her while writing my first post-graduate paper pursuant to completing a course in twentieth-century Southern history. After perusing my first draft, she simply said, Mr. McCord, this is not an assignment for a high school book report. Each time I presented revisions, she would say, This will not suffice. Finally, I wrote an introductory page to a paper describing my paternal grandparents’ loss of their entire crop in 1949 due to heavy summer rains and the lack of local flood control. There was a narrative of how we youngsters used a bateau to float down the tall corn rows, which were totally submersed except for the tassels protruding from the flooded fields. We handpicked the rotting roasting ears from beneath the dingy water and piled our salvaged items into the small boat. Now the wet corn shucks and decomposing ears were ultimately worthless except as hog feed. Bobbing pumpkins, watermelons, and cantaloupes were easily gathered into the small craft, for they floated high in the inundated bottomland. There would be no crops to harvest that autumn, as a year’s worth of labor moved South in a rain-swollen stream simply known as Little River. After reading this depiction of the plight of Southern sharecropping, Dr. Griffith noted in red cursive at the top of the page, This is very descriptive. You have finally understood how to express, in a personal way, Southern Appalachian history. Although she died many years ago, I still feel her firm spirit looking at each page of my stories. From this teacher I learned to write and revise again and again while always thriving to tell a story that is readable, personal, and genuine.

I think my shipmates will appreciate these yarns, and hopefully the casual reader will also. It is a common story, perhaps idealized, but revealing for no other reason than young people who experience the sadness and sentiment of leaving home for the first time can find new friends who become as dear to them as those in hometowns, and that there are locales in the world just as special as the place we were born and raised. The island of Oahu met those criteria for us in the late 1950s.

In late April of 1958, approximately eleven months before Congress voted for Hawaii to become the fiftieth state, 1948 Pulitzer Prize (Tales of the South Pacific) recipient James A. Michener rearranged a work desk in his Waikiki apartment and soon began working on another Pacific epic. Hawaii was surely fiction but nevertheless true to the spirit of the isles. Interestingly, his presence and the writing of Hawaii coincided with our coming to the islands. Michener is my favorite author primarily because he wrote about ordinary people in extraordinary times and places. I have also attempted to record some tales of the islands featuring special shipmates serving their country in a special place and time. True, these narratives are only snippets of personal histories, but it would be sad for our time on the island to be remembered only in the impersonal black-and-white paper print of our Navy service record, which is officially called Defense Department Form 214. So while our memories are still lucid, I intend to write figuratively the stories of the guys from Navy #85 in the margins of their DD214s.

This is one of fifty-two vignettes about our time on Oahu, which is called the gathering place by kamaainas. Whether in the background or foreground, the shipmates are pervasive in my ramblings. Sixty-plus years later, these intelligent, handsome, articulate, humorous, and loyal men talk, e-mail, or visit one another on a regular basis. A strong bond that began on the island has endured. That time saw several romances bloom into marriages and many careers begun. For me, life always seemed different after Hawaii. I suppose it was the last time without much responsibility. Although we stood stressful watches in building 108, life was carefree afterwards.

Many of the themes refer to promises in paradise. We were fortunate to have fifty-six hours of free time after watch duties were fulfilled. Many gravitated to the island’s beautiful beaches because of young wahines. In a strange or familiar land, young men will find young women and vice versa. Consequently, we found girls from Salem, Lubbock, Provo, and even London. Many before us experienced a sensation of love in the islands. In his book, The Trembling of a Leaf, W. Somerset Maugham said this specifically about Honolulu in 1921:

It is the meeting place of East and West. The very new rubs shoulders with the immeasurably old. And if you have not found the romance you expected you have come upon something singularly intriguing.

All these strange people live close to each other, with different languages and different thoughts; they believe in different gods and they have different values; two passions alone they share, love and hunger. And somehow as you watch them you have an impression of extraordinary vitality.

Roy Hill’s Bottoms

It is a long way from the small Northeast Alabama town of Centre to Somerset Maugham’s Hawaii—4,415 miles to be exact but much more in culture and lifestyle.

Roy Hill’s bottoms (fertile lowlands) consisted of 112 acres more or less. His cotton rows ran east to west perpendicular to Spring Creek in northeastern Cherokee County, Alabama. They still do. The rows were seventeen hundred ten feet long, which is a long row to hoe or pick. He