Caribbean Islands, World War II Style

By janiceblake on June 17th, 2011

The Redwood was assigned to the tenth naval district—the south Atlantic and the Caribbean.

Its mission was to install nets across the harbors in every major port—St. Thomas, St. Croix, St. Lucia. Trinidad was the biggest harbor, requiring a net that was seven mile wide; convoys assembled there to bring war supplies north, especially oil from Venezuela. St. Thomas was a major source of bauxite; there was a huge terminal in St. Thomas. Bauxite would be brought in from a number of different islands and then piled up in St. Thomas so there was a central location for vessels to pick it up. “At first,” Joe reports, “The Germans were sinking freighters right in the ports; they were sinking vessels faster than we could put up the nets to protect them.” The damage the Germans were doing to shipping went relatively unreported. But they were wreaking havoc.

Three times in all, Joe ran into guys he knew from home. The first had been James Hilton Smith in Norfolk. Second was Randall Boyd. “When we were in port I steered clear of trouble. And bar rooms were usually trouble. I’d stop in, have one drink and see what was going on. But that was it. After that, I’d split. I usually headed for the USO or the YMCA. At the USO, you could always count on getting something to eat. In the evenings the launch would take you back to the ship.

“One day I was in a USO in Puerto Rico, reading a Boston paper, when a guy asked, ‘You come from up around Boston?’ I told him I was from Weymouth, a small town outside Boston. ‘We have an officer on our ship from down that way,’ he said. ‘What’s his name?’  ‘Boyd.’  ‘Randall Boyd?’  ‘Yeah,’ ‘I know him.’ He lived on Reed Avenue, just a few blocks away from us. He was a graduate of Annapolis. ‘Where is your ship?’ ‘He has duty tonight,’ the guy told me. So I hotfooted it down to the ship. I told the gangway watch I was there to see Lieutenant Boyd. So the guy goes over to the hatch, hollers down, ‘Lieutenant, you have a visitor.’  ‘Send him down.’  So down I go. Well, was he surprised. He told me that the ship he was on was an old World War I ship that had been taken out of mothballs. They had been sent up the Nile to help the Americans. They were taking a licking from the Germans. We talked for quite a while. When I left he said, ‘I will call your mother and tell her I saw you.’ This kind of connection with home was precious to families back in the days when mail was slow. There were no cell phones, and long distance calls were beyond the means of the ordinary sailor.

“The third guy I met from home was Herb Monk, who lived on Forest Street. He was a graduate of Mass Maritime Academy, We were in Trinidad in November of 1942; we had been away from our home port for quite a while, and we needed supplies. There was an American warehouse alongside the pier.  One of the guys broke into the place, and he got some fancy cigars. But cigars were not going to help us out. I was delegated to go over to a supply ship and get what we needed. I had a list of stores. And I got everything. It took me quite a while. I got all the stores up on deck from the different sections of the ship. Tools, cement for some linoleum that was coming loose. All kinds of stuff. Anyway I went down to chow. I had my Thanksgiving dinner, and went back to the deck. Then I am looking at my pile of stores and wondering. How the heck am I going to get these down on the dock?  Well, I happened to look up on the bridge, and I said to myself, ‘Hey, that looks like Herb Monk.’ He was eating an orange. And so I hotfoot it up to the bridge. ‘What are you doing here?’ He asks. ‘See that pile of gear down there on the deck? That’s for my ship.’

‘No problem,’ says Herb. ‘See that net? Just pile your gear up on the net and hook it up.’ So I did, and then Herb speaks to the chief and explains what’s going on. Well there’s a crane on this ship, and the chief says to the crane operator, ‘Get this man’s gear over on the dock.’ So just like that, the crane picks up my net full of gear and swings it over onto the dock. And from there I’m able to get all the supplies back to the ship.

“Some of the guys weren’t too smart. There was one guy, Kissler, the signalman—he liked the bars, and the girls. There was a bar in San Juan called the Black Cat. Kissler had a girlfriend there—although I don’t know if girlfriend is really the right word for her. She wasn’t the kind of girl you’d take home to mother, that’s for sure. One day we had stopped by the Black Cat and there was Kissler at a table with this girl and one of her friends. Her English wasn’t the greatest. She said, ‘I go take piss.’ One of the guys told her, ‘Honey, you shouldn’t say that, you should say ‘I’m going to powder my nose.’”

‘Not going to powder nose. Going to piss. Maybe shit.’

Well, you get the picture.

I took off for wherever I decided to go, but later I wandered back to the Black Cat. It was just about time to get the last launch back to the boat. Some of the guys from the ship were at the bar, and I was standing there talking with them, when this girl, Kissler’s girl came running in and looking around frantically.

She spied me.

‘Hey Joe. Come quick. Quick! Quick! Kissler! Kissler!

Well, she looked pretty distressed. Obviously, she was trying to tell me Kissler was in some kind of trouble.

So I followed her. She took me down the street—to a hotel there. Not a very nice hotel. She took me upstairs to a room.

And there was Kissler, on the bed. Out like a light.

He was naked as a jaybird.

There was only one thing to do. ‘Come on,’ I told her. ‘You gotta help me.’ Well, between the two of us, we dragged and lifted Kissler into the bathroom and got him under the shower. I turned on the cold water full force. And he came to, quick enough.

He started sputtering and shouting.

Well he definitely wasn’t dead. And he wasn’t out cold anymore.

‘Okay, you two are all set,’ I said and took off.

The problem was solved as far as I was concerned.

There was a kid from Pennsylvania, Tom Weeks–a good kid. He had never been away from home before. He came down with syphilis. So of course he was off the ship and into the hospital in San Juan. We all felt bad. Before we left port, another fellow and I went over to the hospital to see him. So the ship pulled out, and we were away quite a while. When we got back we were making the rounds, stopped in at the Black Cat and who do we see in a booth with a girl but Tom Weeks. He looked a hell of a lot better than when we had last seen him, that’s for sure. So we say, ‘Tom what happened? You were so sick in the hospital.’ He says, ‘Oh, they have penicillin now.’

‘And who’s this?’ We point to the girl.

‘Ah, she’s taking penicillin, too. So I’m home free. I’ve got shore duty.’

A few weeks later, Kissler was in the sick bay. Then he got transferred to the hospital in San Juan. Word was that had a venereal disease. We left him there in the hospital but the next time we were in port, a few of us decided to stop by and see him. He looked awful. It was hard to believe he was the same guy. His face was gray and splotchy. He must have lost fifty pounds at least. The guy was so weak and miserable he could hardly lift his head off the pillow. We thought he was a goner. As far as we all knew he was on permanent sick leave. All I know is he didn’t come back to the Redwood.

I didn’t think about him much after that except once in a while to remember that scene in the hotel and think what a sorry fool he was. Then, wouldn’t you know, months later, we were in port again, and a few of us popped into the Black Cat. And there he was, bigger than life, and looking fit and fine. He was in a booth with a couple of other guys and a bunch of girls, including that same girl he had been with in the hotel.

We were all glad to see him still alive and looking well. But we were also flabbergasted. ‘Kissler! What are you thinking? What are you doing here? Are you crazy?’

‘Ah, guys. It’s okay,’ he said. ‘I’m getting penicillin shots now.’ He put his arm around the dame. ‘And so is she.’ He gave her a little squeeze.

I just shook my head. That was the kind of thing that made me realize I didn’t want to be a career navy man. It wasn’t the life for me. I remember when I first went on the Wichita, when I was wandering around, getting to know my way, I saw one of the lavatories (heads) had a sign on the door: Venereal Disease Only. They had a separate bathroom just for the guys with venereal disease. Nope. Not for me.

We got to another island…I don’t remember which one. All I remember is that there were a lot of wolf packs in the area and we were glad to get safely into port. And we are in a bar room. Of course there is always a bar room. And I saw this kid from our ship. We called him “Chicken.” He was one of the minority cooks. He must have been only 17 years old. And I could see this dame was eying him. And I said to the other guys. ‘Hey, don’t let that dame get him out of here.’ But we got to talking, and we weren’t paying attention. And before we knew it there was Chicken leaving the place with this woman. ‘Shucks! She got him’ someone said. So we all rushed out of the bar and started hollering ‘Chicken! Chicken!’ as he goes walking down the street with the dame. And out of the side streets come these other women… not the kind like the dame… but the real women, the housewives, the working women. And they’re all excited and talking to us in Spanish. They kept talking and talking. We didn’t know what the heck they were talking about until another woman comes running up the alley and she’s clutching a squawking chicken by the feet. She’s waving it at us like she wants to give it to us. And we realize, they heard us calling after Chicken and they thought we wanted to buy chickens. So here they were, ready to sell. Well, it took us a while to convince them we didn’t want their chickens.

In the meantime our kid Chicken appears out of nowhere. He told us the dame he went off with started taking off her clothes and he decided he would just run for it. I guess he either didn’t realize what he was getting into by going off with her. Or he just plain changed his mind. Either way, we were glad.

We got paid only when we went back to San Juan, so sometimes some of us—or all of us—would run out of money. One time we had been away from San Juan for so long they sent the checks out to us. Our next stop was Barbados. But what were we going to do? If we went to a bank in Barbados they wouldn’t give us American money; they’d give us their own Barbadian money, which we wouldn’t be able to use anywhere else. Well we put our heads together and decided what we’d do. One guy, Sam Betts cashed his check, and then he loaned out cash to all the rest of us. Then when we got back to San Juan and cashed our checks, we all paid him back.

One time we were in San Juan and we had just gotten paid. I asked for early liberty. I wanted to go ashore by myself. The chief asked why I wanted early liberty, and I said I wanted to buy a war bond. Now I had no intention of buying a war bond. But after I got over on the beach, I said to myself, ‘This son of a gun just might ask to see the bond when I get back.’ So I went into a bank and bought myself a bond. I had to put next of kin on the paperwork, and so I put Ma’s name on it. I had that bond for years.

I went to the USO and then went rubbernecking all over San Juan. Finally I wandered down to skid row. The waterfront area where all the bars were. I walked into the Black Cat. To the right was the bar, and to the left was a big room with a whole lot of tables. So I look in the big room and there’s a lone sailor. It’s Kissler, the signalman. I had got myself a rum and coke with lime. And I brought it over to the table. He said, ‘Meet Helen.’ That was his girl. I guess he forgot that I had already met that girl. Twice.

(c) Janice Blake 2011

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Pearl Harbor Day

By janiceblake on June 12th, 2011

When the Redwood arrived at the Navy Yard in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in early December of 1941, it was slated to be fitted out with some additional equipment—sound gear, radar, depth charges—military gear the ship builder in Ohio hadn’t been able to provide, and even some non-military gear—including a washing machine. From Portsmouth its order were to report to the 10th naval District Headquarter in Puerto Rico. San Juan.

“It was a Sunday,” Joe recalls, “but I don’t remember going to Mass that day. I don’t remember a Mass in the Navy Yard, and I don’t remember going into town to go to church. So apparently I didn’t. But anyways, that afternoon, I was down in the compartment having a nap. I always slept whenever I could.” (We know that by now, don’t we?) “And some of the fellas were up in the mess compartment, and they had a radio. You know how it is—three or four guys, just sitting around listening to the radio on a Sunday afternoon. And then the news came. Shorty Horton, (this little short guy—I don’t know how he ever got into the Navy, he was so short) came down and woke me up. He said, ‘Hey, the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor.’”

And I said, “Are they here?”

He said, “No. Pearl Harbor.”

“I said, ‘Aaah, don’t bother me… Let me sleep.’ Well, of course, then it sunk in. I leaped outta the sack. Up the ladder I went, into the mess compartment; the guys were listening to the radio. And the Captain was there, and I said, ‘Hey, Captain, we’re at war!’

The Captain nodded.

‘Whadda we do now?’ I knew we had no ammunition. We had three inch-fifty guns and about four fifty-caliber machine guns. But we had no ammunition. So, suddenly, we had orders to get underway. I don’t know who gave the order, but it must have been the commanding officer for that area. So we bummed some ammunition from a couple of subs that were in at Portsmouth, too. We were told to get underway and go out and patrol a certain area. By then night had fallen. It was dark. No one knew what to expect. We didn’t know whether Hitler had tie-ins with Japan and the Germans would be coming over on this coast. Because at that time, Hitler was winning over in Europe. The U.S. military leaders—they really didn’t know what was happening. No one did. So out we went. We were patrolling, but we didn’t have any guns big enough to do any real damage. So our orders were, if you see anything, ram it. They were going to sacrifice us. That was the order. As it happened, I had my watch to stand. So I went down to the engine room. I’m down in the engine room, and the bridge calls down and says, ‘We need a man to stand by the searchlight in case we come onto something and need to know what it is.’ They wanted somebody to man that searchlight. Oh, it was a powerful light. It was huge. Huge. It was what they called an arc light. Two charges—a positive and a negative—come together and make an intense bright light. Next thing I know, the Chief says, ‘Hey, you, go on up.’ So I go up to the compartment. Of course this is winter! December 7th. But we didn’t have heavy winter coats. So I put on a sweater over my dungarees, and I put on another pair of blue sailor pants over the dungarees. And I put my pea coat on, and my watch cap. And I climbed up to the search light platform, and there’s another guy there—Sam Ferrar. Sam was on lookout. So I’m up there with Sam, and it’s snowing. And it’s cold. It’s really a wild night. I said, ‘Sam, this is foolish. This is crazy!’ He says, ‘I know it.’ So I took the cover off the searchlight. It’s a huge canvas cover. I stretched it out on the deck, and I crawled in and pulled it up around me. So I’m well covered, protected. After a little while, Sam kicked me. He said, ‘Hey! Move over! I’m getting in there, too.’ I said, ‘Sam! You can’t. You’re…you’re the lookout.’ ‘I’ll be looking for airplanes, then.’ Joe laughs. You couldn’t see the hand in front of your face, it was so pitch black. Snow blowing. Out on the Atlantic. No binoculars. No nothing. Just look out into the dark.”

Thus, Joe Flynn and Sam Ferrar protected the coastline of the northeastern United States on the night of December 7, 1941.

Meanwhile the U.S. military command was rushing troops to the beaches—the National Guard—as many resources as they could. “They didn’t know what to expect.” Joe said. “They were moving whatever was available right to the shores, all along the coast. We didn’t have much of a military at that point. But they had already caught quite a few Germans trying to get into Long island. The subs would bring ‘em in close and try to get them onto the beach… to spy.”

Joe continues his narrative of the first few days of World War II. “A couple of days after Pearl Harbor we were still in Portsmouth. I got liberty. If you rated liberty, you were allowed to go ashore to buy any necessities you needed, before we got underway. Who knew how long we would be at sea, once we left? Naturally, I jumped at the chance to get off the ship. We weren’t supposed to go out of town. We could go into Portsmouth, but we were supposed to stay local. Well, the minute I got out the gate I got myself down to the highway and I hitchhiked to Cambridge. Once I got to Cambridge, I called home and said, I’ll grab the subway, and somebody pick me up at Columbia Circle.’ So they met me at the subway stop in Dorchester and took me home. I was able to spend some time with Ma and Pa and whoever was there. John and Philip came in around eight or nine-o’clock; I don’t remember where they had been working then, maybe the shipyard in Quincy. They were still kids, really; John would have been twenty in 1941, Philip eighteen. Well, of course they were all excited to see me. And I said, ‘Now look you two guys. The thing for you to do is to join the Naval Reserve. You’ll get a bed and food, and you know you’ll be on a ship. And it’ll be better than being in a mud hole or whatever.’ Then somebody drove me into Boston to the Greyhound bus terminal and I caught a bus back up to New Hampshire so I could get back to the ship. I was there for muster at 8 o’clock, and nobody was the wiser.”

“Well we left Portsmouth and headed south through the Cape Cod Canal. The Captain wanted to lay over in Buzzard’s Bay, to tie up for the night …so we could go into New York in daylight. That meant locating the State Pier in Bourne. The old man asked if any of the guys might be familiar with the area. Somebody knew I lived in Weymouth, so the word came down to the fire room for me to go up to the bridge. The Captain asked me if I knew where the State Pier was; it was dark, of course, because everything was blacked out at this point. The Captain wanted me to put the search light on the pier so they could tie up. I went up and took the canvas off the search light and cut the light in. I started to play the light along the shore. Luckily, I was able to pick up the State pier; I put the search light right on it. I had seen it only once before, on a rubberneck boat out of Boston—a class outing in high school.

“So we tied up in Buzzard’s Bay. I thought about calling home, but I said to myself, ‘No I better not. That would be asking too much…for them to drive down.’ Everything was blacked out. And remember there were no good roads then.

“Once we got to New York, we tied up in Staten Island. I got liberty that night, and I saw Rosemary. And I said, ‘I don’t know whether we’re going to be in here again tomorrow or not, but if we are, and if I can possibly get off the ship, I’ll come over. Well, the next day, we were still there. But, I had a watch; I had the duty. Well, I got a guy to stand my watch. And I jumped ship and took off for Astoria.” He laughs. “What did I have to lose? What were they going to do about it? Though I did say to myself, ‘If they ever have an air raid drill, I’m going to be among the missing.’ But there was no air raid drill and I got myself back to the ship with no problems. The next day, though we took off. It was eight days after Pearl Harbor, maybe nine days, and we were heading south.

(c) Janice Blake 2011

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The Redwood

By janiceblake on June 11th, 2011

Joe and his crewmates had all come off of the Wichita, a big ship, a fighting ship. The U.S. S. Redwood was a small vessel by comparison, more like a yacht. “We were a small crew, some thirty-odd guys,” Joe explained. “We had only three commissioned officers and three chiefs—a chief electrician, a chief boatswain’s mate and a chief machinist’s mate.”

The Redwood was designed and built to install nets across harbors, nets designed to keep out German submarines. It was driven by two massive diesel electric engines, whereas the Wichita had been powered by huge steam boilers. Everything about operating and maneuvering this ship was new. “We had to make a few trial runs out on Lake Erie,” Joe said, “And it took us a while to get the hang of the whole thing.” It was the end of October, 1941. One day a guy in the boatyard approached the sailors, “You guys have got to get out of here pretty soon,” he told them. “That lake is going to freeze over, and you’ll be here all winter.” The sailors, all of them familiar with the ocean but new to the Great Lakes, were incredulous. “‘This Lake is going to freeze over?’” Joe remembered saying. “It looked like the ocean to us. We couldn’t believe it. We thought he was pulling our leg.”

“One thing that always happens in any port before getting under way is that the guys are sent ashore to purchase toilet articles or anything we want to have while we’re at sea. So a group of us went ashore in Cleveland and went into a store. We were all wearing our flat hats that still had U.S.S. Wichita embroidered on the ribbon. Well the sales girl in the store looked at us and said, ‘Are you real sailors?’ We said we were. She said, ‘Geez, you sail on the ocean?’ We said we did. She was pretty impressed, ‘All we see is lake sailors up here.’ I’m sure we did look out of place; the people weren’t used to seeing sailors so far from the ocean.” When telling this story, Joe would always add, “Once the war started, sailors didn’t have the names of their ships embroidered on their hats anymore. You never knew if there might be spies around trying to figure out which ship was which, where they had been, and where they were going.”

Once the Redwood left Cleveland, it set a northeasterly course; it would cross Lake Erie and Lake Ontario and continue along the Saint Lawrence into the North Atlantic.

Getting from Erie to Ontario meant traversing the Welland Canal, the twenty-seven mile waterway that links the two, providing a series of eight locks to adjust for the fact that Lake Erie is more than 325 higher than Lake Ontario. The only alternate route is via the Niagara River—and Niagara Falls—inadvisable even to a daredevil willing to attempt the distance in a barrel.

When the Redwood stopped at one of the Canadian ports on Lake Ontario, Joe and Mike went ashore. A couple came walking toward us on the sidewalk, and the woman, surprised to see two U.S. Navy sailors blurted out, “The Yanks are here!” Mike instantly retorted, “I am no Yank. I’m a Rebel!” He was still not used to the idea that outside the U.S.A., all Americans, even Southerners, were considered “Yankees.”

When the ship tied up in Montreal, Joe decided to call Pa’s cousin, Cedric Foster. “I went over to this little store; there was a pay phone on the wall. The place had very dim lighting because they were under blackout; Canada was at war at that point, and we weren’t. Anyway, I reached Cedric by phone and he asked, ‘Where are you?’ Of course I didn’t know exactly where I was. I turned around and said to the woman at the store, ‘Where are we.’ She of course was taking all this in. ‘Tell him you are at the Black Watch Bridge,’ she said. So I told him. As I went back aboard the ship, I said to the gangway watch, ‘If somebody comes looking for me, I’ll be down below.’ Well Cedric did come. He was walking. He didn’t come in a car. We chatted for a while. He asked how long we were going to be there. Of course, I didn’t know. He said, ‘If you are here tomorrow, why don’t you come to the house.’ ‘Can I bring a friend?’ I asked. ‘Sure’ Well, the next day we were still there. I called Cedric, and he said, ‘I knew you were going to be calling. I talked to the chief of police. He told me your ship was staying in port an extra day so you guys could get some sleep.’” So I Mike and I caught the streetcar and told the motorman where we wanted to get off. Cedric came to meet us at the streetcar, and took us back to his house. We had a nice dinner, and a nice visit.”

After Montreal  the Redwood stopped in Quebec. “It was a Sunday, and I thought maybe I could go to church. So I prowled around for a church and found a big Cathedral. I found an empty pew and sat down. The first thing I know, a guy comes down, an usher, and he said, ‘You can’t sit here. This is a family pew.’ Well apparently people had their own pews that they bought and paid for, and nobody else could sit there even if they weren’t there and the place was packed. So I got out of that seat, but the horse’s ass didn’t tell me where I could sit. So I stood.”

When we came out of the Saint Lawrence River and into the Atlantic I came off watch and I saw the lookout, Sam Farrar. I said, “Hey Sam, where the hell are we?” “I’m supposed to spot a lighthouse as a guide,” was all he told me. All of a sudden I see a lot of other ships, and we are barely making headway. I found out we were waiting for a pilot—all these ships were waiting for a pilot—to bring us into Halifax, Nova Scotia. A convoy was being made up. That’s what all the other ships were. Finally the pilot boat pulls alongside, and the pilot comes aboard. The first thing he does is shout up to the bridge, “Make a hard left rudder. You are over a minefield!’”

“Cruising from Halifax down to Portsmouth we began to see what we were up against. That ocean was thick with German subs. I remember seeing the ships hug the shore. They wanted to get into water as shallow as they could. I remember the first time a sub took a shot at us. The sailor on the wheel told the rest of us what happened. The radioman alerted the bridge that there was a torpedo coming. The old man, looking through his binoculars, could see it coming. ‘Here it comes,’ says the Captain. We are all at battle stations stations. I’m down in the engine room, and one of the guys is on the phone so he can repeat to us what the Captain is saying. Of course, there was a terrible long pause while we all waited to see what would happen. Will we get hit? Will we go down? Then the old man walks across the bridge, still watching the torpedo through his binoculars. ‘There it goes.’ That torpedo had gone right under us. It was then that we knew we had a pretty good chance.”

It was the unique design and specialized mission of the Redwood that provided it with an unusual defense against German U-boats. The Redwood needed lots of extra power, out of proportion to its size, not for getting from port to port, but for doing the heavy work of dragging sub nets across the entrances to harbors; the ship had to overcome not just the weight of the nets but the resistance of the water. And so it had two huge diesel engines, which to the radioman in a nearby ship (or submarine) would sound like a much bigger ship. Weeks later, the sailors of the Redwood began to understand why that first torpedo had failed to sink them, and just how lucky they were.

“We pulled into a sub base in St. Thomas, and a sub came in right behind us. The navigator later told us, “We were using you as a guide. You sound like a freighter.” The Redwood wasn’t a big ship. It drew only about 14 feet. But it sounded like a much bigger ship, a ship that would have a much deeper hull. “That sub that had tried to sink us set the torpedo for the depth of a freighter. They aimed the torpedo to hit a vital spot; they wanted to do maximum damage. Those German subs, they didn’t operate near the surface where they could use their periscopes. They stayed low; they didn’t want to be detected. So they couldn’t look around to see what they were shooting at. They detected their targets with their radios, and they judged the targets size by what they could hear. Well when they heard us, they thought we were a big ship. And when they aimed, they had set the torpedo too low.”

Joe and Mike had done well to volunteer their way off the Wichita. If you were going to be a sailor in the United States Navy in the early years of World War II, the U.S.S. Redwood was not a bad place to be. It wasn’t the Hawaiian Packet. But in retrospect, maybe that was just as well.

(c) Janice Blake 2011

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A Swell Time on Nothing at All

By janiceblake on June 9th, 2011

Rosemary did not hear from Joe for a couple of weeks. His ship had pulled out; it was still on neutrality patrol at that point. But he was able to post a letter letting her know that he had very much enjoyed their evening together, and that he would call her when he got back to New York. The Wichita, as we know, returned to the Brooklyn Navy Yard in June and went into drydock. Joe volunteered his way onto the Redwood (which was still under construction); therefore he was beached, so to speak, in New York for the summer.

“That’s when I saw a lot of her,” Joe said.

“The whole summer. What a summer!” Rosemary recalled. “It really was a fabulous summer. We had a swell time on nothing at all.”

The two went to radio shows. They got tickets for Broadway shows. Same day tickets were offered free, or deeply discounted to servicemen. Sometimes there might be standing room only. But Rosemary and Joe didn’t care. They would go in and see the show anyway. They saw “Oklahoma,” “Life with Father,” and several others.

They often went out with Rosemary’s two best friends, Kay and Anna Mae, and their boyfriends, Harry and Jamie. Harry was a furrier; Jamie worked on Wall Street.

“They knew he was getting just twenty-one dollars a month,” Rosemary said. “And they wouldn’t let him spent a penny.”

Now it was Joe’s turn to be the corrector: “Actually it was thirty-six.” They both laugh, and she acknowledges, yes, it was thirty-six.

On one of their dates, they took an excursion boat up the Hudson River, and Joe in his dress whites must have looked to the other passengers like one of the men who worked on the boat. As they were debarking, another passenger came up to him and asked him what time the next boat was going back.

“After that, I got smart,” Joe says. “I had civilian clothes sent down to her house.”

Usually, Joe would change into civilian clothes when he and Rosemary were going out. Sometimes, though, he’d wear his uniform. If they were going to the movies, he’d wear his uniform, because, as with Broadway shows, service men got in for less.

Rosemary used to wonder good-humoredly what the neighbors thought, “He’d come in a sailor, and we’d go out he’d be in civilian clothes. We’d come back and he’d be a civilian, but when he was ready to go back to the ship, he’d come out a sailor again.”

One weekend the two decided to go up to South Weymouth. Joe wanted to introduce Rosemary to his parents. And she would be able to stay at the Leahys. They had stopped at the Leahys first so Rosemary could drop off her bag and change into a freshly ironed frock and freshen up a bit. Tom McGrath had stopped by so he and John Leahy decided to drive over to the Flynns with them. Joe’s buddies, however, had little comfort to offer the nervous Rosemary. “Ah, wait until Mrs. Flynn gets a hold of you!” one of them warned. “She will be giving you the old 1, 2, 3,” said the other. But as they pulled into the Flynn’s driveway, another car pulled up right behind them. And the formidable Mrs. Flynn came out of the house.

Rosemary and Joe, stepped out of the car quickly, leaving Tom and John in the back seat. Joe started to introduce Rosemary to Ma, but she breezed right past them with a wave of her arm, “I’m going to the races this afternoon, and here’s my ride,” she said. “Go in and talk to your father.” And off she went.

The two went inside and sat down. (Joe’s buddies Tom and John, meanwhile, made themselves at home in the canvas chairs under the pear tree.) Pa looked at Rosemary and could see how nervous she was, “Would you like a cigarette?”

“Yes, I would.”

They chatted. Pa was easy to talk to. Rosemary liked him instantly. Later in the weekend she did meet Ma and found her far more good humored and far less scary than Tom and John had led her to expect. Joe’s parents, in turn, were impressed with the bright, pretty girl their son had brought home.

Before Joe left to pick up Rosemary for their trip back to New York, Pa found a moment to speak to him, “That’s a very nice girl. Don’t you be kidding her along.”

Back in New York, Joe and his crew mates, still waiting for the Redwood to be ready to go to sea, were kept busy. Navy ships had to offload their ammunition before they could enter New York Harbor. The ammunition would be placed on barges and then tugs would take the barges over to Lafayette Island, where there was an arsenal. Joe was assigned to a work party tasked with unloading the barges. Each day the sailors would be ferried to the island by the first tug going over on their assigned watch; the last tug leaving at the end of the watch would collect them all and take them back. “We’d unload those barges all day,” Joe said. “Except once in a while I would go up to the top floor, where it was nice and quiet, and take a nap.” The management of Lafayette Island was not a U.S. Navy operation. Civilians were in charge, and so, as supervisors, a bit less rigid than military officers. One afternoon, Joe was deep in one of his customary naps, when he found himself being shaken awake. “Come on,” one of the civilian supervisors said urgently. “The tug is waiting to take everybody back; they’re looking for you!” Together, they scurried downstairs and out to the dock. “On the cruise back to the Navy Yard, the guy who had woken him up approached Joe and in a conspiratorial voice said quietly, “Next time you’re planning on going upstairs to take a nap, let me know!”

Finally, in October, the crew of the Redwood was sent to Cleveland to get their ship. “We took the train out from New York. We all had berths in a Pullman car. I don’t know how Aunt Anna knew when we would be going through, but she met our train and the railroad station in Rochester and gave the conductor a package of goodies for me.”

In April, seeking to feel closer to home and family, Joe had sought out Mrs. Leahy in Astoria. In midsummer, he traveled home and found his own dear and outrageous mother up to her usual antics. And in October, his amazing Aunt Anna had managed to remind him that despite the shadow of war and the unknown on the horizon he was still, at age twenty-six, a beloved boy as far as she was concerned. Until now, along with his sister Mary, these three had been the most important women in Joe Flynn’s life. But now, over the past six or seven months, things had changed. Yes, he still loved all of these women. But none of them would ever come first in his heart again. He had met and spent the most wonderful summer of his life with Rosemary Veronica Bartels.

(c) Janice Blake 2011

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The Hand of Fate

By janiceblake on June 3rd, 2011

It was the happenstance of seeing an advertisement in a magazine that led Joe at age 17 to apply for the Citizens Military Training Camp, the random bad luck of his sister’s Tuberculosis that forced him to quite his job at the A & P when he did, his subsequent inability to find steady work that led him to join the Navy in August of 1940, and the skills he had gained in CMTC camp that placed him on the USS Wichita in the Atlantic squadron rather than on a ship in the Pacific with the rest of the sailors that had gone through boot camp at the same time he did. Thus, in retrospect it is possible to trace a series of random events that ultimately brought Joe Flynn, U.S.N., Fireman Third Class, to the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the late spring of 1941.

Meanwhile, a series of events that appeared completely unrelated was unfolding in other lives—lives of people both known and unknown to Joe. These events would ultimately converge in a chance meeting. And that meeting would turn out to be the single most important event in Joe Flynn’s life.

It all begins with sawdust.

To trace the story, we must go back to South Weymouth, and to Joe’s friend John Leahy. John’s family was in the sawdust business, a business run by his father. Now sawdust is not a commodity that springs to mind when imagining an enteprise that would support a large family; yet in the early decades of the 20th century (and still today) it is a commodity much in demand for its absorbency, insulating qualities, and even its combustibility. Back then, sawdust was used by furriers in treating and cleaning pelts; it was spread on the floor in bar rooms to absorb spills and make cleanup easier; it was used in ice houses as an insulator and in dairy barns and (while they still existed), in livery stables as bedding for animals, easily swept away when wet or soiled. The list of the uses for sawdust goes on and on. But the point is that sawdust was the source of the Leahy family’s prosperity, and the sawdust business represented the family’s livelihood. The firm’s main office was in Somerville, Massachusetts, with a satellite office in New York, one of their largest markets. In 1929 (when Joe and his friend John Leahy were only fourteen and still schoolboys), Mr. Leahy died. He was only 44 years old. It was necessary for the older children to step in and take over the business. So the eldest daughter, Mary, was sent down to New York, to replace her brother who had run the branch office but returned home to take charge in Somerville.

The family got in touch with some friends in Astoria to ask where Mary could find a room to rent, and the friend suggested she talk to their Parish priest. The priest thought about a couple he knew well, the Considines. Now the Considines didn’t ordinarily rent out rooms; they didn’t need to rent out rooms. The husband was a police sergeant, and eventually became a captain, so he made a good living. But they didn’t have any children, they had a big house, and they were nice people. So when Mary Leahy arrived at their door, saying the priest had sent her they said sure, they’d be glad to let her live with them.

This wasn’t the first time the Considines had opened their homes and their hearts to help solve the distress and logistical confusion caused by sudden loss. Just two doors down from the Considines, a neighbor had died—Josephine Bartels. Just a few weeks shy of her fiftieth birthday, Josephine who had suffered from, and finally succumbed to, asthma, for most of her adult life, left a devastated husband, Dick, two sons (Richard, his father’s namesake was married and a young New York City police officer; Edwin was still in high school) and thirteen-year-old daughter, Rosemary, just a schoolgirl.

An upholsterer by trade, Dick had been nearly ten years older than his wife, and had been running a thriving business in Manhattan, a business that had been built up over two generations. He counted among his clientele the scions of the New York City elite—therefore, his work took him into the magnificent homes along Millionaires Row, and other exclusive addresses in the city, as well as the spectacular summer cottages on Long Island and the Jersey Shore. This work went beyond the recovering of fine and rare furniture pieces to the care and maintenance of grand window hangings, the fabrication of slipcovers for chairs and sofas and the opening and closing of various city, country, and seaside homes (draping and removing large pieces of furniture with dust covers) as families moved from one residence to another as the seasons changed.  Josephine, or Josie as he fondly called her, was Dick’s partner in this work, for it was her sure hand that managed the washing and ironing of delicate lace curtains, and the care of fine fabrics, and she would often accompany her husband when visits to a great house involved tasks that would take a full day. Originally, the Bartels family had lived in what is now mid-town Manhattan, at 647 Sixth Avenue (now Avenue of the Americas) between 37th and 38th Streets, in a three-story wooden building with an Italian fruit store and a plumber on the first floor, Dick’s upholstery shop on the second, and the family’s residence on the third. But as the neighborhood evolved, with more an more large buildings crowding out the small ones, the Bartels decided to move to the country, and so in 1923 (just a couple of years after the Flynns had from Boston to South Weymouth) they purchased a lovely brick two-family home in Astoria, where there were still vast expanses of green fields and trees. The 1920s were not kind to Richard Bartels and his upholstery business. Times were changing; the city was changing; and the lifestyles of the wealthy were changing. Many of the big mansions along Fifth Avenue were being sold off and ultimately demolished to make way for apartment buildings, office towers and department stores, especially after 1926 when the twelve-story height restriction in certain residential areas was lifted. With the disappearance of the big houses, Dick’s work diminished. The stock market crash of 1927 was crushing blow. Even those who did not lose their wealth were no longer spending lavishly as they once did. With Josie’s death, Dick was nearly paralyzed with grief. How was he to carry on his business? How was he to run the household by himself? How was he to help Edwin get launched in life? And what about his little Rose, still just a girl? How was he to raise a young girl all by himself?

Perhaps it was the Parish priest who listened to Dick’s concerns, and who was the one to suggest some simple practical solutions. Perhaps it was he who suggested that Dick might be able to make an arrangement to take their family meals during the week with Mr. and Mrs. Considine, their neighbors. And so perhaps that is how it happened that when Mary Leahy moved into the Considines house, she found that it was not just Mr. and Mrs. Considine she would be dining with in the evenings when she got home from work, but the Bartels family, Dick, Eddie, and Rose.

Not too long after Mary moved in with the Considines, her younger sister Anna moved to New York as well. (Perhaps Anna had a streak of adventure; perhaps Mrs. Leahy thought it might be better if her older daughter were not living so far from home “all alone.”) Anna got a job with a telegram company (though not Western Union, another one, according to Rose).

Naturally, Anna moved in with the Considines, too, and thus Mrs. Considine ended up cooking for seven people every night—Dick, Eddie and Rose, Mary and Anna Leahy and of course herself and her husband.

Mary Leahy had a boyfriend back home, Bill Hughes; she eventually went back and married him. But Anna’s eye had been caught by handsome young Eddie Bartels. (Anna was twenty at the time; Eddie was just seventeen.) Eventually they started dating. And three years later, they were married.

Eddie and Anna moved into the downstairs apartment in his father’s house and began thinking about a family. Meanwhile, they would travel to Weymouth on weekends or vacations so Anna could spent time with her mother, her sisters and brothers, and the extended Leahy clan.

Like every house where there are many children and a gregarious mother, the Leahys’ was a busy hive of comings and goings, impromptu gatherings and chance encounters that turned into long afternoons of lemonade out on the lawn or informal dinners where there was lots of talk and laughter. Joe being good friends with Anna’s younger brother John, was in and out of the Leahy house frequently.

Naturally, then, Joe came to know Anna and Eddie well. As it turned out, the young couple, by then the parents of two young children (Edwin, Jr., called “Bunky” and Patricia “Patsy”), happened to be in Weymouth the weekend in August before Joe left for basic training. “Don’t forget to come and visit us if you ever get into New York,” Eddie reminded him. Joe promised that he would.

It was nearly ten months later—somewhere between the time the Wichita first docked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the day the boiler blew up on Pier 92—that Joe decided he would find his way to Eddie and Anna’s house. What happened next is a story that Joe never tired of telling (despite the fact that he would often be corrected on a few of the details or interrupted by the person who treasured the story as much as he did).

“It was the 30th of May, 1941, Memorial Day weekend.”

“No,” says the corrector, “It was April 9th.”

“I knew Mrs. Leahy would be there that day, so I went by to say hello. Mrs. Leahy was like a second mother to me; seeing her make me me feel closer to home. I didn’t think about Eddie’s sister. Never gave it a thought. But while I was there, chatting with them all, and hearing the latest news from Weymouth, Eddie says to one of the kids, ‘Go upstairs and get Aunt Rose.’ I’m thinking to myself, ‘Who is Aunt Rose?’ I’m picturing in my head some old lady. Well, she comes down from upstairs, and then she disappears.

“In Eddie’s living room are French doors to the hallway, which has a stairway to the upstairs apartment. I could see through the French doors that somebody was visiting,” the corrector says. “I turned around and went upstairs again to comb my hair.”

“A few minutes later, Rosemary comes in, and I say to myself, ‘Oh, boy.’ She changed her dress or something. I think you got spruced up a bit.”

“No I didn’t” the corrector states emphatically, and slightly annoyed.

“No?”

“You always say I had a housedress on. And I say, ‘Joe, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never wore a housedress in my life!’”

They both laugh.

“Well, you were up there doing something. Anyways, that’s when we met. And then, in the course of the afternoon, Eddie says, ‘Why don’t you two go out tonight?’”

And I looked at him. I wasn’t interested in going out. I didn’t have any money. Rosemary said she’d like that, but she had to go back upstairs and finish what she was doing. Eddie must have sensed something was wrong because he says, ‘Gee I’ve gotta go to the store,’ and I say, ‘I’ll walk around with you, Eddie.’ And we walk outside, and I say, ‘Eddie I can’t go anywhere. I’ve got three bucks in my pocket!’ ‘Right,’ Eddie says. He puts his hand in his pocket and hands me some cash, I don’t know how much. I can’t remember.

“All this time Rosemary is back upstairs, where she lives with her father. She works during the week. We had talked about her job when I met her earlier; she works at Best and Company on Fifth Avenue, in the audit department. And Saturday is her day to do the shopping and housework. When she’s ready, she comes back down and we go out.”

“And as we’re leaving Eddie says, ‘Now don’t be ordering any fancy drinks, Sis.’”

“That’s his way of telling her I don’t have much money.”

“We went somewhere first to get a sandwich.”

“You had a cup of coffee. And I thought to myself. ‘Uh oh. Weymouth. Friend of John Leahy, who doesn’t approve of anybody taking a drink. This guy’s probably a party pooper, too’. I said, ‘Well, I’m going to have a beer.’ But that didn’t seem to bother him at all. I told him about the free dance for servicemen in uniforn—bands playing at Madison Square Garden. They had great bands. Continuous music. And there he was in his uniform.”

“My tailor made dress blues.”

“So we went. But he had a sore foot. Or he said he did. Because he couldn’t dance. We tried.” (The real problem, apparently, was when it came to dancing Joe had two left feet.) It was…torture!” She laughs. “But he was a nice guy.” She reaches over and pats his hand. “A very nice guy.”

“And all it cost me was a couple of bucks for the sandwiches and coffee…”

“And the beer.”

“Plus 20 cents for the subway—two nickel rides over, and two back.”

Joe’s partner in telling this story is, of course, Rosemary Bartels, “Aunt Rose” to Eddie’s children, and at that time not an old lady at all but a very attractive twenty-five-year old, a stylish New York City girl.

The next day Bunky and Patsy began badgering their father, “Pa! Pa! Do you think he’ll ever come back?”

“Who?” Eddie asked.

“Joe Phlegm.”

The chain of events that led Joe to Astoria in the spring of 1941 began with two deaths in 1929. It was set in motion by a parish priest and facilitated by Mr and Mrs. Considine who had no children. Surely it was the hand of Fate—or angels.

And, yes, Joe Phlegm did come back.

(c) Janice Blake 2011

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Vroom

By janiceblake on May 24th, 2011

In the spring of 1941, when the Wichita got back to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the sailors couldn’t help noticing “there were civilians all over the ship.”

“The scuttlebutt was that the old man had notified the Bureau that the ship was not ready for combat.” (In conversations with Joe, the captain of every ship he ever sailed on was referred to as “the old man.” ) The ship went into dry dock for an overhaul, and the men were put to work scraping the hull. “One day we went to quarters, and the chief says, ‘I need two snipes for the Hawaiian Packet.’ “So I nudged my buddy Mike, who was standing next to me. ‘Mike! Hawaiian Packet! That sounds like a ship without any guns. Let’s grab this. Let’s get off this thing.’ It was obvious we were eventually going to get involved in the war in Europe, and we were on a fighting ship. ‘We’ll take it, Chief!’”

But when Joe and Mike went down to the oil shack, where they were to check out of their department, the orders they were handed were not for the Hawaiian Packet (which had sounded so comfortingly un-warlike). Instead the orders said, “U.S.S. Seattle receiving station, Brooklyn Navy Yard, for further transfer to the U.S.N. Redwood.”

“This wasn’t what we volunteered for,” Joe explained. “So we hightailed it to the chief’s quarters. ‘Hey chief… what’s this?’ We showed him our papers. ‘This isn’t what we—This isn’t it!’

“And the chief says, ‘Well, that’s what you got!’ Typical! Anyways, we had only so much time to get off the ship. We got over on the pier, with our gear, and there’s about twenty other guys, all different rates. We’re all saying, ‘Hey, what is this? What’ve we got here?’ Well, there’s always somebody in a gang that’ll know what the hell is going on. Or he finds out. So one guy says, ‘Here’s the scoop. It’s a ship that’s being built in Cleveland, Ohio, and the shipyard is out on strike. So we’re just going nowhere until that ship is built, and it’s ready to move.’”

Joe chuckles, remembering this bit of great good luck. “Well, this is interesting. So we all go over to the receiving ship. The U.S.S. Seattle was a World War I type cruiser and alongside it was the Camden, another old ship that was once a German sub tender; this old ship had boilers that supplied steam heat for both ships; and these ships bunked fellas that were in transit. We checked in, and a Chief says, ‘Ah, two snipes, huh? Well, you two guys report to the fire room.’ So Mike and I go down the ladder to the fire room and they’re shoveling coal. So I say to Mike, real quick and quiet, ‘Mike, let’s get outta here!’ And the two of us scooted back up the ladder and right off the ship. Nobody had seen us. The guys in that boiler room didn’t even know we were there. And I say, ‘Mike, we don’t want to be shoveling coal in this stupid thing.’” Joe laughs at this recollection. “So we said nothing to nobody. From then on, we just showed up for muster every day, and then took off on our own. No problem.

“Well, it wasn’t too long before we were going to be transferred over to Manhattan to Pier 92—all of us, the entire crew that would be going on that ship being built out in Ohio. We were all shipped over together. Pier 92 was where the Italian liners used to tie up. It was the Italian pier, with pictures of Mussolini all over the waiting room. That’s where we were gonna bunk. We set up cots, and they brought the food over from the Navy Yard.

“We were sent over as an advance party, and this pier is really something. There was a whole row all the way down of overhead doors, for freight. They wanted to winterize the entire structure so they could make it over into a temporary barracks. So they brought in bags and bags of asbestos; we were mixing it up and plastering it on these metal doors. This was actually the raw asbestos. We misted it and plastered it onto the doors. Nobody knew asbestos was bad for your lungs back then.

“Civilians were working on the pier, moving out all the merchandise and furnishings. The civilians that were in charge came looking for a couple of guys to man their incinerator. So of course Mike and I, a couple of firemen, are the logical choice for this job. The civilian guy, an old timer, showed us how to operate this incinerator. And he said, “Now there’s one very important thing. You’ve gotta remember this. He took us around to the back of the boiler, and he says, ‘See this glass? Never let the water get below this point.’ He shows us the indicator. Now that’s very, very important.’ Well, all you had to do was turn a valve and the water would rise up, and the water jacket had the right amount of water in it. Days pass. The civilians are gone, and now we Navy guys are cleaning up the pier, getting rid of all the rubbish. And Mike and I are running the incinerator. Everything is going along fine… until the day that the whole thing was made official. The Navy moved the two ships—the Seattle and the Camden—over from Brooklyn and tied up alongside the pier. Now it’s time for the ship’s company from the Seattle to take over. So this chief comes over to us as Mike and I are preparing the rubbish to go into the incinerator. He says, ‘Okay, you guys, you’re out!’ you know, and points over his shoulder with his thumb.”

“I say ‘Wha—? Why? What do you mean we’re out?’

“He says, ‘I’m takin’ over. I got my own crew. That’s it! You’re out.’ Mike and I haven’t had any problems. We’ve been doing all right. But now, all the guy can say is ‘You’re out. You’re out.’

“‘Well don’t you want to know how the boiler works?’ I asked him.

“I know how the boiler works,” he said.

“’O-kay!’ I said. ‘Let’s go, Mike’”

“But, Joe, don’t you want to tell him about the glass?’ Mike asked.

“I guess he already knows, Mike. We don’t have to tell him anything! Let’s go.” So off Mike and I go. Well, now we’re back to being on our own every day. We’re wandering around.

“And it wasn’t too long—a couple of days—we’re on the pier, and ‘Vroom!’ A big explosion!

“I look at Mike. Mike looks at me, and says, ‘They did it!’ Of course, we moseyed up along with everyone else on the pier who crowded around to see. ‘What happened? What happened?’ everyone is saying. And the City fire trucks are there. There are all kinds of emergency vehicles. The steam from that boiler had been used to heat the waiting room and other buildings along the pier. Now the boiler was blown to bits; the glass had been blown out of all the windows, and there were bricks everywhere.

“Mike and I look at one another and laugh.” It’s six decades later and Joe is still chuckling. “Guess that chief and his crew weren’t as smart as he thought.” Joe concluded. “We fixed that guy’s wagon, didn’t we?”

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The Wichita

By janiceblake on May 24th, 2011

From Newport, Joe’s first posting, in November of 1940, was to the U.S. S. Wichita, a heavy cruiser, part of the Atlantic Squadron.

“When we were brought onto the ship there were only about 50 sailors onboard. And there were berthing compartments that were completely empty. ‘Okay, here are your hooks,’ said the chief who was showing us where to stow our gear. ‘This is where you’re going to sling your hammocks.’ I hope I don’t have to sleep in this,” one guy said. It was the locker for the peak coats. For the first week, I slept in a hammock. It was a case of what compartment they were going to open up next. They were so overwhelmed with new recruits they didn’t know where to put everybody. “At every port, we would take on more sailors: Boston, New York, Hampton, Newport, Norfolk. Boots! They were building up the complement. They were getting ready for war.

“After a week or two, we were assigned to bunks. I had a middle bunk. Right beside it was a battle lamp that was kept on all night. I could take the glass off it and I had enough light to read. So that was a good spot.

“The only downside about the bottom or middle bunk was that when the guy over you climbs up to his bunk, he has to step on yours.”

Within a short while the Wichita had brought on board a solid peacetime crew—probably six or seven hundred men.

“As each group came aboard, the chief would line everybody up and ask who could do this and who could do that. That was the way they decided about assignments.” As Joe’s group went through this sorting process, the chief asked “Any mechanics here? Any of you guys familiar with an automobile?” Joe decided this was his time to speak up. “Yeah,” he said. “I am.”

“I didn’t tell him the only thing I knew about an automobile was how to drive one,” Joe chuckled. “With that I was assigned to B Division, fire room, which was a lot better than being in the engine room. The Wichita had four fire rooms—three steam and one super heater. And so I became a “snipe,” a fire room engineer. My battle station was mid-ship repair, on the main deck, inside. During drills, we would go to our battle stations. Of course, we were drilling all the time.”

Those first few months I was on the Wichita we went on maneuvers constantly. That’s when they would train the gunners; the guys manning the big guns would practice for speed and accuracy.

Of course when you’re down in the fire room, you don’t get to see anything. You don’t know what the hell’s going on. Word would come down from the bridge, ‘Stand by. This is our turn on the target.’ What happened is that a group of ships would be on maneuvers together. They would tow a target somewhere… an old tub they wanted to sink. Then take turns firing at it. So once word comes down that it’s our turn, the Chief says, ‘They’re goin’ to fire the guns. Watch out for flarebacks.’ Well, I had been reading the manual, because I was anxious to make Fireman Second Class, then Fireman First. I didn’t want to stay Fireman Third, you know, because there’s more money when you get promoted.” He laughs. “I wanted to make more money so I read the manual. And when he said ‘Watch out for flarebacks,’ I knew what he was talking about. So I immediately stepped back from the boiler. Then the Chief says, ‘Watch out on the bulkhead for oil leaks. If you see any oil leaks, mark ‘em so they can be taken care of.’ There are oil tanks all around the fire room. They have double bottoms. But still, you have to be sure they don’t leak, or you’re in trouble.

“So when the guns went off, ‘Whewfsh!’ The shells leave the turrets, and the percussion–the power, the air—causes the flames to blow backwards and come out the front of the boilers. Of course, like I said, I stayed back. But the guy on the boiler next to me—there’s two boilers in each fire room—he didn’t get back far enough. His hair got singed.” Joe laughs again. “His eyebrows were singed, his eyelashes, the front of his hair. The flames all came back at him. Just for that instant! Scared the life out of him. They come right back out of the shutters. There are shutters on the front of the boiler. You adjust them depending on how much air you want to go into the boiler. You open the shutters a certain amount to control the intensity of the fire.

The fire room is under pressure. You go through an air lock to get in and out. There are two the boilers and a fireman for each, and in between them is the guy who’s the water tender. He controls the air coming down under the blowers. The more burners you have in each boiler, the more air you need, and the water tender has to watch the steam gauge so you don’t lift the safeties. Say, for example, you carry 450 pounds of steam, and the gauge goes to, say 454, or 455; at that point you’re lifting the safeties, and that’s a no-no. So the water tender has to watch that gauge, and he’ll say two burners or four burners, whatever he needs to keep the pressure right. So you’re opening and closing valves to turn those burners on or off. And you have a peep sight that shows you what color the flame is. ‘Cause in daylight they have a smoke watch up above, and he can tell what fire room is making smoke, and he calls, ‘Knock off the smoke in such-and-such boiler.’ Obviously, you don’t want to make smoke. Smoke is a give-away. They can see smoke on the horizon. That’s bad. So you had to be on your toes. You couldn’t goof off.

But there were some perks to the fireman’s jobs. On the 4 to 8 watch, for example—you go on watch every time it gets to be 4 o’clock—four o’clock in the morning, four o’clock in the afternoon. So on the morning watch, you get up at four and go down to the fire room, and the first thing you do is put on a pot of coffee. That first pot of coffee goes up to the butcher shop ‘cause the butchers can’t stop to make coffee. They’re getting the meat ready for the day. So one of the firemen brings the coffee up to the butcher shop. You get up there, and the butcher says, ‘Okay, whaddaya want?’ You say, ‘Well, I’d like some eggs, and some ham or some bacon.’ And he gives you a little ration. You go back to the fire room, and in the rag locker (there’s a locker full of rags, to wipe up the oil), there’s a hotplate and whatever chow you’ve stashed away. So somebody gets out the hotplate and cooks up the bacon or ham and eggs for the guys on that four to eight watch. That was routine. Little things like that. They helped you survive.”

It was my first Christmas away from home, the Christmas of 1940. We were tied up in Norfolk, Virginia. I saw a sailor from the Wasp, and I knew Jim Smith, a guy from home, was an ensign on the Wasp. Jim Smith had graduated from Annapolis, and his backyard backed up to that of another Annapolis graduate, Randall Boyd. (Coincidentally, Joe ran into both these hometown guys in the course of his tour in the Atlantic.) Well I asked this sailor from the Wasp where his ship was tied up. He told me. I had to take the ferry over to Portsmouth. And I found the Wasp and climbed aboard. I hadn’t seen Jim Smith in, I don’t know how long—probably not since he went off to Annapolis. Well, everything was very formal on this big carrier. You go aboard you salute the colors. Then you salute the quarterdeck and say, ‘Request permission to come aboard, sir.’

‘What is your mission?’

‘I would like to see Ensign Smith.’ Well, he looked at me like I had a hole in my head.

‘We have several Ensign Smiths,’ he said. I could tell he didn’t want to help me out at all. He saw my single red stripe. I was just a fireman. You couldn’t be any lower; it’s equivalent to a buck private in the Army.

‘This would be Ensign James Hilton Smith,’ I said. Well, this changed his attitude right away.

He says to a runner, ‘Go down and tell Ensign Smith he has a visitor.’

The runner comes back and says, ‘Send him down.’

Well, the clown says, ‘Okay you can go down.’ Now it’s my turn to look at him with disgust. How the heck would I know where to find somebody on this huge ship? The Wasp is a huge carrier. The biggest and the best we had.

After a pause, he says to the runner. ‘Take him down.’ So down I go.

Well an Ensign on a carrier was the lowest ranking officer. You couldn’t get any lower. Smitty was in his bunk. He was in his skivvies. Of course, there were two in the compartment. I knew as soon as I walked in and saw him he was not happy. I could see he didn’t like this ship at all. He told me he was attached to the bridge division. ‘But I have put in tor flight training, and I think I’ll get it.’ Eventually, I heard he did get flight training, and he flew a PBY—a flying boat. It was armed, and it could land on water, and take off again. I know he picked up a downed pilot. But I never did see him after that visit on the Wasp. I do know they named a room up in the high school after him.”

In January of 1941, they cut our maneuvers short and put an Admiral on our ship. At that point we were no longer the Atlantic Squadron; we became the Atlantic fleet. Our ship was built for an admiral; it had an admiral’s bridge. Once we got the admiral we had a band on Saturday nights there would be a concert on the fantail. Sometime they would play jazz. And sometime they played military music. There were movies on the fantail, too.  The Wichita was better equipped than the others in the Fleet. One time I was coming off watch and I went on deck and counted; there were seventeen ships in our convoy; a couple of old destroyers, the Tuscaloosa, The Vincennes. But they didn’t have the scout planes. We had a couple of catapults and two seaplanes, and another in pieces in the hanger deck.

I almost came face-to-face with the admiral once. But luckily I escaped. When I went off watch the routine was I’d take a shower and wash my clothes; I’d wash my clothes in a bucket, and then go back to the fire room to hang them up, on the pipes over the boiler to dry.

Anyway, I’m going down. All I have on is my skivvies. I hang up my clothes and look up into the airlock. All I could see was gold braid. Well, I quick turned around and came back down to warn the guys, “The admiral’s coming down. He’s in the airlock. Then I hightailed it back up the other way.

The Wichita had been a WPA project. The funds to build it had come from the Work Progress Administration, not from the War Department. Building the ship was a way to get people working. It was built in the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Its home port was the Brooklyn Navy Yard nearly in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge.

As Joe understood it, the Wichita’s mission was to patrol American waters within the 200-mile limit off the Eastern seaboard, which was recognized by international treaty as being U.S. waters. At this point, the war was on in Europe. “The Germans were raising hell over there,” Joe said, “And we were supposedly neutral.” But being neutral, Joe soon discovered, did not mean being uninvolved. “One day we got to battle stations,” Joe said. “All the hatches were battened down. I looked around, and there were no officers around. I was really rough. I was able to reach, spin the wheel, and open the hatch. I stuck my head out. And I saw huge freighters. ‘Those bastards,’ I thought. “We’re supposed to be patrolling neutral waters, but we’re really escorting freighters!”

The sailors quickly realized the importance of what they were doing. In the summer of 1940 the freighters being escorted by U.S. Navy warships were carrying desperately needed supplies to England. “We would escort them through U.S. waters until they reached Canadian waters,” Joe said. “From there, the Canadian Navy would escort them.” Yet the escorts were no guarantee of safe passage. German wolf packs were stealthy and aggressive; they sank far more merchant ships along the East Coast than the U.S. public was ever aware of. “We saw a Destroyer go down,” Joe said. “A German sub sank it. But the public never knew. The government squelched the story. They even got caught trying to land some spies on the coast of Maine.”

“When we got back to New York, we went to quarters as the ship came into the Harbor. We always did that. The sailors line up along the deck. Well, as we are going in the chief says, ‘Listen you guys. When you get over on the beach, you don’t tell nobody where you been or what you saw.’”

One night when we were in port, I had the gangway watch, and this guy came aboard. He was drunk. ‘Give me that 45,’ he says to me. ‘I want to low my brains out.’ The OD hears him and come down. Of course I told him he couldn’t have the 45. He says, “Okay, then I’ll jump overboard,’ and heads for the fantail. The OD says to me, ‘Stop that man,’ I said, ‘Let the sonofabitch jump!’ I wasn’t going to tangle with him. Well, the officer went and got the guy. I stood by wondering if I was going to get into trouble. After all I had disobeyed a direct order. But nothing ever came of it.

The Navy was not integrated during the war. The only black guys aboard were the officers’ stewards; they were northern Negroes. We had a couple of southerners aboard who weren’t too nice to them. One time we went into Saint Thomas and the stewards we had decided to swap with Navy steward who were Saint Thomas natives. But they weren’t happy at all. They found things worse down there than they had been on the ship. Eventually, they switched back.

We had a guy on the ship who had been on the Panay gunboat in China on the Yangtze River. We called him ‘Panay Lander.’ The Japs had strafed the Panay. It was an international incident. The Panay was part of the Asiatic fleet. That’s where all those guys got the tattoos. China. One guy had Mount Fuji on his back. Another had a battleship on his chest. You’d see this in the shower. There was one guy who had a naked lady on his arm. He wanted to re-enlist (this was back in ’40 or ’41 before the war started. He went for his reenlistment physical but the doctor wouldn’t pass him because of the naked lady on his arm. ‘I can’t send you home to your mother with a naked lady on your arm,’ the doctor said. The guy was all upset. ‘What am I supposed to do?’ he asked. The doctor had no answer, but his buddies did. ‘Well, you could have some clothes put on her.’ So that’s what he did. The first chance he got, he went and had some clothes put on her. I think he converted her from a naked lady to a hula girl. I guess that was okay with the doctor because they let him re-enlist.

(c) 2011 Janice Blake

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Six Years and Counting

By janiceblake on May 24th, 2011

Joe took the train into Boston and made his way to the Navy’s recruiting office. It was the first or second day of June, 1940. Before going inside he stood out on the sidewalk for some long moments, mulling his options. Memorial Day was over. May was over. November and the draft were just six months away. And the war news was getting worse. Hitler had been on thee move for three years now. 1938. 1939. And now it was only halfway through 1940.  Germany had invaded Denmark and Norway in April. In the past few weeks Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and the France had fallen. And now, just this past weekend, the papers were saying that thousands of British and French forces were trapped on the very edge of the French coast. Two or three hundred thousand. They were sitting ducks.

“Everyone knew that sooner or later we were going to get dragged into it,” Joe recalled. “I figured, gee, if I join the Navy, at least I’ll have a place to sleep and food to eat. I won’t be stuck in a muddy foxhole.”

So he went inside. “I took the physical and they signed me up,” he said. “They told me they would notify me when and where to report. It was June, and I didn’t get called to go until August. They were only taking about twenty guys a week out of the Boston office. And there were plenty of guys trying to get in.

“That night, I didn’t go home. I knew Ma would kill me.” Instead he took the trolley out to Brighton where he would spend the night with George and Sadie. From that safe distance he called his mother and told her what he had done.

On August 26, 1940, Joe reported to the Navy Base in Boston where, along with his fellow recruits he took the oath of enlistment. “Now what you’re doing here is enlisting in the United States Navy for six years,” explained the chief who would be administering the oath. “Any questions?”

Joe couldn’t resist, “Do you have anything for less than six years?”

“No, that’s it,” the chief said. “You don’t want it, somebody else does.” The message was clear. Times were tough. Joining the Navy The Navy meant the security of food clothing, a place to sleep, and a reliable monthly paycheck (small though it was). The ranks would not be hard to fill. They all “took” it.

Joe was sent to Newport, Rhode Island, for boot camp,  a place that was familiar from his days at Fort Adams where he had spent his second Citizens Military Training Camp summer.

He found that his CMTC training stood him in good stead. Most of the time he knew what he was doing, and the chiefs in charge of drilling the men noticed he seemed always eager to look sharp.

Training was speeded up and the duration of boot camp was shortened. “The powers that be knew war was coming,” Joe said. “They wanted to man new ships as fast as they were launching them.” In fact, while I was there, in Newport, they were starting ot built wooden barracks. They had never had wooden barracks at the Newport Naval Base before. They were all brick buildings; that’s what I was housed in. When I saw the wooden barracks going up, I didn’t give it much thought at the time. But looking back I realized that’s what it was. They were getting ready.

Joe received his commission aboard the U.S. S. Constellation, sister ship to the U.S. S. Constitution, “Old Ironsides,” the legendary ship which the children of the Nevin School had once donated their pennies to save. But he wasn’t shipped out right away. “They kept me behind to help train new troops,” he said, crediting his CMTC experience for being singled out. “I knew how to handle a Springfield rifle. I knew all the commands. So the chief had me drill the new guys. Only Joe and one other sailor, a former Marine, were kept back in this way. Joe believes that staying in Newport those extra few weeks might very well have saved his life. “All the rest of the guys who went through boot camp when I did were sent to the Pacific. When I was discharged in Charleston six years later, I ran into some of those guys, and I asked about the others. A lot of them never came back. I was very fortunate.”

(c) 2011 Janice Blake

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Out of Work

By janiceblake on April 13th, 2011

When Joe—reluctantly—quit his job at the A&P, he joined the ranks of millions like him: smart, personable, eager and willing young men who wanted to work but could not find employment. For his entire life, Joe had heard his mother moan from time, “Oh, if I only had an education!” (The Flynn children never knew exactly how much—or how little—education Ma actually had. They knew that she had been taken out of school to help support the family; they speculated that she had completed perhaps fifth grade.) To Ma and Pa, allowing their children to stay in school until they graduated from High School was a mark of parental generosity that today would matched perhaps by those who paid tuition and fully supported their children through four years of college.  Having seen their second son earn his diploma, they had fully expected that Joe, like George, would have a job with the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company for as long as he wanted it. Then, like George, Joe could take the Post Office exam and land a Civil Service job that would guarantee lifetime employment and a pension, too. Joe did, in fact, take the Post Office exam in 1936; he scored well. But the Post Office, like every other potential employer, had long lists of other qualified young men who had been waiting for jobs longer than he had. Much longer.

Reality was reality. The Depression had been restricting, or completely eliminating opportunities for more than six years. Things were better than they had been two or three years earlier. But not much better. The prospect of getting hired for a permanent full-time job with a regular paycheck was just about non-existent.  There was only one possibility that Joe could think of: Uncle Michael. Mary had been able to get a job with the Telephone Company. Maybe he could, too. Men weren’t working as operators anymore. As the installation of home telephones became widespread and the need for operators grew, it was a lot less expensive to hire women instead of men. Women didn’t need lifetime jobs; they were required to leave once they got married; so turnover was high; and there was always a steady crop of new, younger girls waiting to take the places of those who left. Which meant the new girls could be started out back at the bottom of the pay scale, and costs could be kept down. No. Joe wasn’t looking to be an operator. But maybe he could be one of the guys who put up the poles and strung the wires. That was a job that he could do. Joe made a plan.

He called Uncle Michael’s office and spoke to his secretary. Got a date and time to see his uncle. Then, on the appointed day dressed himself up in his best pants, put on a good white shirt and tie and headed down to the Telephone building at Weymouth Landing. But Uncle Michael turned out to be no more helpful than a perfect stranger. Maybe less so. “I’m sorry, Joe,” he said. He sat there behind his massive mahogany desk in his dark gabardine suit, pulled his gold watch out of the pocket on his vest, glanced at, then looked back up. “I can’t help you. We hire only college graduates be linemen.” (As though you need a college diploma to dig a ditch and climb up a pole, Joe thought.) “You’re simply not qualified.” Uncle Michael stood up. Joe stood up. They shook hands. Michael walked Joe to the door, opened it, and clapped Joe on the shoulder as he left. “Say hello to your parents for me now, Joe,” Michael was all affability. Joe was furious. He couldn’t believe that Uncle Michael had no way of making an exception to the rules if he really wanted to. It wasn’t as though he had a son of his own he needed to save a job for. Why couldn’t he help out his own brother’s son? He could, if he wanted to. Joe thought. He’s the boss, after all. Well, if that was the kind of guy he was, Joe didn’t want to work for him anyway. He would find something else!

But something else was not easy to find. The best to be hoped for was a day’s work here and there. And the best place to luck into a decent day’s pay (or even half day’s pay, for that matter) was the railroad yard in South Boston. There, dozens, if not hundreds, of young men gathered early every morning hoping for a chance to do the heavy, often back-breaking work of unloading freight cars. Joe would get himself into Boston early, taking the train from the depot in South Weymouth, or maybe driving in with a couple of buddies. As it turned out, Joe had better chances than most guys of heading home with a few dollars in his pocket. Not because he was more likely than the others to be singled out by the railroad freight supervisor. But becasue Mary’s future husband, Ray, was the foreman over at the warehouse for Gilchrist Department Store, several blocks away. Back then department stores maintained their own fleets of trucks and made home deliveries every day. Ray had a crew of drivers and helpers who had been with the company for years. With times being as tight as they were, he didn’t have the budget to add any full-time workers. But there were days when he might need an extra man on a truck, and when he did, he would walk over to the railroad yard and look for Joe. Needless to say, the contrast wasn’t lost on Joe: his future brother-in-law knew a lot more about looking out for your own than did his Uncle Michael.

Joe liked Ray Marad. Though Ma and Pa heartily disapproved. Theie reasons had nothing to do with the kind of man Ray was. In fact, he was a very good man—smart, courteous, generous, hard-working, good-looking, and—quite obviously—crazy about Mary. But his flaws, to Ma and Pa, were obvious, and not ones that could be overlooked or overcome (after all, Ma and Pa were products of their culture and their upbringing): first of all, he was not Irish; more to the point, he was not Catholic; worse, he was, if not a foreigner himself, then the son of foreigners who barely spoke English; worse still they were immigrants not from Europe, not even southern Europe like Italy or Greece, which would be bad enough; he was from Syria, a truly foreign place; and worst of all, as mentioned before, he was “dark.” (Ironic, this irrational terror of dark pigmentation, as Ma, herself, had the black-brown eyes that suggested she very likely had some strains Moorish blood, a heritage of the Spanish invasion of the Emerald isle that resulted in many of those in the coastal counties being labeled black-Irish.)

At any rate, over the latter months of 1938, Mary and Ray continued to date; and in February of 1939 they were married. Their wedding was definitely not a family celebration. In fact, nobody from the family was present. Ma and Pa refused to attend, nor did any of Mary’s siblings. In order to be married in the Catholic Church, which was very important to Mary, Ray, who had been raised a Syrian Orthodox, converted to Catholicism. Even so, because he was, apparently, not considered a “real” Catholic, they were not allowed to marry in the Church, itself. The ceremony took place in the rectory. Not being a story-teller like her brother Joe, Mary never did discuss who was present, what the newlyweds did afterwards to celebrate, and whether or not they had a honeymoon. It was not a topic to be discussed.

Ma and Pa reluctantly, and in spite of themselves, came to appreciate Ray and in fact, took great pride in his growing fame as “the premier weekend golfer of Massachusetts” (according to the Boston Globe). Back in the 1930s, when professional golf was in its infancy, talented amateurs were far better known than they are today; their feats were well publicized and the top “weekend golfers” often drew small galleries of curious and faithful followers, just as the professional golfers did. Pa, as we have seen, greatly enjoyed being an eye witness to Ray’s triumphs on the golf course. (Ma, in contrast, retained a healthy distrust of this man whom she would never consider truly worthy of her beautiful second daughter, though between Ma and her son-in-law, over the years, there grew a grudging mutual respect and, as well as an unacknowledged inside joke that their coolness to one another was mostly just a stubborn sham.) In February of 1940, just nine days shy of their first wedding anniversary, Ray came as close as he would to fully redeeming himself in the eyes of his in-laws when (with very little effort on his part), Mary gave birth to a little girl: Mary Anne, named for Ma (as Mary would have been, if not for the treachery of Aunt Agnes). Through all those months, Ray continued to look out for Joe, finding work for him as best he could.

Joe continued to pick up a day’s pay where and when he could. And when he couldn’t, he was in good company. Most of his buddies were in the same sad and sorry boat.  But not being able to find a job did not mean that these young men were unable to find things to do though some examples stretch credibility. Even through the prism of seven decades it’s difficult to imagine that young men in their early- to mid-twenties would spend their time in an ice cream parlor. Yet that’s where Joe and many of his friends could be often found on weekday evenings. For the price of an ice cream sundae or a cream soda they could gather around a small marble topped tables and shoot the breeze for as long as they wanted.  Having come of age in the era of Prohibition, they had no frame of reference for men of good families hanging out in bar rooms. And certainly—not that there was an overabundance of taverns in South Weymouth, Massachusetts. Besides, a place that sold alcohol was not a place where they could expect to encounter the kind of respectable good Catholic girls they were all—truth be told—interested in meeting. No. The ice cream shop would do just fine for them.

An even better place to meet girls was the roller skating rink in Boston. Opened in 1932, just a few blocks away from the triple-decker where Joe had spent his early years, it was a gathering place for young people from all over the city and suburbs of Boston. As a boy, Joe had learned to ice skate on the field opposite Odd Fellows Hall that was allowed to flood and freeze in winter-time. (Just a few blocks from home, at the edge of Columbian Square, the site is the parking lot for a shopping mall now.)  Translating his skating skill to wheels instead of a blade turned out to be a simple matter. Like the ice cream shop, the advantage of the indoor roller rink, the attraction that made it worth the twenty-five minute drive from South Weymouth and the cost of entry fee and skate rental was—of course—girls. Sometimes Joe would take the family car and when he did, “Well, once a girl knew you had a car, of course she wanted a ride home.” Joe met several girls at the skating rink, and actually dated a couple—pretty, bright girls, from nice families. But the girl he remembered most vividly was one he never did end up asking out on a date. They were probably both too embarrassed. “We were skating around,” he said, “you know how it is at those rinks, you just go around and a round in a circle. Well, this girl was just learning, she wasn’t too steady on her feet. I helped her out by holding her hand and we went around a couple of times. I thought she pretty much had the hang of it, so I told her I was going to let go of her hand. I told her to skate along and I’d stay behind her, in case she fell. Well, wouldn’t you know, she did lose her balance. She just started waving her arms around and then she started falling backwards. I had to catch her of course. And I did. But my hands ended up. . .” he laughed, blushed, shook his head, “you know, my hands landed on her well. . . where they shouldn’t have been. Well, I set her on her feet just as fast as I could, and I don’t know what I said to her. But I’ll tell you one thing: that was the last time I ever offered to teach a girl how to skate!”

With the opening of Suffolk Downs in 1935, thoroughbred racing and pari-mutuel betting came to Boston. Joe (unlike Ma) was not much for gambling, especially, with a cash flow that was never very dependable. But he always looked at gambling opportunities in a philosophical way, saying, “You can’t win if you don’t have a ticket!” Plus, he was always game to see something new. And so were his friends. It was probably the excitement surrounding the running of the third Massachusetts Handicap in 1937 that caught their attention—a crowd of over 40,000 packed themselves into the racecourse to see the phenomenal Seabiscuit win in record-setting time. They had missed that one, but there were more races in the offing. The next horse to captivate the attention of Boston fans was one that thousands wanted to see not because of the races he had won (or might win) but because of who his owner was: Bing Crosby. Joe and his friend, Tom McGrath, decided not to miss this race, so they headed for Suffolk Downs and joined the throng in the infield. “We got there early, but even so there were lots of guys there ahead of us; they had already staked out all the spots along the rail. Well, we finally got ourselves behind one of these guys. What a clown. He was already right up front but that wasn’t good enough for him. He had brought along a stepstool. Well, the horse’s ass! He already had a front row spot; why did he need to stand on a stool and block everyone else’s view? Well, I gave Tom the eye; I looked at the back of the guy’s head, looked down at the step stool; looked back at Tom. He nodded. I nodded. The race started. As the horses were coming around the bend, Tom and I, both of us, at the exact same time, reached down, snatched the stepstools out from under that guy. And whoosht! He was out of our way. Tom and I, just elbowed our way past him and stood there at the rail and got a darned good look at Bing Crosby’s horse. Did the horse win? You know, I don’t even remember.”

Clem Broderick, was a bellhop at the Parker House in Boston. With a steady job plus tips, he was best off of all Joe’s friends, and the only one with a car. So it was that in the summer of 1939, when they hatched a plan to take in the New York World’s Fair, they had to schedule their excursion for a time when Clem would have a day or two off. With all the boys pooling their quarters, it didn’t take much to fill the tank of Clem’s car, as each “two bits” could purchase about a gallon and a half of gas. (In fact, it was common to pull into a gas station during the Depression, Joe said, and ask for just a quarter’s worth of gas.)

Although this turned out to be a memorable adventure, Joe never talked about what he and his buddies actually saw or did at the Fair.  It was an amazing event. They had the opportunity to view Vermeer’s masterwork The Milkmaid on loan from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, an original copy of the Magna Carta, more than seven hundred years old (it was sent from Lincoln Cathedral in England and after the Faire closed was kept at Fort Knox for safety’s sake throughout World War II), as well as works by Davinci, Michelangelo,  Rembrandt, and  Caravaggio. But they probably didn’t. More likely, they spent their time “rubbernecking” (something Joe loved to do) at the trained orangutan, performing elephants, and 80 foot “monkey mountain” (made up of 600 monkeys) in Frank Buck’s Jungleland, perhaps riding the amazing moving stairway into the all-white Perisphere (a landmark of the Fair, along with the 700-foot Trylon tower) with its model city of tomorrow that could be viewed from a moving walkway high above the floor. They were probably drawn to the Transportation pavilions especially General Motor’s Futurama exhibit that carried fairgoers in moving seats above a monumental diorama, The Ford Pavilion where race cars ran continuously on a figure eight track on the roof, the railroad exhibit where The Pennsylvania Railroad’s S1 engine was mounted on rollers so it could remain stationary while running continuously at 60 mph and where the sleek bullet-shaped Duchess of Hamilton locomotive was on display. They probably sought out some of the new technologies that were introduced at the Fair–fluorescent lighting, air conditioning, robots, synthetic voices, and television. They might have seen IBM’s display of an electric typewriter and an electric calculator that used punch cards, or Continental Baking exhibit in a building shaped like something that would one day become instantly recognizable—a giant loaf of Wonder Bread—where an automated and continuous process of baking bread was on display (next door was a field of wheat that actually provided some of the raw material; a sign in the field noted that this was the first time in a century that wheat had been grown within the boundaries of New York City.

Chances are that Joe and his buddies may have seen a few of these sights. Most likely, however they gravitated to the Amusements Area with its roller coaster, the Life Savers parachute jump (still standing in Coney Island) and carnival acts.  Being good Catholic boys they may have skipped the scantily clad Frozen Alive Girl, the Dream of Venus Building, and Living Pictures (which were raided by the New York Vice Squad on several occasions). Let’s hope they steered clear of the Lama Temple girlie show (even though it was approved by Good Housekeeping)! A better choice, would have been the Bill Rose Aquacade, forerunner to Hollywood’s popular musical extravaganzas. But surprisingly, having certainly seen at least a few of these wonders, Joe never talked about any of them. Instead, whenever the topic of the 1939 World’s Fair came up, he would recall that before heading home, they stopped in Astoria, just a few miles away from the Fair grounds, so John Leahy could visit to his sister Anne. Anne was married to Eddie Bartels, and they lived in the downstairs apartment of a very nice brick two-family home with a view of the East River and Manhattan Island. Eddie’s sister and widowed father lived upstairs. But Joe was not interested in any of those details at the time. In fact, there was a group of girls sitting on the front stoop of the house while John was inside. But the boys in the car paid no attention to them at all. They never even got out of the car. And when John—finally—came back to the car, they drove away without a second glance. It never occurred to Joe that over the next six years, that house and its occupants, well, one occupant in particular, would become the center of his life.

In the latter months of the Depression, Joe learned that when there was no other work to be found, it was always possible to get work at the Town Cemetery. Joining a crew for Memorial Day, that was no problem. Hauling away fallen branches, clearing the beds and planting flowers. Those were tasks he actually enjoyed. Hadn’t he been helping with the yard work and garden at home (and at Church) all his life? But the rest of it, that was grim work. Yet Joe had taken a shovel and dug a grave for a few hours’ pay on more than one occasion. It wasn’t work he liked to do, but he would do it if he had to. And so it was that in the summer of 1940, Joe found himself, once again, working at the cemetery. Like every other young man of his time and place, Joe knew by now that there was more trouble hanging over his head than just the fact that work was hard to find. The war in Europe was getting uglier by the day, and there were plenty of people who thought America should jump in. The British were putting up a damned good fight, the only ones left in the fight now that the French, like all the others, had been trampled into submission by Hitler’s Army’s. If the Germans managed to beat down the British, wouldn’t they try to take over America next? And wasn’t fighting Hitler simply the right thing to do? Some argued yes. Some argued no. Joe didn’t spend a lot of time pondering the politics of the whole situation. He just knew that if war came, he was going to have to go fight it. The draft was coming. (Congress had passed the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 on July first by a margin of just one vote. Once President Roosevelt signed the bill, all men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-six would be required to register for the draft.) Joe at twenty-five years old, six feet one inch tall, one hundred and eighty pounds, and healthy as a horse—well, he would be one of the first to go. He knew this. And he thought about it on a sweltering mid-summer day as he thrust his spade into stony clay. He remembered Uncle Leighton’s brief description of life in the trenches during the last war. Even if you weren’t being shot at or gassed, you were living, eating and sleeping in a mud hole. And even the eating part was questionable if the rations ran out. That was the Army. As for the Marines? Well, they were the heroes, the strongest, the fiercest, the bravest of the brave. But Joe, although no coward, was not a fighter by nature. He had no desire to be a hero. He had no qualms about serving his country, doing his duty, going to war like everyone else, but he would like to survive it if he could. What about the Navy? Well, you were guaranteed a bed to sleep in; there would be chow. If your boat got sunk, well, you would be goner. But it would probably be a less gruesome way to go than any of the alternatives. As he thought about his options, Joe kept digging. He was well down into the four by eight foot rectangle he was digging, tossing each shovelful of rocky soil onto the heap that was now nearly above him. The day was hot; his shirt was soaked. “Hmph!” he said to himself with disgust. I guess this is what it would be like to “dig in” on a battlefield. Except there would be bullets (or worse) flying at you and all around you. It occurred to him that being an infantryman could easily put him in the situation of digging his own grave. And an infantryman is what he no doubt would be if he ended up getting drafted. Joe finished shoveling. He had done a good job. He tossed his spade up onto the green grass alongside the open grave, then hauled himself out, lugged his gear back to the foreman’s shed and put it away. As he pocketed his day’s pay, he knew that he would not be coming back to do this again. The next day. Or ever. He  had made a decision. He was going to join the Navy.

(c) Janice Blake 2011

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Witness to History

By janiceblake on April 4th, 2011

A man who is destined to live to a very old age will inevitably be a witness to history. While he may never be at the center of the world’s stage, he will, just by being where he is, when he is, absorb the values, the traditions, the culture, and the lore of his community. And he will, just by living his life, experience the gradual changes that take place day-to-day over the course of eight or nine decades, changes that may seem mildly surprising as they occur one by one, but collectively and in retrospect turn out to have been simply amazing. If he is aware and interested, he will be stunned, captivated, thrilled, outraged, and heartbroken, in turn, by the cataclysmic occurrences—sensational, remarkable, or tragic—that rivet public attention during his lifetime. If he is curious and adventurous, he will seek out noteworthy people and events. And if he simply happens to be in a certain place at a certain time, whether he wishes it or not, he will find himself an eyewitness to history. And so Joe Flynn, who indeed turned out to be blessed with long life, found himself witnessing history on more than one occasion, and also on more than one occasion, history found him.

The Flu Epidemic of 1918, the Boston Police Strike of 1921—each held a place in Joe’s memory, etched by vivid images from very early childhood: Ma tying a string of garlic around the his neck, the motherless baby sitting on Ma’s lap at dinnertime, the policeman walking the beat in front of the Morton Street house accompanied by a solider carrying a rifle. Probably, it was hearing these events talked about from time to time that inspired Joe to dredge up these few related memory-pictures, dust them off, bring them into sharper focus perhaps, and file them away in a place labeled “important.” In contrast, knowledge of significant facts related to early Weymouth history seemed to seep into Joe’s consciousness unbidden, through a process so thoroughly natural that it required no awareness of effort on his part. One day he didn’t know, and then one day he just knew: that Abigail Adams, wife to one U.S. President and mother to another, probably one of the most significant women of the Revolution and early Republic, was born in Weymouth, and that her house still stands near its original location, just a few miles from Joe’s own; that during the century before he was born, the town’s economy had gradually shifted from farming to the manufacture of shoes; that Booker T. Washington once lived in a house on Columbian Street not far from the hospital; and that men from Weymouth had proudly served their country, many sacrificing life and limb, in two major cataclysms: the Civil War and World War I.

Throughout his boyhood, sometime during the last week of May each year, Joe, along with all the other students from the Nevin School, would march solemnly and silently, two-by-two just a short distance down Columbian Street to the Fogg Opera House, for a Memorial Day Assembly. There, on the stage, would be seated a number of the town’s Civil War Veterans. The program varied slightly from year to year, but in essence they were all the same: a long series of proclamations, recitations, declamations, interspersed with performances by the sixth grade chorus, the school orchestra, and vocal solos by students chosen for their elevated status in the eyes of their teachers, if not for their mellifluous voices—and finally, floral presentations to the illustrious members of the Grand Army of the Republic. If most of those attending were like Joe, they thought the old soldiers deserved medals more for sitting through these interminable afternoon assemblies than for risking their lives in battle. Yet long after the recitations, the music, and the ceremonial flag waving were (thankfully) forgotten, what remained was the image of those solemn, dignified old men, sitting on the stage, demonstrating by their very presence that patriotism was a the highest expression of personal honor, that service to country was an unquestioned duty, and that being a veteran meant being the recipient of glory and gratitude forever. A subtext, of course, was that survival was nothing more than the luck of the draw.  But this was never acknowledged. Joe’s attendance at those programs at the Opera House meant that the presence of those veterans of Gettysburg, and Antietam, and Malvern Hill—proud, dignified, tragic and triumphant—remained vibrant, in living memory, well into the twenty-first century.

By the mid-1920s, New England’s towns had changed dramatically from Colonial times. And Weymouth was no exception. Farming and fishing, shipping and ship building had gradually given way to manufacturing and merchandising, banking and business. One by one, farms were disappearing, transformed, in short order, into suburban neighborhoods. A grid of paved streets and empty house lots would be laddered across a pasture or through an orchard seemingly overnight. Then one after the other, in random sequence the house lots would sprout craftsmen style bungalows, pseudo-farmhouses with wide front porches, turreted Victorians with gingerbread fretwork, Colonial revival “garrisons” and “Capes.” Yet the transition was gradual and slow. On Central Street, when the Flynns first moved into the neighborhood, there were still working farms nearby. Mr. Cruddup maintained fields of corn on his property that ran from the Flynns’ house all the way down to Union. Mr. Smith still had apple orchards. In the opposite direction, up toward Columbian Square Mr. Billings maintained a vast truck farm where he grew acres of vegetables. The Flynns house was one of many homes around town that had begun life in the early decades after the Revolution as a simple, stark and sensible farmhouse. These humble yet proud 19th Century structures were not difficult to recognize with their foundations built of fieldstones or granite blocks, straight unadorned lines, and clapboarded siding (usually painted white). Relatively few still retained the significant acreages that had sustained the families who owned them had depended on for their sustenance. Fewer still retained the companion barns and outbuildings that had defined them as working farms. Of the few barns that remained attached or adjacent to these old houses, only a few still housed horses or cows. Yet they survived.

Just up on Central Street, Mr. Bolt still kept cows. Not dozens of cows, like Moore’s, with the big dairy farm over on Pleasant Street. Moore’s dairy had a several trucks that delivered milk all over town. The Moore Dairy truck, always (except in deep winter) trailing the water of melting ice, stopped at the Flynns’ twice a week, to drop off several quarts of milk and pick up empty bottles. Mr. Bolt had only a few cows; he kept the milk and cream he needed for his family and sold what was extra to several of his neighbors.  The Bolts even still made their own butter. It was perhaps the second summer after moving that Joe one afternoon found himself alone, standing in the doorway of the Bolt barn; he could hear over in the cowshed the murmuring of a man’s voice, the protesting lowing response of the cow, the clattering of restless hooves on heavy old oak floors, the clinking of a pail, silence for a moment or two, and then an unfamiliar metallic swish-swish-swish repeated and then changing, variations on a theme, a rhythmic, semi-musical sound, completely unfamiliar. Joe stepped forward, curious. Almost without knowing he was doing so, he kept moving deeper and deeper into the barn until he found himself standing in the doorway to the cow shed. Sensing his presence more than actually seeing him or hearing him, Mr. Bolt looked around, paused, then smiled. “Come on in, boy,” he invited. “I’m just finishing up here, milking old Bess.” He stood. Mr. Bolt was a tall man, much taller than Pa. Yet he looked almost small next to the cow, whose back came up almost to the top of the bib on his overalls. “Still have to milk Molly, though,” Mr. Bolt said. “Want to see how it’s done?” Joe nodded solemnly. Mr. Bolt bent down, and picked up the pail by its handle. Joe could see that it was nearly full, a froth of foam covering the surface. “Wait here,” Mr. Bolt commanded. He disappeared down the walkway that ran behind the row of stanchions, past the tails of five or six other cows. There was a sloshing as he poured the fresh milk into a storage can, a clanking and splashing as he rinsed his pail at the spigot, and then he was back. With his free hand he lifted his milking stool from Bess’s side and set it down firmly next to Molly.  Then he sat himself down firmly. Speaking softly to Molly he washed her down, then patted her side, “Good girl, Molly. Good girl. How are you doing today? What do you have for me?” Joe was unfamiliar with the structure and technology of udders and teats, but clearly Mr. Bolt was not. With skilled and practiced hands he got the milk-song going again, jets of white liquid screech, screech, screeching against the side of the pail and then softening its tone to squishings and gurglings as the pail slowly filled. Joe was mesmerized. He stood motionless and stared, mouth half open. Until with a sudden turn of his wrist, Mr. Bolt redirected the flow of Molly’s milk, and Joe was stunned to feel a splash and spray of wetness on his cheek, and neck, and shoulder, and the front of his shirt. His eyes met Mr. Bolt’s. He laughed. Mr. Bolt laughed. And then he turned and ran straight home. “You won’t believe what just happened,” he jabbered excitedly to Ma. “Mr. Bolt shot me with the cow’s milk!” He pulled at the front of his shirt to show Ma the wet spot. “Look!” he commanded. “See that wet spot. It’s milk from the cow.” He looked up at her earnestly and there was wonder on his face. “And you know what?” He paused. “What?” asked Ma. “It was warm.”

Of course there was the pig farm up at the end of Union Street. As farming towns turned into suburbs, a pig farm was something of a necessity. How else to dispose of the food scraps produced by so many families who didn’t farm? In Weymouth, as in most other towns, the man who owned the pig farm also maintained a contract with the town to pick up garbage, from the covered pails with their hinged step-on lids submerged in the ground next at the base of the back steps that led to each kitchen door.  Throughout the week, on days designated for each neighborhood, the crew hired by the pig farmer drove through town in their stinky “garbage trucks,” leapt over stone walls and vaulted low fences, barrels balanced on their shoulders as they transferred the contents of all those garbage pails to the belly of the garbage truck. From there the discarded table scraps, potato peelings, eggshells, apple cores and coffee grounds, a messy mush that smelled like, well, rotting garbage to humans but (apparently) ambrosia to swine, would be doled out to the residents of the pig farm. This sensible cycle resulted, eventually, in pork chops and bacon at local butcher shops and satisfactorily emptied garbage cans all over town.

For the Flynn boys (but not the girls), there were opportunities for experiences that would ordinarily have been beyond the means of their parents to provide. Because he had no close family of his own, Mr. Leavitt, Pa’s mentor and friend, took to inviting one or more of the Pa’s sons (and their cousin Edmund) along when he went on a short trip or got tickets to a stage performance in Boston. It must have been 1925, when Joe was ten years old, that Mr. Leavitt took him to a magic show in Boston. The illusions, escapes, and magic tricks Joe saw performed were eye-popping—beyond anything he had experienced before. He was mesmerized, by these; he did not enjoy or understand so much the séance and diatribe on spiritualism that followed. Perhaps in the end the semi-technical talk and somewhat creepy monologue about ghosts blanketed his enthusiasm for the astounding tricks he had just seen. For all the talking Joe did about the memorable incidents in his life he never talked about this one. Until years later, when he found himself too old and frail to attend a David Blaine magic show as he had planned, with a bus load of senior citizens. He was philosophical. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’d like to go, but I know it would be too much for me. And besides, I’ve seen magic shows before. I saw Seigfried & Roy in Las Vegas. And even better than that. Mr. Leavitt took me to a magic show once: I’ve seen Houdini!”

Growing up in a New England town in the 1920s—especially a town that had retained the essence of its rural character and layered upon it the grittiness of factory life—meant taking in, as naturally as the blueberries of summer and the apples of fall, the practical frugality that underpinned every true Yankee household. Whether the householders were blue-blooded bankers of Mayflower descent, Italian cobblers lured to America by promises of lucrative work in modern shoe factories, or Irish families from Boston just looking for a good place to raise their children, the mantra they lived by is as familiar as a nursery rhyme: Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without. While Joe may not necessarily have learned, or even heard the words, he absorbed its precepts as surely as his bones were strengthened by the milk delivered to the back door by the Moore Dairy truck. Especially after October of 1929.

The Flynn family weathered the Great Depression well. Because of Pa’s skill at a trade that always offered some good work, even during the worst of financial times, there was always at least a few dollars coming in each week. And because of Ma’s creativity in stretching that money to the limit and supplementing it through imaginative enterprises that usually involved the labor of her children, there was always more than enough to get by on. (Ma drove to Saftler’s, a fabric outlet in Whitman, next to the Old Toll House, to buy remnants and batting she used to make quilts. Why should she spend money on blankets? She outfitted her daughters in hideous dresses Mary wailed were an embarrassment. Where on earth did she find them? And she sent John and Philip into the woods in late fall to hunt for princess pine that she fashioned into Christmas wreaths, which the boys were then sent out to sell door to door.)  “My mother could always put her hands on a few extra dollars,” Joe used to say. “I don’t know how she did it.” But she did.

Joe was twenty-two years old on May 6, 1937.  It was a Thursday morning and he happened to be home.  Pa was been home that day as well. And of course, so was Ma. It was the noise overhead that prompted them to go outside and look up. The thrumming of a powerful engine, unlike the much milder hum of an automobile. What they saw in the sky approaching at a painstakingly slow pace was unlike anything they had ever seen before: a colossal ovoid structure striped nose to tail with struts that held and supported its rigid silver skin. It was huge, over 800 feet long. Its name was spelled out on its side in appropriate large teutonic lettering: Hindenberg. They had read about it of course, in the newspapers. And seen newsreels at the movie theatre. It was carrying passengers from Europe. Inside, they knew, were passenger compartments as well as lounges, even a dining room. Was this the day? Yes. Of course. This was its first trip across the Atlantic to the United States this year. Wasn’t it amazing? Since last year when it began transatlantic service, people could now travel across the ocean in the air instead of on the sea itself. So there it was, headed to New York. But it was moving incredibly slowly. Hardly moving at all. In fact, it was hovering. It had to be hovering deliberately, as it made no headway at all. Pa had time to run inside and get his beloved Kodak camera and snap some pictures. What an unbelievable sight to record on film—the famous German airship over their very own house. The Flynns stood outside and watch the airship for what seemed like hours, until it gradually disappeared from view, drifting farther and farther to the Southwest and, finally, no longer visible beyond the trees that marked the back yards on the opposite side of White Street. With excitement they talked about it at dinnertime. Pa hoped the pictures he had taken would come out all right.

All too soon, excitement turned to stunned shock. What Joe and Pa and Ma had witnessed was not the triumphant air voyage of a revolutionary new kind of transport, but the final hours of the doomed airship. The reason the Hindenberg had been traveling so slowly was because there were thunderstorms in the vicinity of Lakehurst Naval Station where it was to dock. The Captain of the airship delayed his arrival by flying over Manhattan around four in the afternoon and then gave his passengers a sky view tour of the Jersey Shore. Once notified that the weather had cleared he headed back to Lakehurst. The ship was to make a flying mooring; that is, it would be secured by its nose to a tower, high above the ground, and then winched down to ground level. This type of landing took more time than a conventional landing, but required a smaller ground crew. There were a good number of reporters, photographers, and newsreel cameramen on hand for the airship’s first trip of the year to the United States. (In March, it had made a round trip to Rio de Janeiro) Chicago’s radio station, WLS, had sent a radio newsman Herbert Morison and a recording crew to produce an eyewitness report. No doubt the Flynns were among the millions of Americans who listened to his heart-wrenching account, which was broadcast the next day.

It’s practically standing still now. They’ve dropped ropes out of the nose of the ship; and (uh) they’ve been taken ahold of down on the field by a number of men. It’s starting to rain again; it’s… the rain had (uh) slacked up a little bit. The back motors of the ship are just holding it (uh) just enough to keep it from…It’s burst into flames! Get this, Charlie; get this, Charlie! It’s fire… and it’s crashing! It’s crashing terrible! Oh, my! Get out of the way, please! It’s burning and bursting into flames and the… and it’s falling on the mooring mast. And all the folks agree that this is terrible; this is the one of the worst catastrophes in the world. [indecipherable] its flames… Crashing, oh! Four- or five-hundred feet into the sky and it… it’s a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen. It’s smoke, and it’s in flames now; and the frame is crashing to the ground, not quite to the mooring mast. Oh, the humanity! And all the passengers screaming around here. I told you; it—I can’t even talk to people, their friends are out there! Ah! It’s… it… it’s a… ah! I… I can’t talk, ladies and gentlemen. Honest: it’s just laying there, mass of smoking wreckage. Ah! And everybody can hardly breathe and talk and the screaming. Lady, I… I… I’m sorry. Honest: I… I can hardly breathe. I… I’m going to step inside, where I cannot see it. Charlie, that’s terrible. Ah, ah… I can’t. Listen, folks; I… I’m gonna have to stop for a minute because [indecipherable] I’ve lost my voice. This is the worst thing I’ve ever witnessed.

– Herbert Morrison, describing the events, as transcribed for broadcast by WLS radio.

Sparked by residual static electricity from the violent thunderstorm, the Hindenberg burst instantly into flames. The German company that built, owned, and operated the massive dirigible had intended to use helium, not hydrogen as the lighter-than-air gas that would life the airship into the sky. Helium was a byproduct of natural gas, expensive to purchase and, during the 1930s available in quantity only from the United States. But once Hitler came to power the U.S. banned sales of helium to Germany. An exception was agreed to “for peacetime use,” but with Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland, President Roosevelt rescinded the permission. So the owners’ only choice was to fill the ship with hydrogen, inexpensive an easy to manufacture, but highly volatile and extremely flammable. The world was stunned by the tragedy. Joe, no less so than others. Little did he imagine, at the time, that he more than most of those who listened to this broadcast, read newspaper accounts, and saw newsreels of this terrible disaster, would someday have his own encounter with the dangers of landing a ship that was lighter than air.

In the fall of 1938, FDR made a campaign stop in Weymouth. There would be a motorcade up Main Street and Joe made it a point to get himself a spot along the sidewalk. He wanted to be able to get a good look at Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Sure enough, as he went by, seated in the back seat of an open car, waving and smiling, his cigarette holder atilt between his teeth, just as in all the newsreel photos, Joe got a very good look. He did not get to speak to the President of the United States; he did not even get to shake his hand. Yet he was satisfied. After all, he was an able-bodied twenty-three-year-old. The rumblings of war in Europe were becoming louder. The tramping of German jackboots could be heard even across the Atlantic Ocean where Americans hoped and prayed they could somehow stay out of the way of Hitler’s war machine. Yet the prospects of that seemed to be getting less with each passing day. It was this man, driving by, with his infectious smile and friendly wave who would lead decision-making about war and peace. He held the fate of America in his hands. And Joe’s fate as well.

(c) Janice Blake 2011

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