JOINING THE NAVY
September 1937–mid-April 1939
Okay, so I admit I lied to the Navy about my age. I thought I was old enough when I got home from the CCC, and, technically, I guess I was. But everybody in town said forget it. There were too many older guys out of work, and they were all trying to get into the military. The Navy had so few openings, they weren’t even taking applications from anybody under eighteen. That’s what I heard, and I was crushed. I thought about going back to the CCC for another year. My two older brothers talked me into a road trip instead. We had an aunt in Oregon; she invited us to come and stay with her until we found jobs there. So the three of us pooled our savings and bought a used Model A Ford. We packed the rumble seat with food and blankets and took turns driving.
It was about a two-week trip from Arkansas to Oregon. Some nights we slept in the car; other times we camped out on the ground by the side of the road. If we happened to be near a town, we stayed in a hotel. That cost two or three dollars a night, which was kind of expensive for three guys out of work,
so we shared a single room. We never had any trouble finding a gas station—that cost around twenty cents a gallon—but there were no freeways.1 Some of the roads weren’t even paved. I saw lots of Burma Shave signs with silly jokes and sayings, but I do not recall any posted speed limits. We didn’t come across any sheriff or state patrol cars either, which was good, because we didn’t any of us have a driver’s license.2
There were more jobs in Oregon, and the pay was better, too. Even the temporary, seasonal work paid twenty-five cents an hour. They called it “minimum wage.”3 First time I ever heard the term. It was great money for a potato sorter. All I had to do was stand there and pick out all the green ones on the conveyor belt. It was a lot easier than working for my dad on the family farm. Around Christmastime, I got on at the soda fountain in the drugstore. That didn’t take much training either, as soon as I figured out how much cherry syrup to squirt in with the carbonated water, and I was fine with being a soda jerk until I turned eighteen. That was the plan, until my brother Velton got laid off again. My eighteenth birthday was still a couple of months away when he walked into the drugstore and said, “To heck with it. I’m going to join the Navy.” No way was I going to let him go without me.
We took the bus to the nearest recruiting station, which was inside the post office in downtown Portland. I sat down on the steps and started filling out the application. When I got to the blank for “date of birth,” I never thought twice. I wrote “June 1, 1919.” I was afraid the Navy wouldn’t take me if I told the truth: I was actually born in 1920. I knew it was wrong to lie, but I’d have done just about anything to increase my chances of getting accepted. It didn’t seem like such a big deal. The recruiters did not require any proof of age.4 They didn’t even ask for a social security card, which was also good, because I didn’t have one of those either. I didn’t know there was such a thing at the time.5
After I filled out the application, I had to take a written exam. It was all essay questions, like, “What can you do for your country in the Navy?” I think the only purpose was to prove you
could read and write. When I finished that, I had to go inside the post office and take the physical. I was five feet eight and weighed 128 pounds. That’s all I saw on the doctor’s clipboard; everything else was just checkmarks. Next came the interview. I honestly do not know what I would have said if that Navy officer had looked me straight in the eye and said, “You’re not really eighteen yet, are you?” But he never did. He just thumbed through all the papers in my file and asked the same questions I’d already answered on the written exam. That’s all there was to it. He said I was accepted, but there were no openings at the moment. I was told to go home and wait for a letter. I don’t know why my brother got rejected. I felt sorry for Velton. He just laughed and said he was a whole lot sorrier for me. I was the one that had to go home and tell Mom and Dad I had just enlisted in the Navy.
I knew my mother would cry. What surprised me was when my dad cried, too. I’d never seen him get so emotional before. I told them I only did it for the education. The way they carried on, you’d have thought I was going off to war. Dad was worried about the Nazis taking over in Austria, and Mom was all upset about Japan invading China. Kaltenborn had them both convinced that we would be at war with either Germany or Japan tomorrow. I didn’t believe it. I still thought Hitler was a harmless kook, and I couldn’t see how we had a bone to pick with the Japanese.6 We went round and round on that. Dad finally shook his head and told my mother to start praying for me. As soon as she left the room, he said, “Son, why the Navy? You can’t even swim!”
I tried to avoid talking politics with my parents after that. All summer long, I ran out to the mailbox every day to see if I’d got my letter from the Navy. It didn’t come. Adeline was writing to me, though, just like she promised. She sent me a picture after she graduated from high school. I had to write back and say I was still waiting on the Navy. I felt like a total loser. I quit checking the mailbox after Christmas. I thought they lost my application and forgot about me. I knew I couldn’t take another summer on the family farm, so I signed on for another hitch in the CCC in the spring of ’39. Wouldn’t you know, that’s when it came.
Nearly a year after I filled out the application in Oregon, the Navy finally had an opening for me.7 The letter said I had two weeks to report to the recruiting station, and there was a one-way bus ticket to Portland inside. I didn’t need two weeks. I was on that bus the very next day.
There were seven other guys ahead of me on the day I arrived in Portland. The recruiters swore us all into the Navy at once. After we signed our oaths, they put us on a train to California. Sure I was nervous; everybody was. We didn’t know exactly where we were going or what was going to happen when we got there. So we talked about girls. I did not have a steady girlfriend back home, and Adeline was only a pen pal. I did think about her a lot, though, until I walked through the main gates at the Naval Training Station in San Diego. It was bigger than a hundred CCC camps, and it was right on the Pacific. That was the first time I’d ever seen the ocean, but I was really looking at all those warships in the bay.8