THE NAVAL RESEARCH LABORATORY
October 1942–July 1943
My parents drove me to the train station in Little Rock. It was a regular civilian passenger train, but most of the seats were filled with guys in uniform. Some reserved space in the sleeping car, but that cost extra. I rode for free in the section with the reclining seats. It was a three-day trip to Washington, D.C., but it wasn’t that bad. I just read a lot and took naps between stops until the train pulled into Arlington. I caught a bus from there, and it was loaded with soldiers and sailors, too. I don’t know where they were going. I was the only one that got off at the Naval Research Laboratory.
I couldn’t get past the main gate without showing my orders to the Marines. That was normal for any kind of military facility during the war, at least in my experience. What surprised me was the way it looked once I got inside. The Naval Research Laboratory was exactly what I had always imagined a college campus would be: dozens of two- and three-story buildings, all red brick, with ivy growing up the sides. There were big green lawns and shade trees, statues, fountains, and park benches. Guys walking around
with books under their arms. Good gosh, I thought I took a wrong turn and ended up at Harvard or Yale. I could hardly wait to go to my first class in the morning.1
Turns out, my orders were mistaken. The next session of Radio Materiel School was not starting until the first of November, so I had almost a month to kill in Washington, D.C. I spent most of that time with my sister. Verna was the oldest of seven children in my family. She was nearly thirty, but she was still single. She used to be a schoolteacher, which she said she loved, but “men’s jobs” paid better. She didn’t especially like her job at the Bureau of Engraving. I don’t know what she did, other than that it had something do with printing money. All she ever said about it was that most of her coworkers were women. Verna thought this was because the federal government was in the same boat as the civilian employers. They had no choice. They had to hire women to replace all the men who quit their jobs and joined the military after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
I thought Verna had it made. She had her own apartment in Washington, D.C., and a car. She couldn’t drive it all that much because of the gas rationing, but still.2 She could also afford to take me out to all the best restaurants in the city, and we hit quite a few of them. I was shocked when she finally broke down and told me that she was going to give it all up and join the Army herself. She wanted to be a nurse. It was not my place to argue with her, and she sure didn’t need my permission. I just felt sorry for our poor mother. I could almost hear the wailing back home whenever Verna got around to telling her. I wasn’t that worried about my sister being in the Army, mainly because I still believed the war would be over by the time she finished her training in a year or so. I might have thought otherwise if I’d been paying more attention to the news from overseas.3
It’s not that I didn’t care how the war was going against the Nazis in Europe or the Japanese in the Pacific. I just couldn’t spare the time to listen to the radio or read the newspaper after I started my classes. I truly thought the instructors were joking on the first day. One said he was compressing about two years’ worth
of advanced math into this eight-month course. Another told us not to look down if we dropped a pencil, because we might miss something that would be on the final exam. They were serious. I had to hit the books every night and all day on the weekends, and so did everybody else in Radio Materiel School that term. There were about thirty of us, all enlisted men, mostly first or second class petty officers and experienced radiomen. Several of my classmates had a year or two of college before they joined the Navy, and even they thought it was hard. The math was way beyond anything I’d ever learned in algebra and geometry, or even trig. “Operator j” was especially difficult for me. I thought I was just dense until the instructor told us this was actually a concept from calculus.
The one thing I never did understand was why the Navy called the whole place a laboratory. I didn’t see any scientists in white lab coats, and there were no test tubes or microscopes. All I ever saw were regular classrooms, with desks and blackboards and charts on the walls. If there really were scientists working in laboratories, they must have been in the other buildings, the ones I was not authorized to enter. I never questioned why. Everybody knew the Navy was obsessed with secrecy after the war started, and I think I just got used to it. We had all kinds of buildings at Pearl Harbor where you had to be an admiral or on the staff to get past the Marines at the front door. So, if there was something going on with nuclear weapons at the Naval Research Laboratory while I was there, I’m not surprised that my classmates and I were not aware of it. I never even heard the words “Manhattan Project” until the war was over.4
I was not restricted to campus while I was at Radio Materiel School, but I hardly ever stepped outside the gates after Verna left for the Army in December. I had no reason to. I only took the bus downtown one time, and that was to go shopping. I wanted to buy something really special for Adeline’s twenty-third birthday in January. I spent a fortune on a bathrobe—it was purple velvet with a satin lining—and then I had to pay the store to wrap it up and mail it to her. Altogether, I think it came
to over twenty-five dollars. I was happy when she wrote back and thanked me. I was less than pleased when she told me about her new job. She was still a civilian, but she was now a secretary to one of the Army doctors at Fort George Wright in Spokane. She said she sat behind a curtain and took notes in shorthand while he examined and talked with the pilots.
Those flyboys were dangerous. I was afraid one of them would make a pass at Adeline, and she might like it. I especially hated it when she told me about the “Pretty Legs Contest.” She said all the men on the staff at Fort George Wright got to vote on which secretaries had the best-looking legs. Oh, yes, and guess who made it into the top five. I didn’t want to be the jealous boyfriend, so I wrote back and said, “Congratulations.” I never really believed she would ever go for some hotshot pilot over a handsome sailor like me. But you never know what goes on in a girl’s mind when her boyfriend is three thousand miles away.
My four years in the Navy were up in April. When they called me to the administration building on campus, it was decision time. I knew they weren’t going to let me go. By then, everybody who was in the military knew we were in “for the duration.” The only choice I had was whether I wanted to commit to another four years or take my discharge as soon as the war was over. The personnel officer really pressured me to reenlist. He even offered me a signing bonus—a coupon for a chicken dinner. I said no. So then he threw in another bonus. That was another coupon, for a ham-and-egg breakfast. We’re talking real ham, not Spam, and real eggs, not powdered. Okay, now that was tempting. You’d be surprised how many guys in my class actually went for it. If the Navy had offered cash instead of a couple of decent meals in the mess hall, I probably would have reenlisted. As it was, I decided it was worth more to have the choice of being a civilian at the end of the war. I guess you could say I took a gamble that the war would be over in less than four years.
I did not go out for beer on my twenty-third birthday. The first of June fell in the middle of the week, and, besides, I had nobody to celebrate with. We were all studying for our final exams.
I believe everyone in my class passed. Even me. I figured I was on a roll, so I asked to take the Navy’s promotional exam for radiomen. Compared to the finals in Radio Materiel School, it was easy. That gave me the next higher rating in my specialty. I was now a radioman first class, with three stripes on my sleeve to show that I was also a petty office first class. I got an extra ten or twelve bucks in my pay envelope, too. By the end of June, I was making somewhere close to $85 a month. Pretty decent money for a high school dropout in 1943.
We didn’t know what the Navy was going to do with us until the day we graduated. There was no ceremony. An officer just brought a big stack of orders into the classroom and called our names out, one by one. As soon as he left, we ran around and looked at each other’s orders. Not one of my classmates was assigned to a warship. I thought that was unusual, considering all the action in the South Pacific at that time. Some said it was because the Navy didn’t want to get us killed right away, not after they’d invested so much time and money in our training. I doubted that was why, because several guys had orders to what they called “lighter-than-air craft.” That was as hazardous as a warship, in my opinion, if not more so, and I did not envy them. I mean, I still wanted to fly and all, but I preferred a vehicle with wings.5
About twenty of us were assigned to naval air stations. There were so many new ones going up around the world, I’d never heard of most of them. My orders were to the naval air station at Cold Bay in the Aleutian Islands. I had no idea where that was. I went over every inch of the map from Hawaii to the Marshalls to the Solomons. Couldn’t find the Aleutians. So then I checked all the little island chains around New Guinea and Australia. Not there either. Finally, one of my classmates said, “Try Father Hubbard territory.” Well, everybody knew Father Hubbard. I saw one of his films in grade school. It was all about dogsleds and Eskimos and wildlife in Alaska.6 Sure enough, there was Cold Bay: right at the tip of this long peninsula that stuck out from Alaska. And all those little islands lined up west of that peninsula—those were the Aleutians. I could not imagine why the Navy needed an air base
for carrier planes all the way up there. As far as I knew, the North Pacific was not a combat zone. I even wrote and told my parents to stop worrying. I couldn’t say where I was going, of course. The censors would have crossed that out. I just told them I was in no danger from anything, except maybe a case of frostbite.7
My travel orders to Alaska started with a train ride, from Washington, D.C., to the Sand Point Naval Air Station in Seattle, with a short layover in Spokane. I thought this might be my last chance to propose to Adeline before one of those darn flyboys beat me to it, so I sent her a telegram. I hardly looked out the window for the next five days. All the way across the country, I was rehearsing how I was going to ask her to marry me. When the train finally stopped in Spokane, I took a taxi to her house—paid the guy extra to drive fast and avoid the railroad crossings—and then I asked her to step outside and walk with me. Halfway around the block, I forgot my speech. I just blurted it out: “Adeline, I think we should get married.” She didn’t answer. I panicked. Asked her if she wanted time to think about it. But then she kissed me and said, “No, I don’t need any more time. I’ll marry you.” I was the happiest guy on earth, for about five minutes. That’s how long it took us to walk back and tell her parents that we were engaged. To which her mother said, “Don’t be too sure, Ray. She’ll probably back out, like she did with all the others.” I hoped she was kidding. Adeline’s mother had a great sense of humor. If I’d had more time, maybe I could have figured it out, but my taxi was waiting. I had a train to catch.
Sand Point Naval Air Station was on the outskirts of Seattle, close to Lake Washington. They gave me a bunk in the barracks, but I didn’t bother to unpack my seabag. I was supposed to be on a plane to Cold Bay in the morning. Well, that flight was canceled. There were no planes flying in or out of the Aleutian Islands because the weather was bad. That should have been my first clue, especially when the radiomen said this happened a lot, even in the summer.8 At the time, I was just mad because I could have stayed another day with Adeline in Spokane.
I didn’t know anyone in Seattle, and I had nothing to do but
wait for that stupid plane to Alaska. Somebody said I should check the bulletin board in the barracks. This was where the Navy posted names and phone numbers of civilians who liked to entertain sailors. Most of the offers I saw were for lunch or dinner in their homes. There were also a few invitations to parties and special events at the yacht club. I picked the one for a seafood dinner and a concert. When I called that phone number, it turned out to be the office of a surgeon named Dr. Burden. The first thing she said to me was, “You can call me Minnie.”
Minnie Burden was real old. I’m sure she was at least forty-five, but the guys in the barracks at Sand Point told me she was well known for showing sailors a good time in Seattle. Well, I guess so. She took me to a fancy restaurant—first time I’d ever tasted Dungeness crab and Pacific salmon—and then she paid for a taxi to the concert hall. She had season tickets, best seats in the house. I’d never heard classical music performed live. The soloist was Yehudi Menuhin. I didn’t know who he was, but Dr. Burden said he was pretty famous. Maybe that’s why it was standing room only that night. I couldn’t understand how a solo violinist could draw such a big crowd, until he began to play. It was the most beautiful music I’d ever heard in my life. For two whole hours, I actually forgot about the war. I doubt if I ever would have discovered how much I liked classical music if it hadn’t been for Dr. Burden and the Yehudi Menuhin concert in Seattle.9
There was no plane to the Aleutians the next day or the day after that, so I just hung out with the radiomen in the Sand Point control tower. They directed all the Navy pilots who were landing and taking off on the runway. I thought I would be doing the same thing at the naval air station at Cold Bay, if the Navy ever figured out a way to get me there. I would have been happy to go by sea—there were several destroyers and a cruiser in the harbor—but they weren’t headed to Alaska. The only ship that was, was this big ugly civilian cargo vessel, full of lumber. I was afraid that would be my ride, and, sure enough, it was. The guys in the barracks laughed when I showed them my boarding orders. They
handed me a heavy wool peacoat and a pair of thick gloves. I thought this was their idea of a joke. Of course I knew it might be a little cooler in Alaska, but this was July, for crying out loud.
I still had a few hours to kill before the lumber ship was due to leave. Somebody told me I should go to the USO, because they were letting guys make free long-distance phone calls.10 That much was true. The catch was, you could only talk for three minutes, and they wouldn’t let you dial it yourself. You had to write the phone number on a piece of paper, hand it to a volunteer, and then go stand in line until it was your turn. Well, there were at least twenty sailors ahead of me, so it took over an hour to get to the front of the line. The guy ahead of me had just hung up the phone. As he was leaving, he says to me, “Is your girl named Adeline?” I said, “Yes, how did you know?” And he said, “’Cuz I just talked to her.” I didn’t have time to go back and try again.
The lumber ship turned straight north from Seattle, and we stayed in sight of the coastline on both sides for the next three or four days. The crew said this was called the Inside Passage to Alaska. We stopped for one night in the harbor at Ketchikan. That’s where I put on the coat. The day after that, I broke out the gloves. I think we were somewhere in the middle of the Icy Straits when I got a little ticked off at those guys back in the barracks at Sand Point. They should have given me a set of long underwear, too.