I received a draft notice to report for induction thirty days before I was going to graduate from high school in the spring of 1942. But my principal was on the Draft Board, and he said if I was there for twelve years I was going to be there for graduation. So they gave me a sixty-day deferment, and I didn’t go in until thirty days after I graduated. This was the year after Pearl Harbor. I showed up for induction with a group, and they were drafting into all the services. Everybody was picking which service they wanted, and I picked the Army. The guy at the desk stamped “Navy” on my papers. So I said, “I’m sorry, but you made a mistake.” And he said, “No, I didn’t. We’re taking every third one in line for the Navy whether you want it or not.” So that’s how I got into the Navy—by accident!
I started out doing my training at Great Lakes, Illinois. Then they were going ship me to New London, Connecticut, for aviation metal-smith school. But my orders, when they were cut, sent me to San Diego to welding school. So I went to San Diego and went through arc welding, gas welding, and underwater welding. This took about three months. After that I didn’t think I was really an expert, but I could weld. And then I got a ten-day leave out of San Diego, and it took three days to get back home to Detroit. I had a day or two there, and when I got back to San Diego they shipped me to Pearl Harbor on the aircraft carrier Hornet. When I got to Pearl Harbor there were still sunken ships sticking above the water, or partly above the water.
So, I was there in Hawaii for about a month before I got shipped to Midway. During that time I was working on ships in dry dock at Pearl Harbor. I was a shipfitter. When you were in transit, you got all the stuff that wasn’t real pleasant to do, like working at the bottom of the dry dock scraping barnacles!
I got to go into town on leave while I was there and I was disappointed. I was expecting a little South Seas village but Honolulu was a modern town; they even had electric buses. I was looking for grass huts! I really didn’t have much social life in Honolulu. I was too young to drink. I was eighteen or so. But I ended up working a lot with an Oriental magician that I was paying to teach me magic. I was always interested in magic tricks, and I got to talking to him one day when I was in town. I was showing him some of the things I knew, and he was showing me things a lot better than anything I knew!
So, I learned magic when I was in Honolulu. I did magic the rest of the time I was in the service. I also did card tricks. I guess that was an unusual skill to learn in Honolulu! I also carried my ice skates with me the whole time I was in the Navy, and amazingly enough I went ice skating in Hawaii. They had a little ice rink in a town outside Honolulu called Waiwa. That’s another thing not many sailors did in Hawaii.
So, then the word came down that they needed shipfitters for the submarine base on Midway, and I got sent out there. I’d heard about Midway mainly because I had a real good friend who was killed on one of the ships in the Battle of Midway. I’d never heard much about the island itself, though. I got there, and I thought the island looked pretty small! I was supposed to be there for about nine months and I ended up being there for more than a year, because they wouldn’t release us until they got replacements, and they never got replacements. I was there when Roosevelt died, on VE Day, when they dropped the bombs, and on VJ Day. The only way I got off Midway was when the war ended.
We didn’t have much to do. There was a lot of gambling and fights going on, some pretty brutal fights, really. Some of the guys sent there were kind of rough. Some were sent there as a kind of punishment, or other units didn’t want them. In fact, Eddie Peabody had a huge band in Honolulu, and they cut the band in half and gave half the band to Ray Anthony. The story I heard is that he and his fellow musicians came in one morning intoxicated and played reveille or taps with an eight beat, and they shipped them out to Midway as punishment. They were only out there for about three months, but they performed for us while they were there. Every Saturday night they would play, and that was great.
After a while I started resenting being stuck there. It wasn’t real pleasant, there wasn’t much to do, and because of that, I think, there were actually murders that took place there on Midway. There was an inside shipfitters shop, where I was, and it was in a building on the base; and there was an outside shipfitters shop out on the pier, and they would work on the submarines right where they tied up. And my friends were in the outside shop, and if they would dive into the water in the morning and pull a body out they would get the day off. They would occasionally find bodies of American sailors in the water. These guys were evidently killed in fights over gambling debts, or that’s what my friends thought.
One night I was on the twelve-to-four A.M. watch. When a sub would pull in and would have to be worked on, they would send all the submariners to this place on the island called Gooneyville, and they would stay there until they were ready to go back out on their submarine. The story we got was that this one fellow was writing a letter, and another guy put his foot on the bunk and was jiggling it, and he told him to stop two or three times and the other guy didn’t, so he took a gun and shot him. I was at the other end of the island, and the officer of the day came down and picked me up to go over there since they had gotten word there was a problem. So we went down there, and they had arrested the guy who had done the shooting, and we were trying to get a statement out of a guy who witnessed it. He was so intoxicated that we walked him up and down the barracks four or five times, but we couldn’t get him conscious enough to talk.
Another thing that my friend from the outside shop told me was that some guy had won a lot of money gambling, but then he just disappeared. We had a little 8 1/2 by 11 news sheet that they published every day, and they were asking in the paper if anyone had seen this guy. And this was a small island, but no one had seen him. They finally found him tied to one of the pillars under the pier. We figured that he had been killed for his money. You see, they all went to this beer hall where they gambled. That was on the main submarine base, just behind our chow hall. I went there a couple of times, but I didn’t really drink that much and I usually gave the other fellows my beer tickets.
Our main form of entertainment was that we had a different show every night, a movie. After we worked all day we would go back to the barracks, get cleaned up, go over to the chow hall and eat, and then come back. We had about an hour or so when we kicked around the barracks, then we’d go back over to the chow hall where they showed the movies. We’d play pinochle until the movie started, to pass the time, but that wasn’t gambling, that was just cards.
I was pretty sick of Midway by the time the war ended. You were away from home, and I was just a young kid then. I wanted to get off the island, so I volunteered for duty anywhere else other than Midway, even to go into combat, but they said that they couldn’t get a replacement for me so they wouldn’t even process the paperwork.
The subs would come in, and the crew would be off the ship when we started working. Primarily I did stuff that was rebuilding things off the subs. One time I was injured pretty badly trying to fix a coffeepot off a sub. One of their coffeepots had gone bad, and I was going to make a new bottom for it. I brought it to the shop, and I was sweating off the bottom when that molten metal went down and hit the concrete and came back up through the big coffeepot and hit me in the eye. It closed my eye and matted it shut. They thought I would lose my sight but I didn’t. I have a little tic in that eye now, but nothing that interferes with vision. I was in the underground hospital for about three days. You know, the hospital was underground there on Midway. There was only a sick bay above ground on the base.
I had a girlfriend at home during the whole period I was on Midway, and we wrote letters back and forth, so mail call was a pretty big deal. We had a seaplane, a Catalina flying boat, that used to land in the lagoon, and it brought the mail in from Pearl. Sometimes when the water was real calm inside the reefs they would have to send a PT boat out to zigzag in front of the plane to roughen up the water so the plane could take off. I guess if the water was too calm, it would be like the seaplane would be almost glued to the surface. It needed a little rougher water to be able to break the surface of the water to take off.
Finally the war ended and I left Midway on a sub tender, back to Pearl and then back to California.
So, after all those letters, when I got back after the war I got married to my girlfriend. We were married just nine days short of thirty-four years when she passed away. We were actually childhood sweethearts. When I got off the ship in California coming back from Midway, I got a thirty-day leave and went home and got married. Then I had to report back to California, and I had my wife with me then. I was supposed to go back overseas again, but I got seasick every time I was on any kind of ship. I remember one time when I was on a Liberty ship I was the only one who was seasick. I even got seasick on the aircraft carrier on the way to Hawaii, and on the sub tender on the way home, and it’s a floating industrial city. So, I wasn’t much of a seagoing sailor.
So, they were going to ship me out, and my bus broke down that was taking me to my ship. I headed back to the base and had to wait for the bus to get fixed. At that time my aunt back in Detroit was running the insurance company of the skipper of that base, and she had told me to stop in and see him if I got there. I really didn’t want to go up there and see him since I was just a second class shipfitter. But since the bus had broken down, and I had two hours on the base and nothing to do, I thought I’d go up and say hello to him and keep everybody in Detroit happy. So, I went over to his office, and the first thing he said was, “You just got married, didn’t you?” And I said, “Yeah.” And it turned out he knew all about it because my aunt had apparently talked to him. And he says, “How long are you going to be here?” And I said, “Another hour or so.” So he said, “Can you think of any reason you shouldn’t go overseas?” And I said, “Yeah, I have chronic seasickness.” So he picked up the phone and took me off the ship and gave me duty on the base. And that was a great deal! Because when you are seasick, first you are afraid you are going to die, and then that’s the only thing that keeps you going, the hope that you will!
So I was only in California for a couple of months, and then I got discharged at Camp Shumaker in California. My wife and I spent all our money, for on the way back to Detroit we went via Florida. So we finally got home and I had no money and needed a job.
I started out on that first job reporting to work with a pliers, and then I was welding and then doing sheet metal work and then drafting and then I was in charge of the whole place! I went on to other jobs, but, for that first job, if I hadn’t had my Navy welding and sheet metal experience, I would never have made it to superintendent. So I guess the Navy did affect the course of my life in that way.
A while after my first wife died I got remarried, and my wife Doris and I split time between Denver and Phoenix. We go on cruises now, and this is interesting because I found a way around my seasickness. Now I wear this little bracelet; it’s like two elastic bands with a little half-round button, and I press that button against my wrist, and I don’t know what it does but it takes care of the motion sickness. So at least I have overcome that part of my Navy experience.
I think I would like to go back and see Midway now. I haven’t wanted to go back in the past. When I was younger I had no desire at all to ever see that island again!
But I think now it would be interesting to see it again.