Fair Winds and Following Seas: Reflections on the Navy Career of a Teenage Ensign

© 2013 by Ronald Vail. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 04/09/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-3487-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-3488-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-3489-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013905506

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

YEAR OF UNCERTAINTY

FIRST NAVY EXPERIENCE

THE MIDSHIPMAN EXPERIENCE

HARVARD COMMUNICATION SCHOOL

PROCEEDING TO THE WAR ZONE

ENIWETOK ATOLL

WAHIAWA, OAHU, T.H.

DING HAO TSINGTAO

BACK TO WAHIAWA

NEWLYWEDS IN PARADISE

BELLMORE, LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK

BACK ON A LARGE COMMAND AFLOAT

IMPERIAL BEACH, CALIFORNIA

ENROUTE TO GUAM

MAUG SI DOOG

BAINBRIDGE, MARYLAND

TOP OF THE PINNACLE

CAMELOT, CALIFORNIA

TWILIGHT TOUR

POSTSCRIPT

REFLECTIONS

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my beautiful and loving wife, Kris, whose tender care and devotion has made my life ever so enjoyable and who stood by me and supported me all during my career, as well as my post-Navy career and, at the same time, reared our children to be successful and caring adults.

I would like to include in this dedication also my grandson, Sean Kristofer Vail, who was assigned a project in one of his college classes to write a report on an interview with a senior citizen. Choosing me as his subject led to the writing of my memoirs from which this book is taken.

A WORD ABOUT THE PHRASE,

FAIR WINDS AND FOLLOWING SEAS

In the old days of sailing ships when the power systems for traversing ocean courses from one port to another were the winds and the sea currents, fair winds and following seas were the ideal sailing conditions for a ship operating subject to the unpredictable weather and the captain’s knowledge of the rivers of the vast oceans. Fair winds meant that the breezes propelling the ship were neither too strong nor too light and were blowing in the general direction of the ship’s course. Following seas simply meant that the ocean current along the ship’s journey to port was pushing the ship along its chosen route so that the combination of the two effects allowed the ship to hasten its arrival in port after an uneventful and safe voyage. Likewise, a person’s journey in life to be blessed with conditions commensurate with fair winds and following seas meant that the particular journey was traversed under ideal conditions.

INTRODUCTION

I was born in Chicago, Illinois, on May 20, 1925, to ALMON JOHN VAIL and GERTRUDE JEAN (JOHANNA) (RIECKS) VAIL. When my father first met my mother, he gave her the nickname, BILLY, which stuck with her for the rest of her life. We lived in a second story flat (today it would be referred to as an apartment) on the South side of Chicago near my father’s family. My mother met my father while she was living with my father’s older sister, Winnie. In order to find work, she had gone to Chicago from her home town of Anchor, Illinois, about 120 miles south of Chicago, after having been graduated from the eighth grade in Anchor, the same school that I later attended for twelve years. The four-year high school had been added some time after she left.

My father, who never got beyond the 8th grade in school because of family financial distress, worked for a company in Chicago, called Cherry-Burrell Corporation, that manufactured milk pasteurization equipment. Milk pasteurization was a brand new process at the time.

The economy at that time was quite good following World War I. My dad had a fairly good job with Cherry-Burrell Corporation despite his lack of education. He was a very smart man with a knack for working with his hands. He had a way with numbers that always amazed me. His father, whom I never knew for he had died either before I was born or shortly thereafter, was a rather accomplished inventor, but he received no recognition or compensation for his inventions since they were all done on company time.

Things were going relatively well for us until 1929. The stock market crash which ushered in the worst depression the world had experienced up to that time resulted in my dad being laid off in the resulting business recession.

As I mentioned earlier, my mother came from Anchor where she was born and reared. Her father, an old German who had come over to the United States sometime before the end of the 19th century, owned and operated a restaurant in Anchor. I use the word restaurant loosely because the town had and still has a population of only about 165 people. It was and still is strictly a farming community. When my dad lost his job in Chicago, my grandfather turned the business over to my father and mother as an advance on my mother’s inheritance.

So, in January of 1930 we left Chicago and relocated in Anchor; going from the second largest city in the U.S. to one of the smallest towns in Illinois. A very kindly friend of the family owned a trucking business in Anchor. He sent his truck to move us and our household effects. Whether he did this out of the goodness of his heart or whether my grandfather paid for the move, I do not know. Probably, the latter. My folks certainly were in no position to pay for it themselves.

We proceeded south out of Chicago in a blinding snow storm with the three of us and the driver in the cab and our personal effects in the back. I vaguely remember wondering as I looked out the windshield into the storm with visibility not much beyond the hood whether we would ever make it the entire 120 miles.

In Anchor, we lived in a small three room apartment across the street from the restaurant. No electricity, no running water, no kitchen, the latter of which was no problem since we ate all our meals at the restaurant as well as spending all our time there, except to sleep. As I mentioned before, my dad was quite handy with things like that, so it wasn’t long before we had electric lights in the apartment.

The uptown area of Anchor consisted of the farm products trucking business (the truck that moved us to Anchor) at one end of a street, next to an auto repair garage (owned and operated by my uncle Toby, my mother’s brother), and then a barber shop that functioned whenever a barber happened to live in town. Next to the barber shop was the restaurant at the corner so that the uptown area extended in two directions from the restaurant. Around the corner next to the restaurant was the Anchor State Bank which still exists to this day. Beyond the bank came a hardware store, a vacant lot where the store in that location burned many years before our time, a grocery store, drug store (with a soda fountain where my buddies and I spent a lot of money on fountain cokes at 5 cents a drink), another auto repair garage, and finally the post office.

The main street of Anchor ran East and West the entire length of the town, about three or four tenths of a mile. Across the main street from the restaurant was the town’s park, a grassy area of about a half an acre surrounded by a heavy metal chain. During one Halloween, the chain was removed by some kids from a neighboring town and laid down the middle of the main street.

On the opposite side of the park from the restaurant was the rail road tracks which also ran East and West and which carried what we referred to as the tri-daily train—it went one day and tried to get back the next. Actually, its primary purpose for Anchor was to carry grain to market from the grain elevator, a three or four story structure, which sat across the tracks from the park.

In about the center of the park was a dance pavilion on which weekly dances were held in the summertime during the early 30’s. The music was provided by a live orchestra, maybe six or seven musicians. The dances brought a lot of people to town which was a boon to the town’s businesses, especially the restaurant. I delighted in listening to the music, lying next to the dance floor by the band box. One time when I was about 7 or 8 years old, my folks sent someone to look for me when I did not return after the band quit playing. They found me right there still sound asleep.

We also had free movies in the park once a week during the summertime. It also brought many people to town and a lot of business for the restaurant. We kids really looked forward to those movies and spent the afternoon prior to the movie watching the sky and doing what we could to keep the rain clouds away. It is interesting now to reflect that several of the families in Anchor believed that the movies were sinful deviations and would not attend them or let their children attend.

I have dim memories of our first two or three years in Anchor. Being such a small community, I was given free run of the entire town, for there was not a lot of trouble a small boy could get into. I had my 5th birthday in May following our arrival and entered the first grade the start of the following school year. I may have started a year earlier than I should have, but my three buddies, who were all a little older than I, were starting then and I didn’t want to be left out. Ken was about six months older than I, Guy (we called him Smitty) was one year older, and Ike was also about a year older. We all went through twelve years together and Smitty and I went on together to the first year of college.

The restaurant business went well enough in the 1930’s to provide us with the essentials of life, although there were times when I could tell from my mother’s demeanor that we might be in financial trouble. However, the business survived and we were even able to buy a new Pontiac in 1937 and again in October of 1941, a significant purchase when one considers what transpired merely five weeks later.

It was a grueling business for my parents. My dad had to open up at five or six in the morning, especially in the winter when he had to build a fire in the coal stove to warm up the place. One morning while carrying four buckets of coal at once from the coal bin about a half a block away, he slipped on the ice and received a full double hernia. This resulted in the need for him to wear a truss for the rest of his life.

At night, they could never close up until about ten or eleven. We sold a wide range of products with beer being our most popular and most profitable. There were fresh meats at one side of the restaurant and cigarettes, tobacco, candy, and magazines on the other. In between, were the beer, soft drinks, and ice cream.

My primary job in the restaurant as far back as I can remember was to keep the cigarettes, tobacco, candy, and magazines properly stocked. The magazines, of course, were my favorite. I read every comic book that we ever received, including first editions of Action Comics and all the others featuring Superman, Bat Man, Spider Man, and the many other so called super heroes, not to mention Wonder Woman and the other comic book heroines.

We usually made a weekly trip to Bloomington, a comparatively large city 30 miles west of Anchor with a population of about 30,000. The main purpose of the trip was to buy supplies for the restaurant. It was usually a day long outing during which we not only bought supplies, but also had dinner at a nice restaurant and took in a movie at one of the three theaters before returning to Anchor about 11:00 PM. I usually crawled into the back seat and slept during the 30 to 45 minute return trip. One night on our way out, my dad stopped at a gas station for some reason. My mother and I stayed in the car, but I decided it would be a good time to go to the restroom. When I got out of the car, my mother must not have noticed my leaving for when I returned from the restroom, I saw my folks driving away. I was sure that my dad was playing a trick on me and would drive around the block and then pick me up.

After about ten or fifteen minutes, it was obvious that this was no trick. I was so certain that my mother was aware that I had left the car that I was dumb founded that this could have happened. I began calculating the time at which they would notice that I was missing. In anticipation of that and the call that they would make to the station, I went into the station and told the owner who I was and that I was waiting on the corner outside his station for my folks to return to pick me up. As I expected, when they turned into Anchor, my mother reached into the back seat to awaken me.

Finding me missing, she of course panicked thinking first that I had fallen out of the car on the way home; an impossible explanation for the rear windows in our two-door car rolled down only a few inches. After calling the station and verifying that I was there waiting for them, my dad had to get my uncle out of bed and open his gas station to sell him some gasoline so he could make the return trip to Bloomington. Through the years, we had many laughs over that peculiar sequence of events.

In addition to working in the restaurant, I became a carrier for one of the two newspapers delivered in Anchor; the Chicago Daily News. The other paper was the Bloomington Pantagraph. Although I never delivered more than 30 to 40 papers at any one time, I managed to qualify for several trips for the carriers throughout the state who brought in the most new subscriptions in a certain period of time. The secret of my success was the fact that the Chicago Daily News had a program where they would deliver the paper by mail every day to remote addresses, i.e. locations too far from town to be hand delivered. The carrier merely had to collect the subscription fee periodically from the customer.

Most of my subscribers were restaurant customers, farmers, who lived out of town and, of course, all of the venders who came by weekly or monthly to supply the restaurant. I believe I even had some of my father’s family as customers who actually lived in Chicago.

The major trips that I won were a boat trip across Lake Michigan to Milwaukee in about 1936 or 1937, a trip to the New York World’s Fair in 1939 and another to the New York World’s Fair in 1941. I had quite a reputation at the Chicago Daily News headquarters, being one of the top 100 or so carriers in the state, living in a town with a population of just 165 people.

As I mentioned above, in the summer of 1939, I made the Chicago Daily News trip to the New York Worlds Fair. A week after I returned, my mother and I left for California with my mother’s older sister, Lillian, and her husband, Wally, in their 1938 or 1939 Chevrolet. We traversed the entire trip on Route 66, a very harrowing course once you got into the Rockies.

Two of my mother’s younger sisters and their families lived in Los Angeles. We would be staying with my aunt Irma and her husband, Frank, who owned and operated two or