Miscellaneous Navy Experiences

By: Jerry Blackerby

One thing military life does is allow a person to see new places and learn about new things.

The first time I had shrimp was at Jacksonville, Florida while in the Navy in 1951. Several of us went to a place in town to eat. I had never heard of shrimp before, but some of the others told me how good shrimp were. I ordered, even though I did not know what I was getting.

When my meal was delivered, the shrimp were still in the shell. I did not know any better, so tried to eat shell and all. I sure did not like the crunchy taste. As I took a second bite, one of the other guys called me an idiot.

Everyone laughed and told me how to eat shrimp. I found out they were very good. I now love shrimp, but never order them in the shell.

Just before Christmas of 1951, I rode a bus from Jacksonville, Florida to Mineral Wells, Texas. I was going home for Christmas.

I had a layover for two or three hours in a bus station in New Orleans. I went to the coffee shop and saw a cute young lady behind the counter. I was a 17-year old young man in a Navy uniform.

She smiled as I sat down and said, “Can I help you?”

“Coffee,” I said.

“Louisiana or American coffee?” she asked.

I had learned to like shrimp and seafood in Jacksonville, so said, “Louisiana.” I was going to find out what was special about Louisiana coffee.

She brought the cup half full and a pitcher of cream. I pushed the cream aside and asked her to fill the cup. “I am a Navy man, we drink our coffee black.”

She smiled and filled the cup.

I took a sip and almost spit it out. The cute waitress smiled and said, “You’ve never had Louisiana coffee before. I’ll show you how to drink Louisiana coffee.”

She took my cup and dumped about half of it out. Then she filled the cup with cream and added some sugar and set it back in front of me.

I felt sheepish as I drank the coffee. Next cup, I ordered American coffee.

This next incident took place at NAS Jacksonville, Florida in December, 1951.

In the Navy, the stairs are called the ladder. The café or snack bar portion of the Exchange is called a Gedunk. We had problems in our second floor barracks room with a thief. Someone of the 50 or 60 people in the room was stealing money from others in the room. I used a combination lock on my locker, so always locked my wallet inside the locker when I was not getting something from the locker.

Some people would leave their locker unlocked when they went to the shower because they did not have a good way to carry their key. The thefts were reported, but after a couple of weeks the thief had not been caught.

We expected to go into Jacksonville for weekend Liberty on Friday evening following payday. The Duty Chief stopped in our barracks and said that none of us would get a Liberty pass because we still had a thief in our barracks. When asked what we should do, the Chief told us that in the "OLD" Navy, the thief would have been caught by people in the barracks and would have an accident, such as falling down the ladder. He said when someone was taken to sick bay (hospital) following an accident; everyone else would get a Liberty pass.

Two of us decided that we would just go to the Gedunk and then possibly to the movie on base, since we could not go to town. After killing a couple of hours in the Gedunk, a friend stopped by and told us that we could go get Liberty passes.

It seems that some people suspected who the culprit was. They got together and planned a trap. While one person went to take a shower and left his locker unlocked, a couple of others lay in their bunks with their backs turned and appeared to be napping. When the culprit opened the locker, they jumped up and caught him red-handed.

When he was taken to sick bay, the report was that he had accidentally fallen down the ladder, turned the landing, and fell down the lower section also. He had a broken arm and multiple bruises from the fall. After this was reported to the Duty Chief, everyone was authorized to get Liberty passes for the weekend. In those days, nearly everyone looked out for each other.

In January, 1952, a group of us were being transferred from Jacksonville, Florida to NAS Memphis for training. I had previously ridden a train from Dallas to San Diego and from San Diego to Jacksonville, Florida. Each time, we rode in a Pullman and ate in the dining car.

This trip, from one afternoon until before noon the next day, our group filled several Pullman cars near the back of the train, but the Navy did not want to pay to feed us in the dining car.

Instead, the Navy had a freight car fixed up like a galley (kitchen) and a long table for us to sit at while eating. The freight car was behind our Pullman cars and had an doorway cut into it that we could enter from the last Pullman.

We entered the car in groups of about 20 because that was all the seating space available. The freight doors on the side were also open so the car would stay aired out.

It was very cold in the freight car with wind blowing in through the open side doors, even though there were cooking facilities generating some heat. We ate evening meal and breakfast in the freight car, but did not tarry long over our meal.

In 1952, I was attending the Aviation Electronics Technician School at a naval facility near Memphis. My desire when I enlisted was to become an Aviation Radio Operator. The operator rate (AL) had been combined with the technician rate (AT) and all technicians had to learn Morse code, although the qualifying speed was lowered to eight words per minute.

If a student received low grades in either code or the technical classes, they had to attend night school the following week. A friend and I found out that the night school classes usually taught the test the night before a test, so we began attending night school the night before any test.

As we rode the bus into Memphis one evening to see a movie, we saw a pretty girl in civilian clothes sitting with another sailor. We began talking to each other in Morse code (dah di dah style) about the pretty girl. Neither she nor the sailor paid us any mind.

The next evening we were at the night school code class when we saw the same pretty girl, wearing a Navy uniform, come into the classroom. The instructor looked up and spoke to her. She walked over to him and said something we could not hear. She then came over and sat down across the table from us and put on a set of headphones.

The class began and she was copying code much better than we could copy. She would look up and smile at us now and then. After class, she introduced herself to us and the three of us went to the gedunk for beer. Fortunately, we had not gotten vulgar in talking about her on the bus, but she had understood everything we said. She had overheard us say something about attending night school the next night and decided to shake us up, which it did.

We did become friends and sat many evenings in the gedunk drinking a beer with her. She had attended the same course the year before and was stationed at Memphis at that time. The sailor she happened to be dating the time we saw her on the bus was a student in one of the mechanic classes, so had not understood anything we had said in code.

While in Naval Aviation Electronics School, we had to learn to do troubleshooting of electronics equipment. Normally, several of us attended night school on Thursday night before any exam. The night school instructor always reviewed everything that would be covered on an exam the night before the exam. One tip he gave us about troubleshooting an ART-13 transmitter helped me and also got me in trouble.

One problem the instructors put in the ART-13 was to open a bleeder resistor in the plate circuit of the 813-type electron final tube. The transmitter could not get up to full transmit power. His tip was if we could not get full power, turn the power off and touch the plate cap of the 813-type tube with a screwdriver. If we drew an arc, the bleeder resistor was open. The arc would be caused by the charge on a bank of capacitors. There could also be various other troubleshooting problems and he gave tips to troubleshoot each of them. We would only have to troubleshoot one problem.

When I went in to take the exam, I was assigned to troubleshoot a specific ART-13 transmitter. The first step in our troubleshooting process was to check that all tubes were solid in their sockets, before turning on power. The first tube I touched was loose. I pressed it back into the socket and continued making sure tubes were firmly set in their sockets. As I reached to check the 813-type tube, I was knocked backwards by a tremendous shock. The capacitor bank had discharged into me. I picked myself up and went back to the equipment.

That shock told me that the bleeder resistor was open and I had not even turned on the power to do any troubleshooting. I wrote up the problem and turned it in. I had only been at the set to troubleshoot it for less than five minutes. The instructor took me into a conference room and sat me down. I had no idea what the problem was. An officer, a chief and a couple of other instructors came back into the room with the instructor I had handed my paper to. One of them had been the night school instructor the night before.

They accused me of cheating. They suggested that someone had told me what trouble was in that particular set. I never knew how they thought that could have been done because we came in one door and the ones who had completed the exam had gone out another door. We were never close to each other.

I explained what the night school instructor had told us and exactly what had happened. Since the capacitor bank had discharged into me instead of drawing an arc to a screwdriver, I knew what the problem was. I did not see any reason to do further troubleshooting, since we only had to find the problem, not fix it.

The night school instructor confirmed he had told us the tip about drawing an arc with a screwdriver and all of the instructors agreed that was a good technique. It had even been taught in some of the classes. After conferring a few minutes, I was passed on that exam.

Once, my name was spelled Blackberry for a mid-watch. My name was mispronounced frequently, but had always been spelled correctly. This time, it was misspelled so I decided to make an issue of it since there were no serial numbers on the watch list, only names. I did not get up for mid-watch. About 1:30 or 2 a.m., the duty officer showed up. He woke me with a statement, “Blackberry, you were supposed to report for duty at 11:30. Get out of that sack.”

I responded, “I do not have duty, Sir. My name is Blackerby, not Blackberry, Sir. My name is not on the watch roster, Sir.” The duty officer checked my ID card against the watch list. He agreed that I was not on the watch list and left.

They never misspelled my name again. The only problem was that every fourth day after that, I was on the watch list. My name was spelled correctly and it was always a mid-watch at the worst location that could be assigned. “I really showed them.” Fortunately, I only had a few weeks before finishing electronics school.

Treasure Island, at San Francisco, was not a good place to be in transit during the early 1950s. This is the base all sailors being transferred to somewhere in the Pacific were shipped out from.

The Commanding Officer had a wife who went around doing white glove inspections with him. Walter Winchell even talked about it on a broadcast and purportedly said, "Write your boys in Korea, but pray for your boys on Treasure Island." Not long after his broadcast, the base had a new commanding officer.

When I was there in transit in 1952, we had mess cooking or KP duty as the Army would call it every other day. The alternate days, we were assigned various work details until noon.

Some details were even assigned to work in the Commanding Officer’s wife’s flower garden, where she would come out and check the work. I heard horror tales about that detail, but fortunately was never assigned that detail.

We were allowed to go to town after lunch on the details day. There were too many people for the details so after muster (roll call), the petty officer-in-charge would march us past the coffee shop, which we called a gedunk. The old timers that had passed through Treasure Island before knew enough to run and disappear. The petty officer would scream but could not leave the rest of the people or he would lose them also.

When he had the group down to the approximate number needed for details, he would assign details from the remaining troops, who were usually newer people. The person in charge of each detail took your ID card. This way you could not disappear because you did not have an ID card.

I spent two weeks there, and was not brave enough to run so pulled detail each time. Next time through in 1954 I knew better and spent the morning in the gedunk.

Betsey Johnson