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My Brush With History
BY THE READERS
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BULL SESSION
None of us looked forward to going on duty and standing our watch. Four hours on and four hours off around the clock was not an easy routine. This was especially true if you were a radioman aboard the USS Missouri, flagship for the U.S. 3d Fleet deep in the Pacific Theater of Operations.
The year was 1945. As an eighteenyear-old eligible for the draft, I had enlisted in the Navy before graduation from high school in Davenport, Iowa. After boot camp and radio school, at Farragut, Idaho, I was assigned to the staff of Adm. William F. “Bull” Halsey aboard the Missouri, an Iowa-class battleship.
I felt honored to pull duty as a staff member with a four-star admiral. Halsey usually selected the New Jersey, another Iowa-class ship, but
the Jersey had steamed stateside for some badly needed maintenance and repair. The Missouri got the call.
There were seven radio transmitting-and-receiving stations aboard the Missouri, and I usually spent my four hours handling routine communications among ships of the fleet. I had been onboard several weeks and had not even seen the admiral. Then I was transferred to the radio station just behind the ship’s bridge. I would be copying coded messages from several military shore stations. When decoded, these transmissions would help our meteorologists map weather conditions over possible Japanese bombing targets. I quickly came to realize the importance of my work. The safety of our carrier pilots might well depend upon the accuracy and thoroughness of the radiomen on duty behind the bridge.
To obtain weather information I usually copied station NPG Honolulu or an Army station from Andrews Air Force Base on Guam. These were clear stations with little interference of any kind. But station KCT from Vladivostok, U.S.S.R., was different.
If our planes were to raid the Japanese islands of Hokkaido or Honshu, we needed the weather report from KCT. The Japanese, knowing this, constantly jammed the KCT frequency with music, loud laughter, foreign languages—anything and everything to drown out the signal. It required keen concentration to find our signal and stay on it while totally ignoring all the “trash.”
One evening I was copying KCT with the usual Japanese garbage jamming my frequency. I had my eyes closed, and I was concentrating totally on that faint but distinctive signal: Dit dah dit. I automatically hit the R key on the typewriter (or mill, as the Navy called it). Dah dit dit dit, B. Dit dit dit, S.
Then a loud voice behind me asked, “Are they jamming our station?”
“Yes, sir,” I replied, my concentration broken. I hit the space bar of the mill several times to indicate missed letters. I found the signal once again.
“Are you able to copy it?” The voice again. I hit the space bar several more times before finding my signal once more. “Will you be able to get enough for us?” And the space-bar routine again. But this time I blurted out, “Shut up!”
When the transmission was complete, I pulled the message from my machine. Wondering if the blank spaces would ruin our mapmaking effort, I turned in my seat—and looked up at four stars on each lapel of a brown shirt. I had just met Admiral Halsey.
Oh my God, I thought. I was an insignificant radioman, third class, and I had told an admiral to shut up. At nineteen years my life would end. I would be fortunate to get a court-martial for insubordination along with a dishonorable discharge from the Navy.
“Sir, are you the one I told to ‘shut up’?”
This tough-looking admiral was standing there with arms folded and legs apart in a mild inverted Y, brown naval field cap pulled to his brow, jaw jutting menacingly with lips pressed firmly together. I could see now why they called him Bull Halsey.
“Yes, lad,” he blared.
“I apologize, sir. I did not know it was you. I have no excuse, sir.”
The admiral broke his stance and began to pace the floor. “Lad,” he bellowed, “when I come into this radio shack and speak to you while you are on that radio, YOU DO NOT TELL ME
TO SHUT UP! DO YOU UNDERSTAND?” His voice boomed like the nine 16inch guns attached to the ship’s three main turrets.
“Yes, sir, I understand.” I was frozen at attention and, I am certain, tears were welling in my eyes.
Then, stopping in front of me and looking me straight in the eye, he went on in a very calm and friendly voice. “If I or anyone else ever bothers you while you are on that radio, you do not tell them to shut up. What you
tell them is GET THE HELL OUT OF
HERE and THAT’S AN ORDER. Do you understand, lad?”
I could only look at him and stammer, “Yes, sir.”
We saluted. Admiral Halsey went on his way. I never met him again.
—Robert Roddewig, a retired history teacher, lives in Michigan.
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COMMISERATOR IN CHIEF
In 1965 I spent eight months at Bethesda Naval Hospital recovering from shrapnel wounds and two broken legs received in Vietnam. One day that fall, our corpsmen announced that some of us were to be wheel-chaired to a meeting with the President of the United States. Lyndon B. Johnson was in Bethesda for a gallbladder operation, and we had seen the famous picture of him pointing at his scar, presumably to reassure the American people that he was healthy and fit to run the country.
The young lieutenants and enlisted men sat dressed in their blue hospital garb, awaiting a thank-you or even a pep talk. Many in that room had ghastly wounds or missing limbs from high explosives, bullets, or fire. The President drew himself up and announced, “I know just how you boys feel,” then went on to explain that he had just felt the surgeon’s knife. The room was absolutely quiet, no response except silent amazement being possible. Lady Bird Johnson broke the strange miasma hanging over the place. After a Secret Service agent briskly walked in and called her out, she returned, beaming like a possum up a persimmon tree, to announce that she had some good news. Her daughter Luci had just got her first B in college!
Did President Johnson’s eerie speech to his warriors represent some kind of inability to articulate his war, politically or strategically? As I think back, there was a kind of spiritual brokenness hanging over the man even at that early stage of the conflict.
The redeeming part of the day was furnished by my future wife, Pam, who arrived by Greyhound from West Virginia to visit me at the hospital. Without a pause she walked right through Johnson’s security and unhinged a. guard at an elevator with the simple question, “Does this thing go up?”
—Nick Pappas is a political science professor at Radford University in Radford, Virginia.
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FLOWER POWER, 1936
It was the fall of 1936, and students at West Grammar School in Portland, Maine, were excited. Alf Landon was coming to Portland! Mr. Landon was running for President against Franklin Roosevelt. Why were we kids so interested in the election? There was a very practical reason. The desks we used had inkwells recessed in their tops, and we wrote with stock pens. When the pens became dirty, they wouldn’t write well, so we needed a good supply of pen wipers. Alfred Landon’s campaign button was attached to a bright yellow felt sunflower that made the best pen wiper we had ever found. Because of the great demand, what had at first seemed to be an endless supply of buttons was beginning to run out, and campaign workers had started giving them only to adults. I resigned myself to the fact that the dozen or more wipers I had collected were going to be it.
One day, when I had just finished listening to my favorite late-afternoon radio programs (Jack Armstrong, Little Orphan Annie, and Tom Mix), my father announced that Alf Landon was giving a campaign speech at the ballpark that night and asked if I would like to go with him. I jumped at the chance, not so much to hear the candidate as because going out with my dad on a school night was a real treat.
The Portland stadium was not more than a thousand feet from our home. It was small, but in my mind it was the size of Yankee Stadium. As we entered the park, a campaign worker who knew my father motioned him to one side to tell him why the country needed Landon as its next President. I found myself all alone beside a box filled with Landon buttons. I couldn’t resist the temptation. I pinned those buttons all over my body, and when my father and his friend saw what I had done, they both laughed. The worker said to my father, “You have a real Landon man here,” and to me: “Tonight you’re going to see the next President of the United States.”
While we sat waiting for Mr. Landon to arrive, a fog bank gathered in the outfield. As the candidate strode confidently toward the podium set up on the pitcher’s mound, the fog moved in the same direction. They met at the mound. Alf Landon spoke eloquently to an audience that couldn’t see him and that he couldn’t see.
I can’t remember anything the candidate said, but I will never forget what my father said. Dad told me I should have enough pen wipers to last me through high school. When I told him I was disappointed that I had not seen the next President of the United States, my father said simply, “Mr. Roosevelt wasn’t here tonight.”
Although Alfred M. Landon didn’t convince my dad to vote for him, he did carry the state of Maine and one other state, Vermont, giving birth to the phrase “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont.”
—Robert H. Mountain, a retired vice president of Morris Alper & Sons, Inc., lives in Gorham, Maine.
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ATTRACTIVE NUISANCE
During World War II, I served aboard USS Alabama in the United States Navy. Al Barkan, a shipmate more than ten years my senior, assumed the role of mentor to me. Al was a graduate of the University of Chicago and a natural teacher.
In the winter of 1943–44 our ship put in at Seattle, Washington, for an overhaul. Al and I were granted leave, and we traveled home by train, he to New Jersey, I to New York. On our return trip we came through Chicago very early one Sunday morning. Al, noting we had a layover of about five hours, suggested we take a tour of his alma mater, which he had been encouraging me to attend when the war was over.
We went to the campus, and Al, swelling with pride, described the history and architecture of every building. He saved a tour of the football stadium for the very last.
Al told me he had seldom watched any of the football games from the stands because his dormitory room was on an upper floor and its window overlooked the playing field. Nonetheless he wanted me to see the stadium from the inside. As we began to walk around it, he discovered that the iron gates at each of the entrances were shut and padlocked. Visibly disappointed, Al was about to give up hope of getting inside when I noticed that one of the gates a bit farther ahead of us seemed to be ajar. I ran ahead to try it.
Sure enough, the gate was open, and I could see clearly through the underside of the grandstand to the playing field itself. I hailed Al, and he came running.
Al thought it strange that the other gates were locked and looked around for someone who could explain the situation. There was no one to be seen that bright, early Sunday morning. Al hesitated; I urged him onward.
Once inside we waited for our eyes to adjust to the darkness, for the area was only dimly lit by a few hanging light bulbs. When our eyes focused, Al was stupefied by what he saw. I was delighted. The place looked like some weird laboratory, very similar to ones I’d seen in the movies. There
were panels on which were mounted dials, switches, levers, knobs, and buttons. An inveterate toucher, I immediately began playing with the knobs, eager to see what I could make happen. Older and wiser Al thought we had stumbled onto something very ominous, and his impulse was to get the hell out of there. At his insistence we left without ever having visited the playing field.
It was not until after the war was over that I learned about the atomic bomb and its development. A newspaper article I read mentioned the research laboratory set up under the stands at Alonzo Stagg Stadium. Many of the most important scientists in America, including Enrico Fermi, conducted their experiments there.
To this day I thank God and Al for making us leave. But for them my brush with history might have included leveling the city of Chicago with the push of a wrong button.
—William S. Asher lives in Westport, Connecticut.
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Readers are invited to submit their personal “brushes with history, ” for which our regular rates will be paid on publication. Unfortunately, we cannot correspond about or return submissions.
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