When I joined the U.S. Navy in January 1960, I was sent to Newport, Rhode Island, to learn Morse code and semaphore. I then reported to the USS Independence, and when I arrived in Norfolk, Virginia, my company commander sent me to officers’ school to learn about radar air interception of unidentified aircraft. I was the ship’s only enlisted man attending officers’ school for air control.
During this training I was always on the radar’s air picture when jet fighters were launched, but otherwise I was on the surface picture. To avoid collisions, whenever other ships appeared on radar, we would figure out CPA (closest point of approach)—time and distance.
When we left Norfolk Naval Base, we were sent to the Caribbean Sea, southeast of Cuba. This was during the naval blockade of the island in the fall of 1962, when high-altitude photographs showed Soviet missiles there, almost starting a war between the United States and the U.S.S.R. During that time I never left my radar set. I slept on the floor, and they’d bring my food up from the mess hall. This went on for five or six days. The officers would take over the air picture between 0800 and 1600 hours, and that’s when I’d try to sleep. I never showered or shaved; I must have stunk to high heaven.
Also during this time, we would go from a thirty-minute standby to launch an all-out attack on Cuba, then to a fifteen-minute standby, and, on a number of occasions, down to a five-minute standby. One evening an officer told me that the ship was going into complete communications and electronic silence. We were launching a radar aircraft between Cuba and Haiti in the Windward Passage, and it would transfer its radar image to my screen on the ship so I could observe any nearby surface contacts.
Just before midnight I noticed movement along the coast of Haiti, a ship heading west on a course of 285 degrees at seven knots. I called the watch officer, who in turn called the captain and the admiral, who was on board. Other officers showed up. They watched me track the hazy contact on my radar screen and decided to send out escort destroyers to intercept the unidentified vessel before it reached Cuba.
As suddenly as the officers had come, they all disappeared. I was alone again, but now I was tracking our destroyers heading to cut off the mystery ship. The officers returned early the next morning, so I fell asleep for a few hours, until word came in that the destroyers had stopped a Russian freighter with nuclear missiles on board. The destroyers made it turn around and head back toward home.
The news made me feel good, and I went back to sleep with a smile on my face while the officers stood around congratulating one another. When I awoke, I never heard another word about what had happened. But I won’t forget sitting in that quiet dark corner and finding that Russian freighter running along the coast of Haiti trying to make it to Cuba. It’s a small part of history, but I made it.
—Douglas K. Gitchel worked at the Chrysler Corporation for thirty years. He is now retired and living in Arizona.
“HOPPED-UP COUNTRY”
As a teenager I liked the sound of guitar music, and I practiced until I was fairly proficient at picking out tunes. Later I got an electric guitar, and lots of noise became my best creation, musically. After graduating from high school, I moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, and worked days and picked nights. I met Hank Williams, Sr., and saw Hank junior as a diaper baby in Bossier City, across the Red River from Shreveport. Later they moved to Nashville.
I won’t forget sitting in that quiet dark corner and finding a Russian freighter trying to make it to Cuba.
A couple of years later, with delusions of grandeur, I too went to Nashville, intending to pick on the Grand Ole Opry. I soon learned that the city was overrun with guitar players who could beat me, and most of them were starving. I went back South, got a real job, and just picked for fun. I moved to Arkansas, worked for American Oil, and did my picking on KELD radio in El Dorado and at various PTA and church functions.
In 1954 KELD called and asked if I could pick onstage that night with a young man trying to make a start m rock ’n’ roll. They offered to pay me seventy-five dollars. Were they kidding? That was more than I made in a whole week at my full-time job.
The stage was on one side of a football field, and a tent had been set up for the star. I was escorted backstage to meet him and get prepped for the show. By this time I was getting nervous. I was twenty-five. This kid was nineteen, dressed in a pale lavender suit, and hyper as a mule colt.
I started trying to back out of the deal, and he started trying to put me at ease. He didn’t smoke, drink, or curse, and he answered my questions “Yes, sir” or “No, sir.” When I told him I’d never picked rock music, he said, “Sir, my stuff is just hopped-up country.”
We went onstage and started the show. Fifteen minutes later he didn’t have a dry thread on him, and only two strings remained on his Martin D-18 guitar. The crowd was making so much noise they couldn’t hear my mistakes. After about an hour the singer said, “You did good,” and I headed home.
When I walked in the door and laid my money on the table, my wife asked how it had gone. I told her I played terrible but nobody heard it; they were screaming, fainting, dancing, and deaf. I told her about the kid, his good manners. I told her he had an energy that the crowd loved. I predicted he would make a million dollars in the next few years if his body could stand it. “Who was he?” she asked.
“He called himself Elvis Presley,” I said.
— Bob Festavan works for Cahaba Maintenance and Construction Co. in Alabaster, Alabama.
THE PROPHECY
I was nineteen, and I’d just finished up a year as a member of President Eisenhower’s honor guard. I loved marching in the weekly tattoos at the Iwo Jima Memorial and at our own Marine barracks. I loved the street parades, the diplomatic arrival and departure ceremonies, the sentry duty at Blair House when the President received guests of state. And I loved the two weeks out of every six when our platoon rotated from Washington to the President’s retreat at Camp David.
Now it was time for the general from Kansas to transfer his power to the patrician from Massachusetts, and I wondered if my second year in the guard would prove as memorable as the first.
I didn’t enjoy the inaugural parade. Anyone old enough will remember the deep snow and bitter cold. I remember being outside in the Capitol staging area four hours early, along with the honor guards from the other services—hundreds of marchers and not a restroom in sight.
“This guy’s going to get himself killed one day.... He thinks he’s invulnerable. And he’s going to get himself killed.”
Our first glimpse of Camelot came that night, at the inaugural ball. The orchestra played “Hail to the Chief,” and the President and Mrs. Kennedy were announced. He looked properly squared away, although to tell the truth, he needed a haircut; she, in her elegant white sheath, simply looked amazing. The effect was unmistakable: We stood in the presence of royalty.
But royalty rarely has the time or inclination to consider commoners, and our humble status was confirmed when the Kennedys first visited Camp David in October. “Listen up, people,” barked the top sergeant at a platoon briefing the day before. “The President and the First Lady want Caroline to think she’s a normal kid living a normal life. They don’t want their daughter to see any men in uniform. If you see her coming, if you see anyone in the presidential party coming, just hide in the woods.” This was a complete turnabout from the days when the President and Vice President would stop to chat with base personnel. It did not leave us with good feelings.
Nevertheless we spent a crisp fall weekend trying to provide topflight security while hiding from anyone in civilian clothes. History records that we succeeded in the security department; we utterly failed at avoiding Caroline. The First Daughter had free run of the camp, and she was everywhere. She socialized with us in the recreation lodge; she hitched a jeep ride with the roving patrol; she even dropped by to see us in our barracks. So much for the presidential dictum.
While Caroline cavorted about the camp, a Secret Service agent privately groused in the sentry house at the main gate. “This guy’s impossible,” he said, referring to the President. The agent was a veteran; I remembered him from last year at the Summer White House in Newport. He had reason to complain. While President Eisenhower had religiously followed Secret Service precautions to guard his safety, Kennedy often did not.
“We clear a chopper route, he decides to take the limo,” the agent said. “So we clear a route for the limo, and he decides to go another way. There’s no time to clear the new route, so we have to drive it cold. He’s making us nuts.” He shook his head. “And when we tell him to put the bulletproof bubble on the convertible, he says no. Says he doesn’t want anything between himself and the people. Can you believe it? Listen. This guy’s going to get himself killed one day. He really is. He thinks he’s invulnerable. And he’s going to get himself killed.”
—Stephen DeBock is a teacher and instructional media specialist for the Colts Neck, New Jersey, school system.
GANGLAND CONNECTION
When I was a seventh grader in the early 1940s, I delivered papers (the old tabloid Chicago Times) to houses on the 7200 block of South Prairie Avenue. Someone told me that Al Capone’s mother lived in one of the houses on the route. The subscribers at that house didn’t use the name Capone, but when I collected for the paper, a polite, softspoken, and very Italian-looking fellow would pay me.
I didn’t keep the route long, so I had little opportunity to verify the Capone connection. But as I made my way in the world during the course of a Navy career, the fact that I was born and raised in Chicago often elicited remarks about its gangster past. I would pipe up that I was part of that history: I used to deliver papers to Al Capone’s mother.
As the years went by, I began to doubt the story. After all, it was hearsay; the occupants of the house used a different name, and to the best of my knowledge, Al Capone conducted his business in other parts of the city. My fragile tie to his world came to seem like something 1 might have invented to make myself appear more important than I was.
Then I saw the article on Capone’s Chicago in your April 1995 issue, with the photograph of the house at 7244 South Prairie. It was exactly as I remembered it, even to the placement of the porch on the right (north) side. I was vindicated.
I only wish I had met the old lady.
—Ralph Enos, a retired Naval officer, works at the Naval Undersea Museum in Keyport, “Washington.
L.L. AND THE PRESIDENT’S MISSUS
In Freeport, Maine, diagonally across Main Street from L. L. Bean, stood the Patterson Block, a squat dark green building in which were located Cole’s Drug Store, and a gift shop called Ye Green T-Kettle. In 1933, the year I graduated from Freeport High School, Mr. Cole offered me a summer job as a soda jerk for a dollar a day. My classmates thought I was lucky.
From behind the soda fountain I could watch the comings and goings of the community. Since Bean’s mailorder business filled his building, he had located his salesroom in a small space at the rear of the third floor. To get there, a customer had to climb an open stairway on the outside of the building to a second-floor entrance and pass through the cutting room, redolent of leather and rubber, to an internal stairway to the third floor. Here arrows led through the sewing room and the shipping room and past a glass-enclosed office overlooking Main Street, where one could usually view Mr. Bean himself, a large, leonine man with a wide face, broad hands, and a booming voice.
One sultry August morning, when I was alone in the drugstore, I saw a Cadillac convertible with the top down pull into a parking space across the street. Bright chiffon scarves tied to the heads of the two women in the car flowed in the breeze. Behind them another sleek convertible took the next parking space. Two men dressed in solemn suits and shirts with starched collars jumped from the second car to assist the women.
The women moved to the sidewalk. They were dressed in skirts and what my mother called shirtwaists and wore flat-heeled shoes. One carried a clipboard and a small handbag. The other glanced briefly in a shop window before she turned to speak to her companion. It was Eleanor Roosevelt. I dashed to the street for a better look. They walked abreast toward Bean’s stairway, but Mrs. Roosevelt leaned forward as she moved so that she constantly had to look back at her friend with a movement that reminded me of a mother hen tucking a chick under her wing. Old Fred Ward, who worked at the drugstore, limped by without even recognizing her.
“Did you see who just drove into town?” I shouted. “Mrs. Roosevelt! “In 1933 Maine was not Roosevelt territory.
Someone had to be alerted. I felt like Paul Revere, but I was alone in the store and couldn’t leave. I flung open the door to Ye Green T-Kettle next door. “Did you see who just drove into town?” I shouted. Miss Strout, who had been my first-grade teacher and was now clerking as a summer job, was waiting on a customer. Miss Caldwell, the owner, was on her knees rearranging a display. She peered around the corner of the showcase. “Mrs. Roosevelt!” I proclaimed without waiting for an answer.
Miss Caldwell turned back to her chore. The message wasn’t for her. Nobody would waste his time bringing her such tidings. Miss Strout dismissed me with a look of disgust, an expression I remembered from earlier times.
“What do you expect me to do about it?” she asked.
“She just went up to Bean’s,” I went on excitedly.
“Who’s going to stop her?”
“She and Mr. Bean make a good pair, I would say,” the customer said. “He’s switched parties, you know.”
“Switched parties! That’s putting it mild,” Miss Strout retorted. “Ever since I can remember, he was chairman of the Republican Town Committee.”
“I can’t understand what he, of all people, sees in that Roosevelt,” Miss Caldwell called bitterly from the back of the store.
I saw a customer approaching the drugstore and hastened back. She had already heard that Mrs. Roosevelt was in town, and I was happy to verify.
“She’s driving her own car,” I revealed. “That’s it in front of the Post Office. I bet those two men in the other car are Secret Service.”
“More likely some of the gangsters who elected her husband.”
Another customer came in.
“Did you see Mrs. Roosevelt going up to Bean’s?” I asked, trying to keep my excitement intact.
“Guess not,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “What d’you suppose she’s up to in Freeport?”
“Probably on her way down to their summer place on the Bay of Fundy,” I suggested.
“If we’re lucky, that tide down there’ll come in and wash the whole tribe of them out to sea.” Both women laughed. In 1933 Maine was not Roosevelt territory.
More than a half hour later, Mr. Bean thrust his head out of the window in his office and shouted to the street below. “Hey, Bill,” he bellowed. After a pause he tried again. “Anybody seen Chief Bailey?”
“He’s over to Leighton’s garage, L.L.,” a boy’s voice answered from the street. “Want me to get him for you?”
“Sure thing,” boomed Mr. Bean. One of the Jordan boys tore around the corner. Almost immediately Chief Bailey appeared in the middle of the street.
“What’s the problem, Mr. Bean?”
“There you are, Bill. Good. The President’s missus is coming down. See that she gets out of town all right.”
The two women appeared on the landing at the head of the stairs. The Secret Service agents moved over and stood beside Mrs. Roosevelt’s car to open the door for her. By this time a small group had gathered, but no one approached her. She smiled at those who stared at her and walked to her car. The agents helped her into the driver’s seat and her companion in on the opposite side. She started the engine. Chief Bailey stopped traffic in all directions as she backed out into the street and headed north. The Secret Service followed at a discreet distance. —
Franklin F. Gould lives in San Diego, California, where he is a substitute teacher at San Diego Community College.
