Armed Forces Day Memories
The day was November 11, 1958, and the place was New York City. I had arrived in the city from Maine after completing a 21 day leave following the completion of electronics school training in Great Lakes, Illinois earlier that year. I had traveled by train, and when I reached my destination, Grand Central Station in Manhattan, I found the place nearly deserted because if was a national holiday.
I made my way to the main concourse, which as I remember was one level above the street, and to a large, round information kiosk in the center of the room. There was one lady on duty. I was in my Navy uniform, of course, traveling with one handbag and a large sack-like thing that contained everything else. I had a set of orders, which were contained in an oversized, yellow envelope. The destination I was assigned and was seeking was the “USS Maury AGS-16 New York, New York.”
Now, even I, a kid from the country, knew that the ship wouldn’t be right there outside the train station, so I asked the lady if she could give me a hand locating the thing. Well, she read the destination, and remarked, “No idea.” As she was fumbling around to figure out who she might ask, a uniform policeman [most likely from the City’s Transit Authority, but I didn’t know that at the time] walked over from someplace along the shops surrounding the concourse area.
He asked if he could be of assistance, and the lady behind the counter was only too happy to be relieved of the chore. The policeman also looked at my orders and said, as if he might have been either a sailor or a marine, US Navy ships are usually at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Let me give them a call and see if it’s there. So he did, and when he put the phone down, said, no luck. She’s not there.
Well, he happened to know the phone number of the permanent headquarters of the all-services Shore Patrol in the city, and after calling them he learned that the ship was in fact not in New York, New York, or the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but rather at the Bethlehem Steel Repair Yard in Coney Island. Now that didn’t mean much to me, as I had visited the city only one time in my life – when I was about 16 years old, and I had never been to Coney Island.
The policeman read the situation quickly and said he knew exactly where my ship was and how I could get there. He waited for me to retrieve my two bags and instructed me to follow him. We walked to a long hallway and then down a long flight of stairs, coming out on the street next to a long line of waiting taxies. There were so many because it was a holiday and there were very few people on the street and traveling that holiday.
Anyway, the policeman went by himself and spoke quietly to the driver of the first taxicab driver in line, after which he said to me, give this guy a ten dollar bill and he’ll take you straight to your ship. I didn’t now if that was a good deal or not, but as I didn’t know how far we would be traveling, and the policeman had been good enough to make the arrangements, I paid the man and off we went.
Well, it turned out it was quite a long trip indeed. Thankfully the streets were not crowded and we were able to travel at a pretty good speed. Twists and turns and runs down many side streets and we were soon in Brooklyn, heading past LaGuardia Airport and on to the shipyards near Coney Island.
We arrived at the yard, the driver was told where to find the ship, and off we went. He dropped me at the foot of a hellishly long gangway leading from the pier up to the first deck of the ship. I thanked him and he drove off, apparently satisfied with his fare [maybe the only one of the day].
The USS Maury was about 600 feet long, and seemed monstrous to me as she sat next to the pier on that cool November morning. There was no one in sight, either on the pier or on the ship. I grabbed my handbag containing my orders and my large ‘seabag’ and proceeded up the gangway. I remembered that protocol required that I pause at the top, before stepping aboard, to salute the American flag which was most likely flying somewhere at the stern of the ship.
As I reached the top, I placed the handbag down, saluted, and retrieved my orders. Waiting for me near what I learned later was called the quarterdeck was the duty officer and his aide. In this case, the duty officer wasn’t an officer at all, but rather he was a 6’-4” tall Chief Petty Officer, with a chest full of ribbons and gold braid stripes and hash marks on his sleeve. The gold, I learned, denoted a twenty plus year career in the Navy without a blemish to his record of good conduct. The stack of ribbons denoted that he had seen some serious duty, most likely some of it in combat, over his career.
He was apparently not too busy, so my arrival might well have been the highlight of his morning. He walked part way to where I was standing, accompanied by his aide, a young seaman not unlike myself. The aide held out his hand, pointing to my orders, and I handed them over to him. He immediately went to a nearby stand and began recording information contained in the materials.
I came to attention, as I remembered I was supposed to do, and asked in my best voice, “permission to come aboard, sir.” Ordinarily enlisted men are not called sir, no matter how many stripes or how many ribbons, but I figured this guy was on this duty because the regular bunch of officers were taking the holiday off, and he got stuck as next in line of rank or seniority or something
I remember that he grinned, and said something like “permission granted, son” and so I proceeded to step off the gangway and board the ship. I reached back for the heavy, large seabag behind me, and stepped aboard. As it turned out, I had forgotten that the handbag was in front of me, and when I stepped forward I ended up tripping myself and fell forward onto the deck in a kind of spread-eagle fashion, face down and hands out.
Well, the duty officer, the Chief, a WWII and Korean War veteran, and one of the Navy’s true ‘old salts,’ was apparently neither surprised nor alarmed by what had just happened. In fact, while I was in the process of gathering myself back together, I think I heard him chuckle and maybe mutter something like ‘what in hell are they sending us now. . .’ or words to that effect.
Anyway, in short order I was given a firm handshake, welcomed aboard, and directed to follow the aid, who would lead me through the maze of interior passageways to my assigned space in a forward bunkroom. I ended up on that ship for the next two plus years, and when I left her in drydock in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii in the summer of 1960, we had traveled together for almost a year to and through the Mediterranean [including a trip into the Black Sea and a week-long visit to Odessa, Russia], a transit of the Panama canal, and across the Pacific for a 6-month long tour in Thailand.
I will always remember that Armed Forces Day fondly.
Paul Sherburne 491-29-75
US Navy 6/57 to 8/60