Thursday, December 29, 2005

airedale navy: "airedale "

Wednesday, December 28, 2005

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airedale navy

It must have been a hard winter world wide in 62/63. We were four months into our Med Cruise. It was so cold that it snowed at sea. The first two weeks of December saw CAG 1 on the USS FDR. It was in the single digits most of the time, but on two occasions it was below zero. When we turned into the wind to launch aircraft, it was well below zero with the wind chill. The rain, sleet, snow, stung like so many hot needles. I hoped the plane would go to the hangar deck for a 90 hour check, but no luck. We spent the Christmas Holidays in Naples, Italy. Boating was cancelled many nights because the sea in the Bay of Naples had eight to ten feet rollers. The Liberty launch would come abreast of the gangway, and you had to leap to catch the ladder. Try that after several beers. But when boating was cancelled you could spent the night ashore. I remember putting the collar on my peacoat, and thinking how nice and toasty it felt. ( or it could have been the beer). On Christmas Eve, in Naples, I stood the quarterdeck watch with a bosun second class, with five hash marks. I had just made AME3. He asked me how many times I had taken the test. I said once. He just shook his head . My job was to watch the gangway going down to the mess decks, so that drunken sailors wouldn't fall down the ladder and break their necks. Christmas in Naples is kinda like the 4th of July, and Christmas, all wrapped up in one . Lotsa fireworks, gunshots, and bells at midnight.

So yes, cold is cold

Tuesday, December 27, 2005

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Sunday, December 25, 2005

I was watching "A Charlie Brown Christmas" last night and had a flashback to Christmas 1962. We, the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, had left port in Cannes,France and were having flight operations in the northern Med as we sailed towards Naples, Italy and the holidays in port. It was very,very cold. Flight Quarters sounded at 0530. The second launch went out around 1130 hours . We had an hour and a half before the aircraft would return. We left the tie down chains, and turnbuckles between the island and catwalk, and headed towards the messdecks, via the passageway in the island. We went by the hangar deck and down another deck by the Marine Barracks to the messdecks on the starboard side. On the bulkhead outside the galley, a messcook had put up a poster of a Christmas Tree with the Charlie Brown characters on the margins. Charlie Brown, with his nervous grin was in the upper right corner. Lucy was on the left in the middle, with her hand pointing to the star on the tree top, just in front of Charlie Brown. It read "Merry Christmas" and a "Happy New Year". It was rather festive, and it broke the monotony of standing in line. After chow we had two more launches. The fourth of the day went out around 1600. Our "Nite Check" would relieve us and bring in the 1600 launch. We headed for the messdecks,and then we would head to our compartment on the three level. As we retraced our earlier steps to the chowhall we could hear laughter coming from the compartment outside the galley. When we got closer, we could see the reason for the chuckling. Some artist, standing in line, had changed the poster slightly. Charlie Brown's nervous grin was made even more pathetic with beads of perspiration added to his forehead. An obviously pregnant Lucy, complete with maternity dress, had her pointing hand changed to a shaking, balled fist. The artist added a speech a balloon over her head which read "Damn you Charlie Brown". It was funny and a great morale booster. It stayed up on the bulkhead for several days for all to enjoy.

Thoughts on a Cold Night

The dog was snoring, which woke me up, so I thought I’d go to the bathroom while I was awake. I couldn’t fall asleep right away, and I began to think of cold winter nights when I was a kid. In the 50’s, our house on Ward Street had a coal furnace. Each fall, before Halloween, dad would order coal for the winter. It would arrive in a dump truck, holding about three cubic yards of coal. The truck would pull into the neighbor’s driveway, as the coal chute was on that side of the house. The driver would run chute, much like a concrete chute to the basement window. I’d stand there and watch the coal rumble down into our coal bin, by the furnace. The driver would sweep the dust down, into our coal bin as he prepared to go. We were set for the winter. Our house being built in 1949 had only single pane glass in all the windows, which meant they would ice over when it got real cold. I mean ice a
half inch thick on the inside. November would find the onset of the really cold weather. Each morning. Mom would wake me up for school. She would start the gas oven, and open the door to get some heat into the kitchen. Then, whoever was available, often me, would go downstairs into the cold basement to stoke the furnace. That involved “shaking down the clinkers”, or coal cinders to the bottom of the furnace, to be taken out later and put on the driveway or for the trashman to pick up. Then I would get the big bladed coal shovel from the bin and get two or three shovels full of coal and put it on the burning embers. The furnace being stoked, it would be nice and toasty about the time I had to leave to catch the Loop bus. The furnace would have coal added at bedtime, at breakfast and any other time is was, as mom would say ”nippy”. I always think of that when I watch the part of
“A Christmas Carol”, where Scrooge chastises Bob Cratchit for adding coal to the fireplace n the office. On a normal winter the load of coal would the cold season. On those winters where it was unusually cold, and we ran out of coal, we would drive to Ecorse, and but several unit of packaged coal. The packaged coal would come in brown paper about one foot by one foot, by four inches thick. We would use them sparingly as they were expensive.
The guys I hung around with, had dads that were truck drivers or truck mechanics. The company they worked for hauled rolls of steel from the steel mills to the auto factories. To lock the rolls of steel on the truck bed, they used chains and lengths of rough one 4 x 4’s. when winter was long and they were out of coal, they’d saw the 4 x 4’s into two foot lengths and use them for heat. I used to help them throw the wood down into their coal bins.
At Christmas, everyone had real trees. We always got Scotch pine, The Strassers always got a balsam tree, you know, short needles. After Christmas, when everyone put their Christmas trees out for the trashman to pick up, we, Kenny and Tommy Strasser, Charlie Burkhardt, and I would collect them and take them down to vacant lots in the next block and stack them into Christmas tree forts, like log cabins, and have great snowball fights.