Carl Henrikson Narrator

Louis M. Starr Interviewer

January 18, 1955 615 Butler Library, Columbia University, New York City

First of all, my name is Carl Henrikson, Jr. I had nothing to do with the selection of the name. It happened to have been one that had been passed to the oldest son for seven generations. I kept up the custom by imposing the same name on my own son.

My dad was a Swedish immigrant who came over in 1896, coming fromProject Sweden in the province of Varmland. My mother was the daughter of Swedish homesteaders, nee Fredell, and lived in Minnesota all her life.

My dad used to tell very interesting stories about the hardships of theSociety earlier immigrants in making the sea journey and the cross-country journey to Minnesota. Even as late as 1896, the Swedish immigrants had hardships. The earlier immigrants,History of course, had greater hardships. Accommodations on the ships were extremely primitive. The immigrants, in many cases, had to bring and use their own food, their own blankets on shipboard. When they reached New York, in many instances, they found themselves in Oralthe hands of unscrupulous agents who arranged for their transportation to Minnesota. Even their sleeping car accommodations in those days were nothing like they are now. There were crude bunks built in the railroad cars, and the immigrants had to supply their own bedding. The cars wereHistorical poorly heated and extremely crowded, and the newcomers were glad when they reached the promised land of Minnesota.

The Swedish immigrationHistory to Minnesota st arted in about 1850. Several Swedes found their way up to the area just north of Minneapolis, via the Saint Croix River, an area now called Chisago County, and they wrote back to Sweden about the rich lands that were there merely for the taking, and of the beautiful lakes and forested areas.

When my dad got there in 1896, it was all taken, and his hopes for getting some of this rich farm land didn’tForest materialize.Minnesota But he had been an apprentice painter, and had learned the trade very well in Sweden, so he went into the painting business with my uncle, who had come over two years earlier. For many, many years, they were partners in painting and other businesses.

My mother told stories about the hardships of the early homesteader settlers--the cold winters, the primitive living conditions, and the hard work breaking the land and putting it into cultivation. My granddad on my mother’s side was a wagon maker and made sleighs also. I remember in my childhood many of these wagons--they were very well, built. The sleighs were still in existence. They were often pointed out to me. They were called “Fridell wagons” or “Fridell sleighs”. He made them while he conducted his farming activities. He used to bring the

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work into his kitchen when it got real cold; otherwise he worked his shop out by the barn.

These early Minnesota settlers were marvelous people. All of them weren’t farmers; many were tradesmen, but, in my opinion and as I remember them, I thought and still think that they were really great men. They overcame the obstacles of the country, and of the language. In that area where I lived, a town called Lindstrom, about ninety-eight percent of the inhabitants were Swedes or of Swedish descent. Swedish was used a great deal more in business or on the street than English. I recall my young brother, Paul. When he went to school with me, about three years after I had started, I had to translate for him. I don’t know how it happened that I learned English, but I did. But Paul was the only one who stuck with the Swedish. My other brother, Earl, never did learn how to speak Swedish; he then couldn’t even understand it. I can’t account for the difference--I can’t recall; it’s just too long ago. Earl was four years younger; Paul was two year younger, my sister Marie, six years younger. The children came two years apart in my family. It’s customary up in that country, and most families had at least six or seven children. I don’t know whether the Swedes were looking on children as security in old age, but it certainly proved out that way with a good many Swedish people. The parents inProject later years were very well cared for by successful children. Who had gone through very hard times and knew how to work hard.

Times were awfully hard in my early childhood days. I can rememberSociety that I used a good deal of clothing from wealthier neighbors who pitied us. When I got clothes that were actually clothes bought in the stores, I felt quite proud. History

I can remember the depression of 1907. There was very little business for my dad and my uncle, and they decided that the only way they keepOral the family eating was to go out to the harvest fields in the Dakotas. They bummed rides out to the Dakotas, but there were hundreds of thousands of others who had gone out for the same reason, so they found very little work, started back home broke and had to walk. My dad tells about howHistorical they used to wash their blistered feet in the creeks under the bridges, how they tried to get on the freights to burn their way back, but the freights were crowded with bums, and they were chased off at every station. History These hardships also were felt in the food we got. Even a few years later, I recall that we got our meat from rabbits that we could shoot. I learned how to shoot very early in life so that I could help supply meat--rabbits, squirrels. In the summer and in the winter we fished; in the winter we fished through the ice. So our food came pretty much from the country.

At a veryForest young age, IMinnesota had to go to work for my dad summers, helping him hang wallpaper. I used to do the pasting and he used to do the hanging. I think I was about twelve years old when I started to work for him. Also, I used to take care of the horses of the banker, Mr. Tuthill, across the street after school hours. In the summertime, in the evenings and in the mornings, before I would go to work for my dad, I would go out and catch frogs as bait for the fishermen. In the fall I would usually get started in school a month late because September was potato picking time. We would go out and help the farmers pick potatoes. I remember, too, that we were very well paid--a dollar a day, and of course, we got our meals free. Most of the farmers let us younger folks sleep, very proudly, of course, in beds. The older boys had to sleep out in the barn.

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When I was thirteen years old, I got a job as night telephone operator in my home town. I went to work at nine o’clock, and usually the last call at night was at eleven. There was a bedroom next to the office, the place where the board was, and I could sleep all night. My first call in the morning was the call for the horse doctor, the veterinarian, Dr. Son- well. I can still remember his number--it was number 30. The calls always came in within five minutes of six o’clock in the morning, because the farmers would go out into the barn, find one of the horses or cows down, and they were probably almost as concerned about the horses and cows as they were about members of their family, so the horse doctor got the first call in the morning, and usually he got several calls.

For that work, I got a salary of seven dollars a month. I held that job for three years. I had an awful lot of fun, too, because I was the only boy, and had a pretty good deep voice, within miles, and I used to enjoy talking until one or two o’clock in the morning with the women telephone operators up and down the line. Later on, when I reached the mature age of fifteen and sixteen, I made trips to call them, and quite some courtships existed. Project I knew about whatever went on in town from listening in on the telephone. I knew about the love life of a lot of married people, and I think probably, I knew more about that community than anybody there. But I kept it strictly confidential. Society We had party lines, of course. As I recall it, at that time we had about ninety subscribers. The party lines were very interesting because everybody listenedHistory in. We used to ring with a hand grinder; they didn’t have power in those days--only batteries. The equipment was pretty primitive. On some nights when we had heavy thunderstorms, all hell broke loose up in the office because we had our fuse board rightOral in the office and there was terrific crackling and flames flying in all directions.

One other thing. That telephone office was quiteHistorical a hangout. All my friends came up there and would sit with me from nine until ten thirty. The stories we told and the plan- fling that went on there was simply terrific. History I got fired from that job. I was in high school at the time, and freshman class and sophomore class, and the junior and senior class, too, had a flag contest. We were attempting to get our flags on top of the high school, and the one who could keep it there until noon of a certain day won the cont est. Well, one rainy night, the seniors got their flag up-I was a junior at the time--and I happened to look out the window and see the big flag up there, so I called one of my friends. We got a ladder,Forest and I abandonedMinnesota the switchboard, and we went down there and yanked down the senior flag. I got back and who was there in the office, but the branch manager of the company. He hadn’t been in town for months, but he happened to come in that morning and I got the gate. It was something I shouldn’t have done, of course, but it’s strange how those class loyalties can influence one.

There was other work, though. In the wintertime we trapped muskrat, and mink, when we could get them. That meant getting up at four thirty and five o’clock in the morning, running the trap line and skinning out the rats and putting them on boards before going to school. It was bitterly cold. It got down sometimes to twenty-five and thirty below zero. It was fairly profitable. The

3 average price of muskrat skins at that time was about from fifteen to twenty-five Cents a skin. You might get three and four dollars for a mink. For weasels you would get all the way from fifty cents to a dollar.

I remember one year we went down with our skins to St. Paul. St. Paul was quite a fur trading center in that time--there was a good deal of trapping that went on in Minnesota. The market had gone completely to pot. My dad happened to go down with me to help me sell my skins--I was only about twelve or thirteen years old at the time- -and we decided to have them tanned and hold them over for another year. Then, incidentally, they Cut fur mittens, caps and muffs for my mother and sister. The following year the skin market went up a good deal and we made out all right.

A friend of mine across the Street by the name of Clarence Tuthill, who incidentally happens to work in New York now--I happened to meet him quite by accident--the banker’s son, got interested in a thing called wireless and started to experiment around. He bought a wireless set, a transmitter and a receiver. I had another friend, Victor, who is in the insuranceProject business up in Minnesota at the present, who also bought a wireless set. Well, I couldn’t afford to buy one. I think they cost something like $18.75, and that was a lot of money. But I looked them over, read some very early literature on the wireless, and decided that I would build one. I was making a little bit of money by selling soda pop and candy at the ball games onSociety Sunday. I would make a profit on the average of $1.20 a Sunday. So I got a receiver and various parts and put together the transmitter, with the use of spark coil from my dad’s Historylaunch. Every time he wanted to use the launch, he had to go up and dismantle my wireless set to put his spark coil back in the launch.

Those were pioneering times in radio- -thisOral was back in 1912, when so-called tubes in radio had just been invented by Lee DeForest. We were very anxious to get a hold of one of these tubes. Clarence Tuthill, as I recall it, did get a hold of one, but I never did. We made our transmitter out of a spark coil. We used batteries at first, and aHistorical spark cap. We made a condenser out of plates of glass and zinc. Our spark cap we made Out of battery binding post and pieces of brass and zinc. My key for the transmitter, which incidentally was made up of my dad’s spark coil, was a scrap of brass and knob was a topHistory off an ink bottle. I put a battery binding post innot that with sealing wax and it worked quite well.

Later on, however, I had trouble with it, because we had been reading a little literature and we had been reading physics books, and we thought that we might apply something that we had read in a physics book. The principle that an electric current going through an electrolytic solution, say, of sulfuricForest acid, wouldMinnesota interrupt the current a tremendous number of times. As I recall it, it was at a frequency of some thousands of times a second. We decided that we would attempt to build one of these, and we did. We used a fruit jar and in that we had our electrolytic solution, four parts water to one part sulfuric acid. For one of the poles we put a heavy piece of copper wire into a medicine bottle. We drilled a hole in the bottom of the medicine, because we had a very narrow aperture coming out of it, and the other pole was a piece of lead. We decided we would hook it onto the electric lights, screw the vibrator and spark coil down, and see what we got.

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Well, we really got something. With a one inch spark cap we got a three inch hot flame, of very high frequency. The only trouble was when we drew that current off the electric lines--and incidentally the electric lines had just come into town--we flickered every light in town. There were five of us at that time with radio sets, and we all built electrolytic interrupters and used our spark coils. That was Clarence Tuthill, Lindstrom--the town was named after his granddad, Victor, whose father was a great merchant up in Lindstrom, and Francis Momberg, son of the jewelers. We were all Swedish boys, except Tuthill; Tuthill was not a Swede.

Just as soon as we saw the light flickering, we all dashed for sets, because we knew that somebody was on and we could go up and listen. That didn’t last too long because people complained. They wanted to know why the lights were flickering. Mr. Layton, as I recall it, was the lineman on that branch of the power company extending Out from St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin. He looked into it. He was quite a detective, and he found out what was happening. He placed it, and he said, “Well, boys, it’s perfectly all right, but you’re going to have a condenser on the pole outside the house. Otherwise we can’t let you carry on.” Well, we couldn’t afford a condenser, $200, so we just had to give up our wonderful electrolyticProject interrupter. At that time we formed a club and called it the Lindstrom Radio Club, because we were all convinced at that time that “wireless” would be a very temporary name for this electronic miracle of communication by air. Believe it or not, here we were fourteen and fifteen years old, and we named the club the Lindstrom Radio Club. We learned code, but not verySociety well, but it was rather handy with Clarence, because I could open up my window and yell over to him and ask him whether he got me, what did I say, and so on, so we couldHistory check by direct communication.

Then in 1915, some people came down from Duluth, Minnesota, to organize a unit of the Minnesota Naval Militia. They wanted a unitOral of at least forty to fifty men. There weren’t that many eligible people around, so they let a lot of us young fellows in. Our parents were perfectly willing to sign the application saying that we were eighteen years old, even though we were only fifteen and sixteen. All sorts of promises were made.Historical Yes, we would get airplanes that we could fly. Those of us in radio saw opportunities to become radio operators.

We used to drill once a weekHistory in the opera house of the home town, and then in the summertime we made weekend cruises on the U.S.S. Gopher, named after the animal symbol of Minnesota, the Gopher State. We would go up to Duluth on a Friday and come back Monday morning on these training cruises, and Clarence Tuthill, I and Chick Lindstrorn were radio operators.

But I got very sick of it. I didn’t know the code well enough to take it down. They were just using the ForestMorse Code.Minnesota

There were no tubes in the set. It was just a regular transmitter with a great big rotary gap. The little radio shack was exceedingly cramped, and when you opened up with that transmitter, the ozone smell became almost overpowering in that little airtight shack.

I can recall hearing the first music on radio. It was startling. It seems that an experimenter, an amateur on the hill up in Duluth, was fooling around attempting to transmit music, and he did, but the tone range was very narrow. But imagine my nodding off and suddenly hearing this

5 music in my receivers! It was astounding.

Each summer, also, they had cruises out on the Atlantic. In 1916, I went on a summer cruise on the U.S.S. Rhode Island, but had the misfortune of being put in the sick bay with pneumonia off Block Island. Here we were, kids sixteen years old, sailors, and I think pretty good ones. The young Swedish people up there certainly had learned how to work hard and were extremely conscientious and very susceptible to discipline, because Swedish homes are highly disciplined. I can remember in my home whenever we had visitors, the children lined up in a row. We had been taught how to bow and curtsey perfectly, and we had been taught never to speak unless spoken to. We had to disappear upstairs to our wood stove-heated rooms very early in the evening.

I’m sure the naval officers were aware that we were under eighteen. They winked at it in those days. The younger you can get them, the better you can train them. They probably do a little winking still today, if they can get the parents to sign. Project This was the Minnesota Naval Militia, of course tied up in some way with the United States Navy--I never knew exactly how.

In 1916, I read the Congressman Schall, the famous blind Congressman,Society later Senator from Minnesota and later ambassador to England, was going to give competitive examinations for appointments to Annapolis. I had made up my mind thatHistory I wanted a naval career, so even though I was sixteen and, as I recall it, had barely started in a course in geometry, I decided to prepare myself for those examinations and try to get the principal appointment. I got down there and I was heartbroken, because here were twentyOral- one people competing for this principal appointment. Many of them were high school graduated and college students.

I took the examination with the rest of them, bothHistorical a physical and an educational examination, and lo and behold, one day I got a telegram saying I had won the principal appointment at Annapolis. I still don’t understand what happened. I have a hunch that probably the good Congressman used other factors than merelyHistory the examinations in deciding on his appointment. Probably he thought it would be a good thing to have the upper part of his district represented.

So then I had to prepare for the entrance examinations to Annapolis. I went to a preparatory school, at that time called the Northwest Preparatory Academy, to prep for the exams. I worked very hard, took the examination, and at the beginning of the algebra exam I got a terrible nosebleed,Forest and couldn’tMinnesota finish the exam the way I wanted to. I flunked the algebra and of course flunked out of entrance, only because of that one subject, algebra. So the good Congressman was kind enough the following year to give me another app ointment without examination. However, that was in 1917 and the Naval Militia unit was thrown into the United States naval reserve force, and we were called into active service on March 20, 1917, so I did not take the examination. I never got to Annapolis, but I don’t particularly regret it.

I might say something about the early sports of the day in a little Swedish community. I remember too that most of the conversation in homes, on the street, in business places was

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Swedish. I learned how to understand Swedish, but none of us younger people ever tried to speak it. One brother did, but he got away from it, I think it was a little bit too bad that we didn’t. In later life I did learn how to speak Swedish in school at the University of Chicago under the tutelage of a professor with a German background.

My parents wanted us to speak good English. They didn’t encourage us to carry on with Swedish at all. All of the Swedes were most devout Americans. The thing that is a constant wonder to me is the fact that this thing that sociologists speak about so often--the conflict between the immigrant parents and the offspring coming up under a new culture, and all the difficulties that those conflicts brought about--just didn’t exist in the Swedish community.

The farm children did more Swedish conversation than the children in the small towns. The population of this small town where I lived at that time was about four hundred and fifty people. There was a town about two miles away, called Center City, which had a population of about two hundred. A town about three miles to the other side called Chisago City had a population of about three hundred. This town got its name from the Indian name for Projectthe lakes in that area. As a matter of fact, as I recall it, the Indian name was Kichisago. At one time it was great Indian country. Strangely enough, however, I never did find any Indian artifacts as much as I hunted around the country. I never looked for them. Probably I walked over them a good many times. Society Getting back to sports, we played baseball. We had a kid baseball team, and we traveled to nearby towns. We had a band; I played cornet in the band,History and most of the young fellows played in the band. We hunted. All the young boys hunted. We had old shotguns. My granddad let me have his old shotgun and almost burst into tears when he found a rust spot on it at one time, and then told me I could use his older gun, whichOral was a muzzle loader. I didn’t like the muzzle loader, so finally my dad let me use his gun, which was a very good one, incidentally. I had an old rifle which didn’t function any too well, a .22 rifle. Historical I had to be a meat shooter. In other words when I went out to shoot it was to keep the family in food. My dad used to count the shells or the bullets before I would go out, and I had to account for every shot that was missingHistory with game, rabbits, or in the fall I shot muskrats, or squirrels, or ducks. When you have that kind of pressure on you, you have to learn how to shoot.

There were no hunting licenses in those days, no trapping licenses. I don’t know when hunting licenses came into use in Minnesota, but certainly not before the First World War, as I recall it. There were deer hunting licenses, however, but not for small game. There weren’t any deer around thatForest country atMinnesota that time; there are now. They’ve come down from the north, which is strange.

We did a good deal of fishing and motor boating. There were more motorboats on the lake in those days than there are now. Of course now there are a good many outboard motor boats. In 1917, war was declared, about three weeks after we were mustered into the navy. Our unit was sent to Philadelphia and we were put on board the U.S.S. Massachusetts, which was obsolete then. There were two other ships in the navy yard; they called them part of the White Fleet, the famous White Fleet that went around the world. There was the U.S.S. Iowa and the U.S.S. Oregon. They had been in mothballs for years. Ships in mothballs in those days were really in

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mothballs tar on the deck an inch thick, and they had to chip all the paint off, repaint them and put them back into shape.

Then we were taken off those ships--they acted as sort of receiving stations--and assigned to various ships. At that time I remember the first convoy that went across the Atlantic, and one of my friends went across on it. Did we have a good time listening to his stories about that trip! There was submarine battle. I doubt that there ever was a submarine battle, but he told an interesting story anyhow.

Then the time came when volunteers were asked for extra hazardous duty. Well, of course, everybody volunteered for extra hazardous duty and I did too. The only thing was, when they selected the few people for this extra hazardous duty, I was the fortunate or the unfortunate one to be selected. It was for minesweepers. They had converted some railroad tugs--as I recall it, the Lehigh Railroad tugs--and they were to be used as minesweepers over on the other side. I happened to get the U.S.S. Genessee. There was also the U.S.S. Lykeris, the Cherokee--you see the minesweeper-tugboats were al named after Indian tribes. Project

Later on, new minesweepers were built and they were named after birds. They were palaces compared to these old railroad tugs. Society I should say that before we left Minnesota for Philadelphia some high officers came from Washington to my home town to inspect the Naval MilitiaHistory unit and examined people who wanted petty officer ratings. Instead of going for radio, I wanted to be up on the bridge where the real excitement was, so I had studied for a rating in quartermaster second class! At that time I think I was seventeen years old. Oral

I was quartermaster second class on this U.S.S. Genessee. When I went over to here in Philadelphia she was a pile of junk. The crew wasHistorical composed of young fellows who had been shipped in from the Midwest and various parts of the East Coast. None of them had ever been to sea before. I felt like an old sea dog compared to them, because I had had cruises and had been on the Atlantic the summerHistory before, I had to take on considerable responsibility.

We had an old Swedish skipper by the name of Teasel. Believe it or not, he couldn’t read English. He was an old merchantman that they had commissioned as a lieutenant.

We put out to sea. Our first assignment was to tow submarines from the lower Delaware up to the submarineForest base at MinnesotaNew London. We didn’t know what work we were going to be assigned to, and I remember that night when they got down there I was in my bunk. We had two signalmen, and I was in charge of the bridge gang--myself and two signalmen. The submarines would blink their lights, and these two boys couldn’t read the signals. I got up on the bridge, but I didn’t know whether I could, either, but I did manage to read them, and we picked up two submarines and towed them up to New London. Fortunately the weather was very calm.

When we got up there, we had several practice sessions with the other tugs towing submarines. We still didn’t know what we were going to do. Then one day we got orders to get the submarines in tow, provision the ship- - it was a coal burning tug and we had coal piled all over

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the ship--and we put out to sea. We wouldn’t know our destination until that evening. Destination: Ponta Delgada, Azores. A calm night, it was such a night out, and the tugs--there were three of us--had six submarines in tow and riding three. We were to change off towing them. The reason we were towing them was that they couldn’t get across the Atlantic under their own oil capacity.

The second night was a calm night, and the submarine bearers had their phonographs out on the deck, and we could hear the music across the water. I went to bed under those very calm conditions, and woke up toward morning. We were pitching violently, terrifically; we were coming into a hurricane.

I put my clothes on and went up to the bridge. I never realized that a ship could toss around from side to side so extremely and still stay afloat. The water was coming down the hatches and the dishes we had--and they were all crockery--were tumbling all over. We had lost our submarines; the tow lines had broken. The wind was screaming through the rigging. It roared. The rain was pouring down. We were in a hurricane. Project

For about forty-eight hours all our efforts were to stay afloat. We had lost not only the submarines completely, but the other tugs. I understand the Lykens turned back and had to be run aground. She went down in the same storm the Cherokee Queen also Societywent down. They lost about nineteen men. We were then just to the north and west of Bermuda, as I recall it, so we got orders by radio to pull into Bermuda. The other ships,History the submarines and the tugs, didn’t get the orders. We were the only tug to get to Bermuda. We waited, and no submarines. Finally, the commander of the Bushnell, which was a mother ship for the submarines in Bermuda, sent us a very distressing signal to the effect that weOral must now consider these submarines as lost with many brave men--the usual message of that kind. But fortunately one by one they showed up. Some of them showed up in Bermuda. One showed up, as I recall it, down at North Carolina, another one up at Portsmouth, New Hampshire,Historical and one of them, the smallest of them all--only half as large as the “L” boats, the one got all the way to Ponta Delgada in the Azores on her own. How she ever did I don’t know but she did. History We laid up in Bermuda for a while. We had no dishes. All of our bedding was soaked, all of our clothing was I had a sewing machine that was under water for days. I finally got that out and cleaned it up and remarkably it ran. On a tugboat you’ve got to double. I was the sail maker, the tailor, and quite a few other things.

After a fewForest days of thisMinnesota terrific hurricane, we did get to Bermuda. We had no charts because we didn’t expect to go there. We didn’t know the regulations and amenities of entering the harbor and we irritated the local British naval officials a great deal by brazenly sailing in the glassy bay without any recognition signals, and with little regard for channels and buoys. But we got in there, after scraping a few reefs.

I had orders to take a report over to the admiral in charge of the naval forces in that area, a British admiral. The skipper told me to hand it to the admiral personally. Well, I had learned to obey to the letter, so I went to the admiral’s home, and a colored servant in a white coat came to the door. It was right at lunchtime or dinnertime--I forget which. I said, “I have some documents

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that I would like to give to the Admiral personally.”

The servant said, “I will take them.”

I said, “No, my orders are to give them to the admiral personally.”

The admiral was in the dining room and he overheard me. He said, “Give those documents to the man and he’ll give them to me.”

I couldn’t see the admiral because he was around the corner, and I said, “I am sorry. My orders are to give these to the admiral personally.”

The admiral told me to get out and bring them back to the skipper, which I did. I don’t know what happened, but the skipper had the record or that.

We enjoyed Bermuda a great deal. All of these Midwestern sailors, mostProject of whom had never seen the ocean before, were now old salts.

I’d like to go back, however, to a few things that happened in Philadelphia before I went on the tug. I was reminded of it when I mentioned the Midwestern sailors whoSociety had never seen the ocean. History While waiting for my billet on the tug, I was at the camp called the receiving station. We had to go through a period of quarantine before being put on a ship for overseas. One Saturday afternoon orders came for a crew to go downOral and scrape the bottom of the U.S.S. Orion, which at that time was the biggest ship in the navy--it was a collier. Well, Saturday afternoon, those of us out of quarantine all went ashore. None of us wanted to stay in camp over the weekend. There were no petty officers around, and I was one ofHistorical the seniors, seventeen years old, a second class quartermaster. So I got orders to take this crew of some four hundred men down to scrape the bottom of the U.S.S. Orion. The U.S.S. Orion was put into dry-dock, the water was pumped out, and I had this huge crew--Historythe biggest command I’ve ever had in my life--and the biggest one I’ll ever have. I ran around that dry-dock with a great big megaphone and gave orders here and there, orders that I got from civilian workers, who told me what to do. But we got the bottom scraped in record time, and I got a very nice commendation for the job of scraping the bottom of the biggest ship in the navy at that time. None of these people scraping the bottom of the ship had ever seen a ship before. They all came from the Midwest. They were farmers from Iowa who had come throughForest the GreatMinnesota Lakes Naval Training Station. So it was a terrific experience for them to be so closely connected with a big ship, even though it was the bottom.

A collier was bigger than a battleship. These colliers were tremendously large. We had one little accident. As the water was being let out of the dry-dock, one of the floats on which the sailors were working with the long handled scrapers happened to get caught on the propeller. They didn’t get it off, the water went down and down, and the boys climbed on the propeller and were stranded. Some of them, however, went into the water.

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Of course, every sailor has a sweetheart in a port. They used to say a sailor has a sweetheart in every port; that isn’t quite true, because sailors don’t get to every port. In Philadelphia, I met a young lady, a Susan Cossard, up in Redwood Park, and there was the usual sad parting when I left Philadelphia and a stream of letters back and forth after I got to sea. Of course, I had another sweetheart at home, too with whom I correspond.

Returning to Bermuda, the submarines were put back in shape, we were put back in shape and cleaned up and we started out for the Azores. We got to the Azores. It wasn’t entirely an uneventful trip. One man was lost off one of the submarines one night. Submarines, of course, don’t carry lifeboats and it was impossible to find him. We looked around for a while, but it was pitch black, and we were traveling dark, and we just had to give him up.

We became hardened sailors. We still didn’t have any dishes to eat off. During the storm we had no dishes, did no cooking, and fed ourselves on the stores down in the hold. We got down into the hold, would open cases of tomatoes and fruit, and the cook did manage to cook a boiler full of coffee once in a great while. There was no place to sleep. We slept onProject the engine room gratings. The ship, at that time, was careening around. We did have a list indicator to show how far we rolled, and that showed a roll of forty-five degrees to one side and fifty-five to the other. Water poured in all over, even in the engine room. Of course, there was no washing. The salt water would dry on our faces and we would be salt-encrusted all over.Society

Sleeping on the engine room gratings was quite an athleticHistory achievement, because you had to get your fingers and your toes in to keep yourself from rolling over on top of the cylinder heads on the engine. We slept on life preservers. We did that about three or four nights, any time we had a heavy sea, and we had several heavy seas allOral the way from Bermuda to the Azores, and then we slept on topsides.

The skipper, old man Teasel, had been to sea enoughHistorical so that he had sense enough to be more frightened than the rest of us were. We had an executive officer who was a society man. As I recall it, he was both a lawyer and a doctor, but he liked his drink, and he was taken off the ship in Bermuda because he showedHistory himself not fit to fulfill that kind of an assignment.

The average age of the crew on the tug, as I recall it, was about nineteen years of age. We were all young. We had forty-eight on the crew. We had three commissioned officers: the captain, who was a two-striper; an executive officer, a stripe-and-a-half; and then we had a warrant engineer in charge of the engine room. ForestMinnesota The tugboat was, as I recall it, about one hundred and sixty feet long, had power of about one thousand horsepower-I forget what the tonnage was. It was very seaworthy, after it was fixed up to be seaworthy, after the ventilators were taken off the main deck and put up to the gun deck so that the seas wouldn’t wash down. But it was very wet sleeping. I remember trying to eat down below when the water was sloshing around down in the living quarters. There were benches along the edge of the bunks, and one heavy sea came along and those of us sitting with plates in our hand--tin-pie tins, incidentally, what we had scrounged around and found--slid clean across the deck and put our food right in the laps of the fellows sitting on the other side and had to stop

11 it. Everything we had was wet--it was terrible.

Well, we pulled into the Azores--I forget in how many days. I do know that the total sailing time across the Atlantic was thirty-nine sailing days--that I do remember--because you don’t make very much speed towing a couple of submarines.

When we got to the Azores, all of us thought it was a fabulous place. It was the tropics. Almost none of us, except the captain, had been in a tropical country, and we found the bumboats coming alongside selling pineapples six for a quarter, oranges at half a dollar for about half a bushel. Boy, this was the life. You could go ashore and get a meal for a thousand meals, which were sixty-six cents, and have everything you want--wines, liquors and anything you could ask for. That was the life. I remember as we pulled toward the Azores, I was mystified because I noticed this white area at the base of this mountainous island.

The island was about, as I recall it, seven or eight miles long and about two or three miles wide. This white area that looked like snow on the beach in the early half lightProject of dawn actually was the city of Ponta Delgada, a beautiful place with all the houses painted in pastel tints. None of us had ever seen anything like that. Bermuda was astounding enough to us Midwestern sailors, but the Azores, that was something. We happened to get in there by Christmas Day in 1917. I went to church that Christmas night and found all the churches crowded, andSociety I remarked how religious the people were. History We were standing at the back of this large church in Ponta Delgada, and one of the Portuguese Azoreans happened to overhear me, and he tapped me on the shoulder and said, “The churches are crowded on Christmas in your country,Oral too? You will find that on Sundays they are just as empty here as they are in your country,” which brought me up with a considerable start.

We were in the Azores just about a week or two,Historical getting prepared for a trip we knew not where, because we never knew ahead of time just where we were going. When we pulled out of the Azores, we headed northeast, and then we were told that we were to go to Queenstown, Ireland, still towing the submarines.History Incidentally, the captain of one of the submarines was Admiral Nimitz. At that time, he was Lieutenant Nimitz--I remember the name quite well. Naturally, that comes back to me because of the fame that he has gained since. I didn’t know him personally.

We had on board the tug, a commander who was in charge of the submarine flotilla. He was a charming fellow, and had a tremendous respect for the navigating ability of our Swedish captain, Teasel. ForestMinnesota

I must tell one story about Teasel now, because actually this event happened at New London, and the story is still being told in naval circles all over the world. However, as time has passed, the story has changed a good deal; I have heard a number of versions of it.

This is the story: (and incidentally, I have heard this story through two admirals, but they’ve got it on a different tug and with a different skipper, but this is actually the story.) At New London it was bitterly cold. We were waiting to tow the submarines to the Azores. The dock where we were tied up was infested with rats. We had no rat shields on our mooring lines, and the rats were

12

trying to climb up the lines to board the ship. We amused ours elves by having some of the boys hide back of the bulwarks of the tub, and a couple of us up on the bridge would tell the fellows when a rat was about halfway up the line. The boys would jump up and shake the lines, and down would fall the rats in the water.

The Swedish skipper came out of his cabin, which was just below the bridge, and was enjoying the fun too, when he spotted a huge gray rat about as big as a cat coming around the corner of the warehouse on the pier. He made the famous remark, “Look! Look, boys. Yesus, what a mice!”

Well, I’m sure that that story will be told for many years to come. Admiral Stone, who was in charge of the Mediterranean fleet, told the story so that I heard it one day at a luncheon table, and I made the mistake--yes, it was a mistake--to tell the Admiral the real story. One shouldn’t do those things.

I made the same mistake several years later by telling Admiral “Bull” Halsey the real story after I had heard a version of it from him at a luncheon table. I don’t think thatProject I will ever correct an admiral anymore, because I don’t think they are pleased to have themselves corrected.

Another instance, while I am on the Swedish skipper that indicated his background of education, was this: I was on the bridge one day, receiving a semaphore signal fromSociety a signalman off in the distance who was transmitting very slowly. So I was spelling out in disgust. So I slowly said, “Y- E-S.” I said, “Skipper, he said yes.” History

Old man Teasel said, “What did you say?” Oral I said, “He said yes.”

He said, “But what did you spell?” Historical

“I spelled Y-E-S.” History He said, “Is that the way you spell ‘yes’?”

I said, “Yes, how do you spell it?”

He said, “Why, J-A-S, of course.” ForestMinnesota In my luncheon with Admiral Bull Halsey- - I was one member of a luncheon group at the Union League Club--Bull Halsey, after personal discussion about the U.S.S. Genessee--and he knew it very well and told us some stories about the U.S.S. Genessee that I didn’t know, and particularly about our Swedish skipper--told the story of the difficulties and the hardships that we had in crossing the Atlantic. To hear him tell it, it was a much more harrowing story than I had ever imagined it was. Those stories, with time, have a way of getting more and more interesting.

Halsey was the captain of a destroyer, and part of the time, I think, he was the with the admiral’s staff. Admiral Simms was our American commander-in-chief. Incidentally, on the trip from

13

Bermuda to Queenstown, we were accompanied by the mother ship, the U.S.S. Bushnell, so we had the good solid company of a larger ship.

We had a terrible time getting into Queenstown. About two hundred miles out we were met by a destroyer convoy. That was a sight I’ll never forget. I had seen some camouflaged ships, but not with that new type of camouflage that the destroyers had at that time, the “patchwork quilt” type of camouflage. I never knew that a ship could roll and toss around as much as those destroyers could. We could watch the boys sliding on lines just like a strap that you would see in a streetcar or a subway car. They would grab the strap and slide down the cable down the deck at quite some speed. It was a very dangerous occupation.

But for real thrills, the sight of the crew of the submarine attaching a tow line from the submarine to our tug in a heavy sea was something that was really soul-stirring. In bitter winter, they would get out on the forecastle of the submarine, heaving on this very heavy tow line, dipping under water, completely under water, hiding all of the men. Then they would come up, and as soon as they were above water, they would yank in that tow lineProject and get it up on the submarine. My, how I pitied those poor fellows. Unfortunately, the shaping gear had not been invented to prevent tow lines from breaking off. We tried and tried to devise something to prevent cow lines parting, but we never did. So we often had that task of getting the submarines in tow again after a parted line. In heavy weather it was dirty businessSociety on the deck of a submarine. Why they weren’t washed off the deck, I don’t know. They had one little thin wire to hang onto from the bow of the submarine up to the conningHistory tower. As I recall it, it was just a very low wire, probably a foot above the deck around the edge of the deck, but that was all to keep them on board. And it was in midwinter, and bitterly cold. Oral I said we had a terrible time getting into Queenstown, and so we did. We got in there and it was pitch dark, and we approached the harbor entrance. We were told to follow one of the destroyers- -they would guide us in. The only thing we couldHistorical see on the destroyer was a dim blue light, well- shielded, on the after mast of the destroyer. We got into the inner harbor at Queenstown, and then the destroyer took a right-hand turn. We couldn’t see anything. It was pitch dark, and it was a heavy night. So we lostHistory our guide. We didn’t know where on earth to go, so we kept on going and plowed into the submarine nets. Well, then all hell broke loose. A light commenced to flash up on a hill, and a gun blasted. I woke up to the fact that probably that light up on the hill that was just flickering was a signal. I had never seen blinker lights used that fast before. So I gave an acknowledgement, asked them to go slowly, and sure enough it was a signal. We had plowed into the submarine nets, and a big searchlight went on. They saw that we weren’t a submarine. As I recallForest it, there wasMinnesota only a shot or two fired at us, neither of which hit us. Finally, we got an escort and got into Queenstown. I recall, too, that morning we waited and waited and waited for daylight, and no daylight. 7:30, 8:00, 9:00, and still dark. We commenced to realize that we were pretty far north. It finally got light some time after nine in the morning.

Well, the skipper had to go up and report. I didn’t learn about that famous report until this dinner with Bull Halsey. The skipper told about the hardships and they decided, after listening to him report, that he was some god.

14

Queenstown was another great new land to the Midwest sailors, but by this time we were really old tars. Here we were, with the British sloops and destroyers, and our own destroyers strung out in that beautiful harbor, with Queenst own on the hillside with its dominating cathedral spire, and the houses row on row in terraces on the hill. Queenstown was quite a place for the sailors on leave. By the time we got there, sailors were not permitted to go up to Cork. They had had a terrible battle a few weeks before we got there in which several sailors were hurt, and that was off limits for the rest of the war.

In Queenstown there was the main street down along the waterfront, with the famous Anchor Bar. That was the first time I ever saw barmaids. They had barmaids in Queenstown, not that I patronized the bars a great deal--I was too young. There was the Rob Roy Hotel and the Queens Hotel, and up on the hill, the famous Hog Wrassle. The Hog Wrassle was a public dance hail, a great big red sheet iron barn. But what a place for the sailors. One thing that disappointed me a great deal and made me pity the Irish people was that so few of them, even the younger people, had teeth. It was a rare person who, by the time he was seventeen and eighteen years old, had a full set of teeth in his mouth. The better class women, I suppose, didn’tProject frequent the streets very much. There wasn’t very much for the sailors to do.

They did build a club in an old bathhouse down along the waterfront. Later on they built a YMCA hut. Society

The favorite meal in Queenstown was steak and eggs.History All of us enjoyed going ashore to eat steak and eggs. Of course, the word was that the reason the Irish people’s teeth were so bad was that the water was bad. Consequently, the sailors thought they had better drink something different from water. Which they did--ale, porter, BlackOral and White, and other famous drinks.

I would like to get in here the story of a little girlfriend of mine in Queenstown. I was very proud of her because she had all her teeth. Her name wasHistorical Tessie O’Sullivan. She had a pal who was called Josie Fitzpatrick. Josie was a big husky gal; Tessie was more petite but was husky too. She should be, because Josie and Tessie worked in the dock- yards, and they were riveters. Josie was the riveter and TessieHistory was the holder -on. They prided themselves on the fact they would never go out with sailors. Everyone tried to make the grade, and one day I tried my luck. I merely went up and asked how I could get to the church. They said, “We don’t know and we don’t care.”

I said, “Well, goodness, I thought you could at least be civil.” ForestMinnesota So they said, “Well, we’ll show you.”

And that’s how I got to know Tessie and big Josie. Big Josie used to be called by the British, the “Boot” because she had slugged so many British sailors who attempted to approach her on the street. Tessie later on, I think, was responsible for probably saving my life.

Before I left Minnesota I got interested in the Boy Scout movement. It was a very young movement at that time. I had run across what ostensibly was a Boy Scout troop up in the hills back of the town, and I made myself acquainted and told them that I was interested in scout work

15 and knew something about it in America.

I was taken in by the group, got acquainted with them, went out on a hike or two with them. Incidentally, from the top of the hill you could overlook the harbor, and I pointed out the ship that I sailed on.

Some weeks later, some of the boys from the tug were up on the hill picking blackberries, and they ran across what looked like a hatch cover over some sort of a subterranean cave. Being curious, they lifted it up, and in there they saw a store of arms, guns. So immediately, they bled off for the admiralty house to report their find. The admiralty sent several lorries and got three lorries full of arms. These arms were for the Irish revolutionists, called Sinn Feiners. These arms had been smuggled in by German ships, believe it or not, in the early part of the war, probably by German submarines. What had happened when these boys discovered the arms is that they were observed by several of these boys who were Boy Scouts--in effect they were a junior training corp. of the revolutionist army. I didn’t know that; they were hiding under the guise of the Boy Scouts, I believe. Project

They had trailed the boys to the admiralty and down to the dock and watched and saw that they ahd gone out to the tugboat. So they connected this event with my activities with the Boy Scout troop--or the Sinn Fein youngsters. Society

I didn’t know about this until the next day. I went ashoreHistory and called at Tessie’s home, and had the door slammed in my face. Then I went down to a store, the back half of which was the living quarters of the family that owned it--they were friends of Tessie’s. The living quarters were separated from the front of the store by clothOral curtains. So I asked for Tessie and if she had been around. Before that they had been very friendly, and they just told me no. Well, I heard a movement back of the curtains, pulled the curtains aside and there was Tessie. So she pulled me behind the curtains and said, “Get right back onHistorical the ship. They’re going to put a placard up on ye.” The custom of the Sinn Feiners at that time when they executed anyone in ambush--because that’s the way the executions were carried out--would be to put a placard on the victims chest with a string around his neckHistory explaining what the offense had been so that people would know why he had been, shall we say, quasi-legally executed.

So Tessie explained to me that I was the one who had shown them where the guns were. The boys that had found the guns were from my ship, and I was going to have a placard pinned on me. She wanted me to go right back to the ship then. ForestMinnesota That was something to think about. After all, I had been wrongfully accused, but I didn’t feel that I should go around trying to explain to somebody about this accusation. So after that I was rather careful where I strayed when I went ashore in Queenstown, for fear that I might be wrongfully executed.

The Sinn Feiners were extremely active during World War I. You have read in history about their connivance with the Germans and so on. As I say, Queenstown was a very interesting place during the war.

16

We didn’t stay in Queenstown very long after we first came back. They made us ready for sea right away. They sent us out to tow in a torpedoed ship. We had assumed that we would probably be transferred someplace to sweep mines, but after we got over there, they decided that we would do rescue duty, towing in and trying to salvage torpedoed ships. I think we had been in about a day or two when they sent us out on our first assignment. When we were on the way to the ship we got a warning message by radio that there was a submarine in the vicinity, and the location was given. The shore radio stations had direction finding devices so that they could get the directions of any submarine radio signal, get a cross bearing on it, and tell pretty nearly where it was.

Well, lo and behold, when we checked on the position, we found it was right where we were! This warning had come from another ship, and the ship was only about a mile away from us. This was two days after we arrived in Queenstown. I put the glass on the ship. I had just got the spyglass in focus when there was a terrific eruption. I never knew that a torpedo could throw water and mess and debris as high as that geyser. I thought, “Oh, oh. My gosh, here we are here two days and already we’re right in the middle of it.” Project

We weren’t equipped to battle any submarines. We had a three inch gun on our forecastle, but that was not proper armament to hunt submarines. Later on they put depth charges on our fantail. Well, we went on and finished our task, and that was the last torpedoing,Society the only torpedoing that we witnessed through the whole war from early 1918, the first week in January, until the end of the war. We never saw this submarine. She never cameHistory up. Apparently she saw us and got the radio warning signals and knew that she had been spotted, and off she went.

We had a battle twice, but the most interestingOral one was the great battle of the Lusitania buoy. One rather misty morning, the lookout yelled, “Periscope ahoy two points on the port bow.” While the lookout yelled, there was a periscope with a wake behind it. The guns were manned. We had never fired the three inch gun before. IHistorical think our crew had been trained out at Great Lakes, and it was probably the first shot they had ever fired. So we fired at this periscope, and all the windows smashed in, of course. There was a terrific noise. History We fired two shots, and the periscope stayed right where it was, seemingly just steaming ahead. We got close enough so that we could get a view of it with our glasses, and very soon we found out we had been firing at a spar buoy marking the location where the Lusitania had gone. So it was an exciting battle. The tidal flow had made it look like a wake.

We had oneForest battle though,Minnesota and we took an awful lot of ribbing about it. One morning I was napping in my bunk and the pharmacist’s mate shook my shoulder and said, “Carl, get right up on the bridge. There’s a submarine alongside.”

I said, “Get away from me.”

He said, “No, I’m not kidding you.”

I said, “Why doesn’t that siren go off?”

17

He said, “The skipper doesn’t want to blow it. He doesn’t think they’ve seen us yet.”

I clambered out because I could see that he was white as a sheet and very much upset. I climbed up on the bridge and sure enough out here, not alongside, but out some five or six hundred yards, was a big submarine on the surface. She had two guns on her deck, and we could see her quite plainly. She was still in the water, and we were just turning to steam toward her. This was many months after the famous battle of the Lusitania buoy. Shortly after that, our gunner’s mate’s term expired and he was discharged and nobody had taken care of the gun.

We got pointed toward the submarine. We were really going to battle it this time. We found that the gun was all salted tight and we cou1dnt train it. So there was nothing to do but to turn around and get out of there as fast as we could. We had two machine guns, old Colt machine guns, that started out very slowly and then increasing in firing. One of my assignments, doubling, tripling or quadrupling in brass, was that of machine gunner. I had never fired. I did read the instruction book and knew how it worked. So I had the machine gun trained on the submarine in case anyone came out on deck. Project

They did come out on deck. As I recall it, we fired a few halfhearted shots at it, but we never knew where they went. We could see some spurts, but I don’t think anybody got hurt. When they got about three quarters of a mile or a mile away, they opened up on us,Society and fired, but they missed us by far. History The thing we were kidded about was this: of course, we immediately radioed for help. I remember the messages coming up to the bridge. One of them asked us what speed we could make. We said we could make eleven knots.Oral Another message came up about ten or fifteen minutes later. “What speed are you making?” The skipper sent back, “We are making fourteen knots.” That also became a saga of Queenstown. Years afterw ards, back in 1938 or 1939, a commander visited my office when I was directorHistorical of education and research for the National Association of Credit Men. At that time, I was asked to fill out my application for a commission as Lieutenant commander in the intelligence division. When I told him what my service had been during the war and mentionedHistory the Genessee, he immediately remembered that story. He had been in the message center at the time in Queenstown, and told about us being chased for two hours by this submarine.

Well, we came back into Queenstown exceedingly chagrined. We certainly were not welcomed back as heroes. We were immediately put into dry-dock. The admiral explained. We were going to have a Forestgun put on ourMinnesota stern, a gun that we would find much more useful, which was, of course, a pretty bare insult. Well, we did have the gun put on the stern, but we never did have occasion to use the guns again.

We did have occasion at one time to drop some depth charges. As I said, we could go about eleven knots. We had seen depth charges toss destroyers around, and they go pretty fast. We often wondered what on earth would happen to us when we rolled a depth charge off the end of our fantail.

18

We sighted a periscope one day. It was one of those days when there were misty patches. We had a terrible time trying to spot it. By that time, we had listening devices, and we had several men trained to use them. They heard signals from the submarine and directed us to where they thought it was. We got orders to drop the depth charge over the side, which we did, nothing happened. We dropped another, and nothing happened. We wondered why on earth these depth charges didn’t go off. A destroyer came up in the vicinity and we explained that we had dropped depth charges and they did not function. I think that was the first time I ever heard that word “function” used.

Well, when we got back into Queenstown, we found out why. We had a brand new gunner’s mate who knew nothing whatever about depth charges, and none of us knew that there was a safety fork on the end of the depth charge that had to be pulled before it was dropped overboard! So we dropped these two depth charges without properly arming them or taking off the safety fork. More chagrin.

By that time we were being kidded a great deal by other sailors becauseProject these stories went the rounds, of course-- about being chased by the submarine, about having a gun put on our stern because that’s where we would be most likely to use it, how our tail end was pointing at a submarine, about dropping the depth charges overboard without taking out the safety fork, about having a battle royal with the Lusitania buoy. Society

We lost our Swedish skipper early in our QueenstownHistory days. It seems they had psychologists even in those days, and some of the officers to whom Teasel had reported suspected that probably he was not entirely emotionally balanced. So they had him over for an examination. Teasel came back to the ship and said, “Henrikson, I passedOral my examination.”

“You passed your examination? Were you up for an increase in rating?” Historical “Oh no. Didn’t you know?”

“Know what?” History

“They were examining me to find out whether I’m crazy or not. I am, and I’m leaving the boat.” He was packing up. Teasel didn’t turn out to be so crazy. He didn’t like the tub. We found out that some months later, after undergoing more thorough examinations in the States, he had been given a berth on the fastest ship on the northern Atlantic, the U.S.S. NorthernForest Pacific,Minnesota as navigating officer; so he did all right.

Our new skipper had just been recently appointed ensign, and had risen in one fell swoop from boatswain’s mate second class to ensign. He was a coxswain on the admiral’s barge. One of the admirals was stationed on the U.S.S. Melville. I hope that if anyone reads this, they don’t take this as derogatory of the captain. We all felt, of course, that what on earth were we getting, a fellow who was a boatswain’s mate second class just a week before, and now he was coming over to take charge of our tub.

19

One of his first movements of the bug Genessee was to coal up in an old wooden coal hawk that one time had been the pride of the seas, a British wooden battleship. This coal hawk was close by the Melville, and the skipper insisted that he was going to give the engine room signals, which were bells and jingles. I had the wheel. Priorly, I had always handled the engine room signals and the wheel. It’s like driving an automobile, trying to have one fellow steer and the other fellow handle the clutch and the gearshift.

Well, he started giving orders. All his old shipmates on the Melville were lined up along the rail to see the new skipper in his tug. Again, I believed in following orders to the letter. The poor skipper got mixed up and I knew it, but I couldn’t grab the signals away from him. We ploughed into the wooden coal hawk--really smashed into her. We heard a great roar of laughter from all the boys along the rail of the Melville.

We got coaled up, and then we were to go back. Again this man was going to wheel her back. The poor fellow put her on the beach. He didn’t know the depth of the waters around harbor, and those of us who had been on the tub a while did, of course. I was nervousProject when I saw it, and felt it coming.

He later turned out to be a pretty good skipper. They didn’t can him for what he had done that day. Of course, a story went around that what helped him get his commissionSociety was that one night coming back from shore the admiral slipped off his barge, went into the water, and the boatswain yanked him out. Whether there’s any truth to the story,History I don’t know. Probably not.

The skipper picked up a mongrel pup on the shore one day. What a crying, unpleasant cur that dog was. None of us liked him. I was goingOral ashore and the captain asked me if I would take the dog ashore for a little airing. I said sure, I would take the dog ashore. I did, and everybody on the ship whispered out of the side of his mouth, “If you don’t lose that dog, believe me, it’s your neck.” Well, I didn’t mean to lose the dog, but Historicalwhile I was back in the hills, the tug got sudden orders to pull out. They whistled and whistled for me, but I didn’t hear the whistle, so I got left on the beach and lost the dog. History While I was on the beach, I went over to the Melville and slept, and went up to the signal station up on the hill run by the British navy. They were having flag hoist drills, maneuvering little fleets of brass ships. I went up there day after day after day, got in on the flag hoist drills, and learned these maneuver signals. We had none of that in the United States Navy.

Our destroyersForest were alsoMinnesota given orders to learn these fleet maneuver signals. We had a little fleet, as I recall it, of eight brass ships about one inch long that we maneuvered with each hoist of signals. Usually a hoist is three or four flags.

When the ship got back in, I made my peace with the captain for losing his dog. A few days later, they were going to run a contest on flag hoists. There was hoist after hoist, and the man maneuvered these ships around the deck on the bridge of our ship. The signals were being sent from the signal station up on top of the hill over on the dockyard on the island. Lo and behold, when the final hoist went up. “What is your disposition?” (In other words, “How are your ships arranged?) I looked down at my ships and gave orders for the flag hoist to the boys who were

20 doing the hoisting, and gave them what I thought was my disposition. I looked down the line at the British sloops, the British destroyers and the American destroyers, and my signal wasn’t the same as any of them--I was just different. Then when they raised the next signal, “The correct disposition should be. . . I never got such a thrill in all my life! “. . . The tugboat.”

I had gone in on it voluntarily; I didn’t have to get in on it.

For that little luck--it was probably luck--we got the British admiral’s barge alongside and got a “VGI”, which is a designation for excellence in signaling. It means “Very Good Indeed”. When I started this thing, the skipper said, “Look, this is entirely unofficial. This is entirely unofficial. I don’t have any part of this at all.”

I said, “Sure, we’re just practicing.”

But he was perfectly glad to welcome the admiral up the side of the ship when he came along. Of course, he welcomed the admiral much better than our old skipper, Teasel.Project Teasel would lie around in his undershirt, and when a visiting officer would approach in a boat, he would quickly put on his jacket, go down to the side of ship--a tugboat, you know, lies very low in the water; it’s three foot sea board, and then there’s about two feet--reach down, grab an officer by the hand, and lift him bodily with one hand from his boat up on the deck.Society His usual greeting would be this: “Teasel is my name.” History The officer would start telling the captain his name and the captain would say, “That’s all right. Never mind. Won’t know it five minutes from now anyhow.” That was always the standard greeting. Oral

One Teasel story which almost had me falling out of the rigging was when we were taking submarines in Cow. The tow line had parted asHistorical usual. It was right at lunchtime, and we all got up from our meals and went to work. I climbed the rigging because the sea was running quite heavily, and I had to be up there in order to see any semaphore signals or blinker signals from the conning tower while the tugHistory was in trough. The skipper was sitting down on the after deck house, giving orders on the detail of getting out the towing line. When he had run out of the galley he had put a lot of bacon and eggs in his white hat and put it right on his head. He would take off his hat every now and then and reach in and grab some bacon and some eggs, and put them in his mouth. He happened to look up at me while I was relaying a signal to him, and I saw the bacon grease and the egg yolks running down his forehead and his cheeks from under his hat. It was a sight to beholdForest and oneMinnesota long to be remembered.

The old skipper often told me that just as soon as he could he was going to retire from the sea and go on a farm, but I doubt that he ever did. He was a big, husky roly poly fellow with a white mustache and a florid face, a typical Swedish sea gull with a very strong Swedish accent. At that time, I couldn’t speak Swedish, but I could understand it. I could read it barely, from having read the comic sections of the Swedish newspapers when I was a boy. One time I had occasion to copy down a Swedish message in semaphore which the skipper could read and which I think I read very well too.

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The skipper was not one for too strict naval discipline. The crew both hated and loved Tease. I recall one evening, Teasel was a cigar smoker, and he was quite insistent that we be very careful about smoking around the decks in the war zone. This one night Teasel was smoking this glowing cigar--he was very careful except for his own cigar smoking- - and he went aft in the deck house. Suddenly the lookout called, “Rocket! Three points off the starboard beam!” I had happened to be looking back there at the same time and I knew what the lookout had seen. He had seen Teasel snap his cigar butt out over the ocean, and it looked like a rocket.

Old man Teasel had another kind of a dirty habit of relieving his body at night off the edge of the upper deck. One night he happened to sprinkle one of the sailors down below. I never heard a sailor cuss out a commanding officer the way he did, and he got by with it.

Some of the seas that we went through off Queenstown were terrific. It’s almost unbelievable what a tugboat like that can stand. One night we were in a terrifically heavy storm. I was trying to get some sleep on the floor of the pilot house, curled around the binnacleProject which holds the compass. We changed course. We were on patrol at that time. Usually when we were not out at sea after some ship, we patrolled an area of about thirty miles from the lightship outside Queens- town harbor and off to the east. Well, we changed course and got into a very bad sea. A whole wave hit us, came in through the door, and filled the pilot house. HereSociety was the highest part of the ship full of water, and I was submerged! It broke all the windows again. The windows in the pilot house broke regularly. I tried to fit storm curtainsHistory over it, and we had bars put across with canvas curtains to save them, but the sea has a terrific force, and it will go through canvas and glass like nothing. Oral One other experience at sea, which I thought was my last for a while was this: when we were towing, we had to rig the tap rail log out on a spar so as to clear the shrouds, the rigging that goes up from the bulwarks up to the top of the mast.Historical We had to do that so the log and the spinner on the end of the line wouldn’t get fouled in the towing line. Every hour we had to go down to read the log. We read that by letting go of one line and pulling the log forward, so that I could pull it up to the rail and read it. History

Well, this night the skipper changed course while I was down reading the log, and a terrific sea came over the bow and swept me off my feet. It, of course, took the spar and the tap rail log out, too. I felt myself being tossed along in a terrific turmoil of water, end over end. I felt something and grabbed it. It felt as if my arms were being torn right out of my shoulder sockets, but I held on. I supposeForest it was justMinnesota a matter of seconds when the water washed away, and I found myself holding on to a rung in the shrouds with my feet about four feet off the deck. It was just a happy grab at the shrouds or I’d have been at sea, and they couldn’t have picked me up.

Why men weren’t washed overboard with a freeboard of a few feet and the seas pouring over the sides all the time continues to be a wonder to me. One impression you get of the way the ship behaves at sea is when you stand on the very after part and goes into a trough, and you look downhill and see the bow way off and way down, pointing almost straight down. Then she heaves straight up and you look way uphill and see that bow pointing so far up. You see these huge waves that look to be sixty or seventy feet high--they’re probably only twenty-five or thirty

22 feet high, but that’s the way they look--and it’s just awesome. You wonder how on earth the tug is going to be kept from going completely awash and underneath. You had a lot of respect for shipbuilders when you saw what a ship like the tug could go through.

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