Deep Freeze Oral History Project Interview with Charles A. Bevilacqua, CWO4, CEC USN (Ret.) conducted on August 3, 1999, by Dian O. Belanger

DOB: Today is the 3rd of August, 1999. I'm Dian Belanger. I'm speaking with Charles Bevilacqua about his experiences during Deep Freeze I.

Good morning, Charlie. Thanks so much for talking with me.

CB: Good morning to you, Dian, and I certainly welcome you to Meredith, New Hampshire, and especially to my home here on beautiful Lake Winnipesaukee. I've been looking forward to this interview for a long time and I'm glad you're here and on such a beautiful day.

DOB: Thank you, Charlie. Start by telling me just real briefly, Charlie, a little bit about your background: where you grew up, where you went to school, what you decided to do with your life, and in particular anything that might suggest you'd end up in a place like .

CB: Okay! I was born in Woburn, Massachusetts, on the 8th of June, 1930, and went to the schools in Woburn, Massachusetts, graduating in 1948. Immediately after graduating, I joined the and went right into training. Immediately after my training I went overseas to the island of , then into Korea as a youngster ill- trained for a war in Korea, but there I was. I then did a year tour with a detachment on Moen Island, Truk Atoll, Eastern Caroline Islands. My next Seabee deployment was to Subic Bay, Philippines, July 1951 to August 1952. By now I was a builder second class (BU2) with a lot of building experience and Quonset hut erection. The next Seabee tour was back to Guam, Mariana Islands, more construction and promotion to builder first class (BU1).

In high school my training was in the vocational trade in the carpentry business and I did a little carpentry before I went into the Seabees, so the Seabees was the natural service to go into. I wanted to be a Seabee rather than a sailor on a ship. And I pretty well thought I knew I was going to stay in for at least twenty years, anyway. I didn't think I'd stay in thirty years, but anyway, I'm glad for the experience.

My father was tragically murdered in 1933, leaving my wonderful mother with me three years old and brother Albert two years old. We grew up on welfare with less than nothing during the Depression years in cold winter, rat-infested homes in Woburn, Mass. We both enlisted in the U.S. Navy Seabees and both retired as commissioned officers— my brother as a full commander, and I as a chief warrant officer (W4).

DOB: How did you learn about opportunities for you in Antarctica?

CB: I started hearing about this in 1955 through Navy papers and really wasn't too interested in it until I started seeing more and more articles. And then the men assigned to Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 2

Antarctica began coming to Davisville . . . I was at Davisville, Rhode Island, the Seabee base, and getting ready to go on another deployment when I really rated shore duty, and I was now a first class petty officer. The Korean War was over, and I was looking for something further to enhance my career. I knew that an expedition going to Antarctica would certainly help my career.

I started inquiring about it, and when I started inquiring about it I started reading all the books I could on Antarctica and reading about Admiral Byrd, Amundsen, and Scott and the different other expeditions. The more I read the more I became interested. Up to that point in time, most of my deployments had been into the warmer climates, into the South Pacific, the islands of Truk and Guam and the Philippines were all warm climates. But I grew up in Massachusetts and skied in New Hampshire and I figured well, it may be a little bit colder in Antarctica, so I can tolerate it down there.

But I was very disappointed to find out when I really started getting interested that they were all filled up and they did not need another first class petty officer builder type. But I persisted. I kept going up to the MCB (Special) headquarters and keep inquiring around until I finally talked with a Lieutenant Dan Slosser who was really a line officer. He wasn't a Seabee, but I found out that they were going to build Quonset huts at McMurdo Sound. I really wanted to go to Little America because that's where Admiral Byrd had been and all the history was there and didn't want to really go to McMurdo, but the Quonset huts were going to be built at McMurdo. And I came to find out that nobody really knew much about how to build Quonset huts and I was sort of, for a youngster, pretty much an expert on Quonset hut erection.

DOB: How did you get to be an expert building Quonset huts?

CB: By building Quonset huts in the South Pacific on the islands of Guam and Korea and down in Truk in the Caroline Islands. It seemed as though everywhere I went we had to build those damn Quonset huts. And I say "damn" Quonset huts because they were beautiful, great buildings, strong and durable, but they were very difficult to build, and I wished I'd never, ever see another Quonset hut in my life to have to build. It was not so hard to erect the framework, but to nail on the metal corrugated sheeting was very hard on hands and fingers. I still cringe at the thought.

But talking to Dan Slosser, I mentioned that I knew how to build Quonset huts, and he was immediately interested in this because nobody knew much about these metal Quonset huts—not many on active duty had built them. So he started questioning me, and he got out a set of prints and I said, "I don't even need a set of prints. You can ask me anything about those Quonset huts you want to. I don't need a set of prints to build one of them." So he started asking me questions off the print, and I had all the answers for him. They passed the word and they said, "Hey. We've got a Seabee who knows how to build Quonset huts. But if you go, you're going to go to McMurdo and not Little America." I said, "Well, okay. That's fine with me. I'll go to McMurdo." Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 3

And then I became especially interested in going to McMurdo when I found out that the contingent that was at McMurdo and wintered over were going to be the ones that went to the . And I really wanted to go to the geographic South Pole.

So everything was falling into place, and before I knew it MCB (Special) saw to it that I got my orders changed to MCB (Special) to go to Antarctica and I was going to be the great Quonset hut builder expert. Damn!

DOB: Okay. Did you know much about Antarctica before you started reading about it in the 1950s?

CB: No, I did not. As I say, I was a youngster right out of high school, joined the Navy, entered the Seabees, and had very little inkling about Antarctica. Operation Highjump had gone on before I went in the service. That was in '47, and I knew very little about that. I was more interested in sports and girls than I was in what the U.S. Navy was doing in Antarctica.

DOB: So you were in Davisville in the summer of 1955. What did you do there to prepare you for this experience?

CB: Other than going up and being a pest of myself to MCB (Special) and anybody that I could talk to, really not very much because I was getting ready to go on another deployment elsewhere. I was going to go back to or someplace. I don't remember where I was going to go.

DOB: So you didn't have an assignment as part of the preparations for .

CB: Oh. After I got assigned to it, then I got in with the training, and my particular job there, my big job there, was to build maplewood wooden sleds. I was a carpenter and I was really good in the woodworking shop, and this was another good trade that I had. So I was assigned to the public works carpenter shop to build the sleds that were going to be towed behind the Weasels. Not the dog sleds or the big heavy sleds that were going to be towed behind the tractors, but they wanted some sleds that were going to be made out of beautiful maple lumber and lashed together with rawhide. This was no problem for me. I was just a natural in the woodworking shop, so I was a natural and a good asset to MCB (Special) in that case. I hadn't even gotten to the Quonset huts yet. But I was a natural, and the sleds came out beautiful and I just wish that I could've found some and had one today. They were great tow sleds to put behind the Weasels.

DOB: Did you have any cold weather survival training?

Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 4

CB: I did not have any cold weather survival training other than what I knew from New Hampshire and Massachusetts in my previous skiing as a youngster. No, I had no cold weather training, but I loved alpine skiing and still do.

DOB: So you went to Antarctica to do building. Did you have enough building supplies and all of the materials that you needed? Did you get there and say, oh, we forgot something?

CB: Prior to going to Antarctica, I had been in the Seabees. I was in the Seabees since like I say '48, so I guess I was in for about seven years. And at that time, those were the lean years as far as supplies and tools were concerned, so I had to do . . . my training before that was a lot of make do with what you had. Improper tools, improper material to do a job and expected to do a good job with not the right stuff. So when we went to Antarctica, we really had a lot of tools, a lot of equipment. We were missing some things, but we had the old spirit of CAN-DO! And you just made do with what you had.

DOB: Can you think of an example?

CB: Can I think of an example? Right now I can't think of an example. Yes, I can, I think. In the building of the Quonset huts, we didn't have the proper squares, but I knew of the triangulation of the three-four-five. That was three foot by four foot by five foot, the five being the hypotenuse of a right triangle which made a real big right triangle, so I used that method in laying out the Quonset huts that we had to build and the other buildings also. Rather than trying to use a square, I used the three-four-five rule to lay out the buildings and the criss-cross method, using a long tape measure.

I wasn't the senior builder, I was the second in line. A Chief Wise was senior to me. He was already a chief. I was a first class petty officer on the chief's promotion list. But Chief Wise was the senior builder and a good builder. But that's a story for a little bit later on what happened to him to make me the senior builder at McMurdo and Pole Station.

DOB: Tell it.

CB: That story is the loss of Petty Officer Richard T. Williams, construction driver third class, for whom Williams (Willie) Field, one of the air landing strips at McMurdo, is named after.

DOB: I will get back to that. Okay. I want to talk just a moment about the trip. You were on the USS Wyandot AKA-92 and I'm curious about what you were seeing and hearing and feeling as you approached the high latitudes on this ship.

CB: I wrote a diary, and my diary is pretty comprehensive about it. But it was all a great experience for me. I always enjoyed traveling, and although I was really due for shore duty, I took on this deployment to Antarctica. I was really delighted to make the trip Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 5

down there and to see all these things that hardly anybody else had seen before. This was a great adventure for me.

DOB: What did you see that stands out in your mind?

CB: Besides the girls in New Zealand?

DOB: South of New Zealand.

CB: South of New Zealand. Okay. We'll skip the part of New Zealand. But anyway, of course starting to see the first ice pack, the first icebergs, was something that I had never seen before other than in pictures and studying in school. They didn't have that much interest to me because they were so far away that I thought I'd never see one in my whole life. And then I started to see these icebergs and then realizing that 85 percent of that berg was under the water and I was only seeing a very small part of it. And that that ice that I was looking at was tens of thousands of years old, and it was finally calving off from the continent of snow that fell jillions of years ago.

So the further south I got, the more intrigued I became, and I spent a great deal of time outside on the deck of the ship just waiting for anything else. But even the seagulls or the seabirds flying over, the direction of the waves intrigued me, and the other ships on the horizon that were sailing down with us. Anything that was going on I tried to find out as much as I could about it. I was just intrigued by the whole experience, a great adventure.

DOB: Was there anything about it that surprised you?

CB: The extension of the trip down and the roughness of the water. I heard that the trip was going to be a rough one. I had sailed across the Pacific a number of times on Navy ships because we didn't travel by air in those days. When we went on deployment we went everywhere by ship, and we were on ships for a long time. So I was on this ship for a long time, but these were definitely the roughest waters for sure, and the ship rolled and rolled. However, I was very pleased that the rougher it got, the better I got. It seemed like the calmer the water was, the queasier I got. That was interesting. It seemed like the rougher the seas, and if the ship was heading into the seas, I got better.

And of course the splitting of the bamboo that we had to split on the way down—I don't know if anybody's ever brought that up—but we picked up a load of bamboo in . On the trip down, we had to go through the Panama Canal out of Norfolk, Virginia. And the splitting of a jillion trail . . . bamboo splits for the trail flags, and we just split and split and split. Of course we'd come to a real crooked one and a hard one, we'd toss it over the side. Today I wonder if scientists find a piece of bamboo on one of those southern islands and say, oh my gosh, this was a tropical paradise just a few hundred Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 6

years ago, and it was the bamboo we tossed over the side of the ship that was too crooked for us to split into trail markers. But I sure remember that part of it.

And I remember some of the entertainment that the chaplain put on. He was just an exceptional . . . you probably heard about Father John Condit, and we were privileged to have him on the ship. He was forever entertaining us, and we just got to know him all the more and to fall in love with the guy. He was our buddy. He was a great, great person. Wish he were still here for you to meet. He would have so much to tell you about this Antarctica . . . so many things that we're not privy to that people told him that he could probably tell today. And he was a great storyteller.

DOB: You liked him.

CB: I—for a man to say about another man—I adored our commanding officer, David Canham. I thought the world of our chaplain, Father John Condit, and our doctor, Dr. Taylor. These three people, to me, just get more important, and I just miss them all the more every day I think about them because they just get bigger and bigger in life, those three people. They enhanced my life. They made me a far better man today through my association with them.

They all added certain different things to me. Commander Canham taught me leadership. I saw so much leadership in that man in a quiet, subtle way, and I think I just wanted to be like him. As a leader, when I became a chief and a warrant officer, I look back on many commanding officers, but Canham stands out and I said I've got to try to be like him because he was just inspiring. Forty-five years later, that man still stands out in my admiration and respect.

DOB: Did you ever figure out what there was about his example that made him special?

CB: Well, one thing, his size and his good looks. I mean his size and his good looks just commanded respect, but his quiet, demure way and his smile and he just never seemed to get rattled and always had a pleasant air about him, and his knowledge and his concern for us. We were all very special to him. Bob Chaudoin, his yeoman, would best describe Canham.

I can always remember a conversation I had with him, and everybody was talking to this young lieutenant commander. "You take care of my son," and "You take care of my husband." And one day he was talking to me and he says, "Who's going to take care of me? I'm younger than some of these guys." Well, I guess we all saw to it that . . . we respected him so much that we saw to it that we were going to take care of him by just trying to do as good a job as we could.

The chaplain . . . an entertainer and a great person. The religion was good and he never pushed it on anybody. He let everybody take what they could out of what he preached. Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 7

And just his natural ability to play so many musical instruments and to walk into a hut and organize a show. He'd put on these shows you probably heard about. Just by walking in, and I remember him coming into the chief's hut—I was a chief then—and coming in and having a few beers with us and talking and laughing and then, "By the way, chiefs, you're going to put on a show in three weeks." "Get outta here, Father. We're not putting on one of those shows. Let the enlisted men, let the officers do that. The chiefs aren't going to do that." Well, he talked us into putting on a great Saturday night show, and just because of his manner and all the paraphernalia that he had brought to McMurdo just to put on shows with.

Nobody understood what he had in all those boxes that were painted green on the corner, or whatever color that the chaplain had. Why has the chaplain got so many of these boxes? Well, they were just full of paraphernalia that he needed for his shows and his musical instruments, dresses, skirts, hats, dolls and what have you.

And then Doc Taylor was just a marvelous person. He was actually . . . I don't know if this story has ever come out. One of the last people to come into the battalion was our doctor. We just couldn't seem to get a doctor assigned and we're always wondering, when is our doctor going to come? Little America had their doctor, but the ones going to McMurdo, we didn't have our doctor yet. Finally, just before we left, our doctor showed up and it was Doc Taylor. He was bald-headed, kind of stooped over and he walked with a little bit of a gait. He was probably only eight or ten years older than some of the chiefs, but I remember looking at him and saying, "My gosh. Why are they sending this old doctor down to Antarctica? He's going to die on us. How is he going to survive down there?"

Well, Doc Taylor turned out to be not only a marvelous doctor, a wonderful person of great leadership, but he also turned out to be the most virile of all of us. I don't know if you've heard this before. He actually fathered the last three children of any of us, and here's a guy we thought was going to die on us in Antarctica, and he fathered the last three kids. Doc Taylor was the father of singer/entertainers James Taylor and Livingston Taylor. He had divorced their mother and married a younger woman (Suzanne) and fathered three children with her in 1983, 1986, and 1989. Doc Taylor and his new family lived in in the 1980s. My friend, Jim Rooney, and I occasionally visited with them in their home in Boston.

DOB: Well, we're way ahead of ourselves. I want to go back to the early days at McMurdo Sound. The ice was far farther north than had been anticipated. And there was just a lot of difficulty and delay in getting to Ross Island and getting construction started and the offloading completed and so on, and of course that's always a problem because the summer season is very short. And until the Glacier came back to break you in closer, you were hauling supplies from a great distance.

Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 8

CB: The ice was about—maybe other people would know more than I do—but I think we were about forty miles out from Hut Point. We were held out by the ice. And of course now we're getting into . . . we arrived in late December, but now it's early January and the little , the smaller ones—the Eastwind and the Northwind and the Edisto— couldn't seem to break in. And it was past the halfway point for the construction season. Now, they fly down in September and October and start the construction season. Here we're into January, ninety-three of us are going to winter over, and nothing, absolutely nothing, has been built. Not even a tent is up. And we're still forty miles out.

Well, we got a channel broken in about ten miles, and most of us were ill-experienced on ice. I had never operated off of ice. Only a few had any ice experience, but the push was on because nothing had been built. And wow, we're way, way behind on construction and the ships are going to be leaving in a few weeks. The ships are going to leave out of there the end of February or early March at the latest.

So the push was on to get some supplies to Hut Point, so they put some sleds over the side of the USS Wyandot and some tractors to start hauling supplies across this improper ice, this rotten ice, this cracked ice that was completely unsafe for heavy tractors, let alone the lighter vehicles, the Weasels. But it was certainly not conducive to the D-4s and the D-8s, tractors that weighed ten and thirty tons.

DOB: Who would've known that that ice was poor or could you just tell?

CB: We really didn't know. We lacked the experience of operating on ice. We didn't have any way of measuring the thickness. They put a tractor over the side and it held up. The planes were on the ice. The R4s, the R5, and the P2Vs were on the ice, and I don't know why they never fell through the ice and went down because they were even heavier, but they were further in than we were. But the push was on. We just had to get going and take chances. So it was the 3rd or 4th of January 1956 when we started hauling supplies in, and then they decided that Cape Armitage, Hut Point, was just too far to go and we're going to change the site to Cape Royds.

DOB: Cape Evans?

CB: Cape Evans. Yes. Change the site to Cape Evans which was closer by about twenty miles, I believe. Dick Bowers would have the right answer to that. So we were headed there, and we were hauling supplies across the ice and we came to a big crack. We went across a lot of smaller cracks, water came up, and we still didn't know. We should've realized then that this was just completely unsafe, but you're trying to do a job. You're trying to get on with the expedition. You don't want to be the one that goes back and says, "Hey, look. We don't belong on the ice. It's unsafe, somebody's going to get killed, we're going to lose a tractor and we're going to lose some people, we're going to lose supplies. We just can't make it across." Nobody wanted to take that responsibility to Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 9

stop what was already too late getting started. So I can't really put the blame on anybody. It was just the rush of the things, the inexperience.

And I guess the experienced people that maybe would have known didn't seem to be with us. They were off at Little America, which was a historical site for the Americans up to that point in time. We didn't have Captain Black, and Admiral Dufek wasn't here. I don't know where Admiral Byrd was, I don't know where Paul Siple was. These are people . . . I think they were over at Little America. But they're the ones that could've said, "Hey, this ice is unsafe, and we've got thirty miles of this stuff? We'll never make it. Load the tractors and sleds back aboard until ice conditions improve."

But anyway, we found this bigger crack which we didn't even dare go across. It was about three or four foot wide with water in it and seals lying about. So we went back and complained about this. A decision was made to build a big, heavy, wood timber bridge. So we got some heavy timbers, some telephone poles and some heavy planking off of the ship, and we built a big, substantial, heavy bridge and dragged that back to the big crack. It was about ten miles away from the ship, and we pushed that across the crack, all without sleep. You just worked, hardly ate, and did not sleep.

I don't know how we ever worked. The only thing was we were young. I was twenty- five years old and wanted to do a good job and wanted to work as much as I could. And the guys next to me were my age or even younger that were working for me, and we were working for Chief Wise who was the senior person on this particular trip that we're making on the ice, hauling in building and food supplies.

So we pushed the bridge across, and then we went back and got the heavier tractors and came back out with a sled. Then Al Hisey, one of my builders, a second class petty officer or a third at the time, drove a smaller tractor (D-4) up onto this bridge spanning this big crack, and a little bit of water came up but it was okay. The bridge held, the crack held. He went across the bridge and went about forty or sixty feet or so, turned around and came back, then stopped up on the bridge. Everything seemed to be okay. A little settling, but that little settling should've told us that the ice is not safe. But we were young. We were inexperienced and we wanted to proceed ahead. Hisey then drove off the bridge and parked the D-4 tractor.

Then Williams got in the bigger, heavier D-8 tractor. We unhooked the sled and Williams started to drive across the open crack, over the bridge. I was walking alongside of the D-8 with Chief Wise. We were watching as things were going along. We were walking right alongside the tractor. I think Chief Wise was on one side and I was on the other. Williams got up on the bridge and that was fine and it held, but more water came up than the smaller tractor. But again, we didn't see the signs. We wanted to just keep going.

DOB: So how did you get across? Did you walk on the bridge? Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 10

CB: Yes, I walked up on the bridge right alongside the tractor, I went across the bridge. I think Willie stopped briefly but I'm not sure. But he was leaning out the door, the door was locked open and the top was off the tractor cab housing. He was inside the cab. Then he proceeded on and we says, "Everything looks okay. A little water coming up." But the first things on our mind was jump—the word "jump." That was we were just ready to say jump because now we're getting scared. But I feel now, as I look back, nobody wanted to admit that they were concerned or scared. You wanted to get on with the job. You didn't want to be the one that says, "Stop the tractor. Go back," and then somebody say, "Well, Bevilacqua said it was unsafe." "Well, who is Bevilacqua to say the ice is unsafe" or "Who is Chief Wise to say stop!" So anyway, we went off the bridge—

DOB: That violates the can-do spirit, doesn't it?

CB: Very well put. I didn't think of that but I'll remember that from here on out. So we proceeded on. Now Williams is my friend. We had been on liberty together and I kind of knew him for a short time. I lent him my car back in Rhode Island to go home for his last trip home because he was going to get married when we came back. We had a short time off, just before we left Davisville, so I let him take my car home. But anyway, this is my friend.

Willie went about forty or sixty feet beyond the bridge, and then all of a sudden the tractor just broke through the ice. And I'm yelling at him, "Jump!" And he's yelling at me, "Jump!" Everybody's just yelling "Jump!" Chief Wise was on the other side of the D-8. The D-8 toppled over, hit me, dragged me down under the water with Williams. He was leaning out the door when I saw him, heading out the door, because I was looking at him yelling "Jump!"

I went under the ice and now the tractor is gone because the water is very deep, something like 600 fathoms, 3,600 feet deep, but we didn't know that at the time. I ended up under the ice and struggled to get through. Well, my clothes buoyed me up right away, and I was a good swimmer anyway. So I struggled to the surface, and as soon as I struggled to the surface, I said, "Where's Willie?" Immediately up came an empty gas can that was inside the tractor. A red five-gallon metal can—we didn't have plastic in those days. Up came a red metal gas can, and I remember grabbing that and flinging that, just throwing it to get it out of the way because I was pushing ice out of the way to make a hole for Willie and trying to find him under the ice.

Now at this point my clothes are now starting to get wet and I started to sink, so the guys hauled me out. I immediately took my clothes off. This is my buddy. He's right there. My friend is right there. I was right there, he had to be right there. I took my heavy outer clothes off and my boots and I jumped back in again into the water and broken ice. I started pushing ice away. I'm all shook up, I'm all excited, the adrenaline's going like Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 11

crazy. I'm twenty-five years old, my friend is right here. If I can just make a hole, Willie will pop up and we'll get him out of the water.

Well, up came a seat, and I remember yelling, "Here he is! Here he is!" because I could see . . . I'm making a hole and here comes this thing. Well, it was the seat from inside the tractor. That was too heavy for me to move, and I couldn't move that, but I was kind of using it as a little bit of buoyancy as I was kicking ice out of the way and I'm yelling, "Willie! Willie! Willie!" But of course Willie didn't come up. And now I feel that I'm starting to get very cold, so the guys dragged me out. I crawled up onto the ice, sank to my knees and started praying.

DOB: How big a hole is there in the ice?

CB: Well, the size of the tractor is quite big, so it's a big, big hole.

DOB: As big as the tractor?

CB: Bigger than the tractor. Other ice went, too. It was as big as this porch, perhaps. So it was a big hole, but it was all full of chunks of ice that floated on the surface, completely covering the hole.

I started getting cold and then I went into shock and hypothermia. They then put me in the D-4 that Hisey had just driven across, which was warm, and somebody got in there and started rubbing me and trying to keep me going because now I'm shaking and I'm in shock. I can't remember going back to the ship, but they say that they flagged a helicopter—it took a while—but they got me back to the ship in a helicopter. I don't remember that at all. I remember people helping me up the gangway, carrying me up the gangway of the Wyandot and putting me in sickbay, treating me and then asking me questions.

[Interruption]

CB: I don't remember how I got back to the ship, but they do say that, and I wrote in my diary because I guess they told me later on that they got a helicopter to take me back. I don't remember that part. But I remember them trying to sedate me and they couldn't sedate me, I remember that, until they finally got enough stuff in me that they got me to sleep and rest. But when I woke up, I was kind of scared because now we had lost Willie and I really wanted to stay on this expedition and I thought that maybe—

DOB: Why?

CB: Well, I thought that they would send me back.

DOB: Yes. But why would you want to stay having had such a traumatic experience? Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 12

CB: I had been in the South Pacific at the end of World War II and I had been to Korea, so death was not . . . I accepted these things. I was young and I was going to live forever. I was twenty-five years old, and I had another eighty years to go or so or a hundred years to go, that was never going to happen to me and I was never going to be fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty years old—that was so far in the future, inconceivable.

I still really wanted to stay. I mean one look as you started getting closer to Antarctica and you looked at Mt. Erebus from the ship, and every day you get closer and closer and look at the beauty of Antarctica. Just unsurpassed of anywhere else that you could go on a clear day. So I really wanted to stay. I was still into the . . . as I say, I had read all the books that I could on Antarctica before, and these guys had deaths on those expeditions, but the writer was still alive and I figured I was going to be one of the writers.

No, I still wanted to stay so I was very concerned about what I said and what I did. So I acted very brave like it didn't bother me, but it really did. But like it was just, well, that happened, it's not going to happen again, let's get on with the job.

But as it turned out . . . of course I'm glad I did stay because it certainly enhanced . . . I had a marvelous time and the experience was unsurpassed of anything that I've ever done in my whole life. Until they put me in a rocket and send me to the moon to build up there, I don't think it'll equal what I did in Antarctica.

So time went on and they decided that we were still going to go to Cape Evans, but then they decided to go back to Hut Point. The Glacier showed up and I got better in a few days because as I say, I was young and in great health, a kind of a fitness bug in those days. So I came out of this thing okay except for the thoughts that I had of losing Willie. Even when I had to go aboard the USS Glacier and break through ice, we crossed this same crack. We knew the crack was there, and I think the bridge was probably still there. As a matter of fact, I have pictures someplace. I have been looking for the pictures of the bridge and hole. I don't know if anybody else has shown you the pictures of it. Have they shown you the pictures of it?

DOB: No. CB: Okay. I have the pictures someplace and I've been trying to find them. But we just got on with the job and eventually the Glacier broke further in. But the problem there was, the Glacier couldn't even get in as far as she wanted. This was a real bad ice year, as we can especially see now that we're there every year, because the ice goes out all the way in to the point that they're afraid that the airfield is going to go out.

So what made things kind of bad was they decided to keep the thin-hull ships further out, still maybe about thirty miles out, and that the icebreakers would go up to the cargo ship, then they'd offload onto the icebreakers. Have you ever heard that story before?

Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 13

DOB: Yes.

CB: So this kind of jumbled up things that were supposed to get done, and of course this was another move onto the icebreakers that really weren't rigged to load and offload cargo on such a large scale. So things got banged up, but fortunately the supply department did a good job trying to keep things as squared away as they could. We soon got a tent camp up and tried to subsist.

The food was terrible, not because of the cooks, but because of the conditions. We were living out of a tent that kept blowing down, the stove kept blowing out, we had no water. I remember drinking out of these filthy, filthy little water pools that the skua gulls used before us. And I guess it was just the cold weather, low probably bacteria count because of the cold weather, and our youth that made us survive drinking that filthy, filthy water. You'd just brush stuff off and push it away, and you'd get down and drink out of this filthy pool to drink some water. You'd eat snow, which we weren't supposed to do.

And then the food was terrible and our filthy mess kits . . . the immersion heaters that we were supposed to use to clean our mess gear that we had to eat out of was never hot so we were washing in cold water, and your mess kit got filthier and filthier. But again, the only thing I can figure out is that we'd wash it with snow. You'd rub snow in it to get most of the dirt and garbage and grease out of it, and again, the cold just probably kept the bacteria count down.

But each day, actually from the first day there, somebody else and myself, I can't remember who it was . . . we worked untold hours. You just worked and worked and worked. Then you got a little bit of sleep for an hour or two and you got back up again. And of course Chief Wise, and I was his assistant, for the building part, so we were always being pestered about "What do we do next?" Chief Wise especially, and myself, could get very little rest because the guys wanted to work. Everybody wanted to start building. They were cooks, bakers, and candlestick makers, everybody wanted to build. The electricians, steelworkers, and everybody became a builder, and that's what we were. So it was very little sleep that we could get because we always had to be jumping around, squaring buildings up, leveling things, figuring out where the next building was going to go.

Thank heavens we had Lt. Dick Bowers, who was also a worrywart. He fussed over how the building should go, so he took a great deal of . . . but he had the whole base to worry about. We just had to worry about the buildings. He had everything to worry about. But he was there for us anyway.

Anyway, what I lived in to start with was a large wooden packing crate. I remember someone and myself opened up a large box, we pulled this motor out, whatever it was, we banged the nails out of it, and we crawled inside—one other guy and myself—and we slept in this box. We could get three or four hours sleep. I mean I'm just laying there Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 14

with another guy. I can't remember who it was—I wish I could. But just trying to sleep in our clothes, never taking our boots or socks or underwear off or anything. Never changing anything, never able to wash or shave, beard coming on, dirty, and sleeping in this box for a couple of days until we got a tent up.

But the tents kept blowing down, I remember. We couldn't drive the wooden stakes in the frozen ground. These improper, ill-suited sixteen-by-sixteen pyramidal tents that we slept in in the South Pacific, just were not going to work in Antarctica. They were fine for the South Pacific when I deployed out there, but they just kept blowing down. That was worse so I went back to the box. Others used the box also. It was always in demand.

We worked and worked and we finally got one building up about three-quarters of the way—one of the twenty-by-forty-eight-foot Clement buildings. But we couldn't find the panels to finish it off with, so we draped a piece of canvas over one end and people just literally went in there, fell on the floor, and went to sleep on that floor and it was like sleeping in heaven. We were mostly out of the wind. There was no stove in it yet, it was bitter cold, but you were out of the wind.

The almost constant wind was the bad thing that we had then. It seemed like I got more frostbite in the summer than I did in the winter in my experience in Antarctica. My face here is permanently deformed from so much frostbite. You can't really notice it today, but I notice it in pictures. When you take a picture, it really shows up that this right side has been affected because it was just so constantly frostbitten.

So anyway, that was just heaven-sent to get part of that building up. And then as we worked, again, untold hours, everybody pitched in to help the builders because the electricians couldn't do any work, very little, the steelworkers couldn't work, the corpsmen couldn't work, you know, nobody was getting hurt or sick. So everybody came and helped us out to keep getting the buildings up.

And each day, things got a little better. We improved our camp a little bit better, but as time went on, we started getting some rumblings about the loss of Williams as things started getting a little bit better. And so fortunately and unfortunately, they decided to send Chief Wise back to Davisville and that put me as the senior builder, because he was with us when Williams went through the ice. Chief Wise was a good builder, much more experienced than I was, and a good chief. He was a good chief petty officer. I admired Chief Wise.

As it turned out later on in life in our careers, I was able to amend part of his embarrassment of being sent back. He didn't want to go back, but they felt that during the winter night that this would be brought up that he should have stopped Willie from going across the bridge. He shouldn't have . . . and it was not, absolutely not, Chief Wise's fault. But they felt that on a Saturday night party and a couple of beers, some of Willie's really close friends might start accusing him of the loss of Williams and it was Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 15

best to send him back, and that put me in charge of builders. I was making chief, and they said, "Well, we've got another chief builder, Chief Bevilacqua, he'll take Chief Wise's place."

Fortunately, as I say, later on in life, 1966, when I became the Master Chief of the Seabees and I was ordering E-7s, -8s, and -9s around the battalions, I was able to do a favor for Chief Wise and give him his choice of duty to make up for his embarrassment and loss of Antarctica.

DOB: I was going to ask you a question about how you motivate these young inexperienced people, and I guess the answer is they motivated themselves by knowing that they'd be much more comfortable if they worked harder.

CB: That is exactly it. Each one wanted to try to outdo the other. I had very little . . . only one incident can I remember of a leadership problem. But I can never remember any other problem with any of my guys. I soon learned what I had to learn real quick when Chief Wise left about what the heck . . . how the camp had to be built, and of course Dick Bowers knew how he wanted it laid out, and he pretty well let me run my crew. And I will admit, I'll be the first one to admit, I wasn't as experienced as I should have been when I went to Antarctica, but I was standing next to other people who were even less experienced than I was in cold weather construction.

I admired and respected Dick Bowers. He was a young lieutenant. What he had going for him was he had a good personality and he worked hard. He worked very hard and he tried to stay ahead. And he was smart. So he let us know what we had to do. And of course I'm worried about the building, but he's got to worry about the electrical, the plumbing, the steelworkers and everything. So he pretty well saw that things were going along good and he would tend to get involved in those things that needed attention.

As the Clement buildings went, they weren't that difficult. They were pre-fabricated buildings, they were quite simple, you had to level them off, you had to make them square, and I had that expertise to do that. When we had to build the Quonset huts later on, that was another story. But the Clement buildings were just a simple thing. You could take a cook, baker, and a candlestick maker and say, okay, this is what you've got to do and he could do as good a job as a builder—a Seabee—could.

But many of us were not really the heavy, well-known, knowledgeable construction men that everybody built us up to be. We just had our enthusiasm and our youth to get us by. And why? We did because we volunteered for Antarctic duty. The older people didn't volunteer, the more experienced people that had been in cold climes before didn't volunteer for this expedition. They didn't want to go down to that cold place down there. So we made do with what we had, in tools, material, and personnel. And we made it work.

Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 16

DOB: As you wintered over that winter of 1956, maybe the chief job that you had to do at that time was to prepare for the following summer's main project which was to build the station at South Pole. What were your specific responsibilities that winter in getting ready for the Pole assignment?

CB: Well, okay. We kind of skipped over the Quonset hut erection era. That's okay? That's part of the construction. I mean they were one son of a gun to build down there.

Anyway, my main thing was to . . . I had to worry about the buildings at the South Pole. Now we had the experience with the building materials that we had to put up McMurdo with. Did anybody mention to you about the train wreck? The train accident?

DOB: No.

CB: That has never come up in a conversation?

[End Side A, Tape 1]

[Begin Side B, Tape 1]

CB: I guess nobody has mentioned the train wreck, and I can't understand that. But just prior to us leaving, all our building material is on a train coming to Davisville, Rhode Island for loading on the Arneb and the Wyandot. There was a bad flood in Connecticut, and part of the train track washed away, and part of the freight train fell into the Connecticut River. Well they hauled it back out and said okay, fine. This is all insured, we'll just go back to the manufacturer and get new stuff and get it back for the Navy. Hey, wait a minute. We're going, the ship's sailing, we need that stuff. Broken, bent or busted or missing, we need it. So they loaded it back up, hauled it to Davisville and we hauled it down to Antarctica.

Well, when we got to McMurdo, what did we do, because there were no buildings at McMurdo. Whether the buildings were for the South Pole or McMurdo, it didn't matter. We were going to use the best material to build McMurdo, to get some permanent shelter as soon as possible.

So during the winter night, we were not only faced with correcting these panels that came . . . four-by-eight panels—you've seen the pictures of them. But sometimes the splines were on the wrong side or the plywood was not put on properly. Pieces of plywood were crooked, so we had to shave these off. We had to meticulously go and open up all the bundles, identify the panels—that was my big job—then set these panels up with the, say, the B6 panels on the outside. Those were the more numerous walls that had no windows or escape hatches or doors in them, and put the more critical panels on the inside. But go over each panel, make sure they were planed down properly, the spline was in the proper side, put all the splines, say, on the left side. We got some of the Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 17

other panels, the splines were on the right, some on the left. We had to keep changing splines around. So I said, okay, all splines on the left-hand side, that's that!

So we had to take all these panels and work each panel over and then pack them up as I had designated with the less critical panels on the outside and the more critical panels on the inside. And we did this outside in a tent-like structure through the winter night, working in the cold.

DOB: Did you actually build the Clements huts?

CB: No, we were well versed in building those Clement huts from constructing McMurdo, so all we needed to do now was to make every panel as fit for construction as possible where we didn't have to stop like we did at McMurdo and keep planing something off or taking a spline off the right side and putting it on the left side, fixing the rubber gaskets or something. We just went over each panel and then restacked them up in stacks of eight or ten, whatever they were.

DOB: But they were supposed to be pre-fab, but you're saying that they didn't necessarily fit together properly.

CB: The quality wasn't there. The quality wasn't there; they were done in a hurry. Can't blame the manufacturer too much. He was probably pressured for time, and they just went bang, bang, bang, bang. Well, we suffered in Antarctica for it. So I was trying to eliminate as many of those problems, working out with Lt. Dick Bowers what I was doing. He approved about taking every single panel through the winter night and going over each panel, as I say, to make it as construction perfect as possible. So it would eliminate us using sledgehammers like we did at McMurdo to beat these panels into place to try to get them to fit a lot better. And they did—they fit a lot better at the South Pole construction.

However, what it was with the steel roof trusses, the trusses were really bent. I remember the trusses were really bent from the train wreck and the rough handling of transferring them from the ship to the icebreaker, the icebreaker onto the sleds. A lot of them got bent from the train and also from the rough handling at McMurdo. And these were the ones we ended up having to take to the South Pole.

Then at the last minute—well, not the last minute. Somehow it came down that they couldn't drop the long twenty-foot steel trusses out of the C-124 Globemasters. They were too long—you've heard that.

DOB: Yes.

CB: So we had to cut them in half, and this is where I ran into about the only leadership problem I remember. I had two guys assigned to cutting the trusses in half. "But," I said, Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 18

"before you cut the truss"—they were going to cut each truss with an acetylene torch—"I want each one marked each side 1, 1; then 2, 2; 3, 3." One of the guys just fought me on this. He says, "They're trusses, they're twenty feet long, every one of them is the same, they don't need to be marked." I said, "I need every truss marked before you cut it in half. You're cutting it with a torch, it's going to be jagged edges. We'll never fit these things together. I mean you just can't ever match them up." Well, he'd mark them when I was there, but not when I wasn't there. When I saw that they were all these trusses cut without markings on them, I said, "We're in trouble."

And we had to get splice plates made, but they had to make them in New Zealand. Oh gosh, it was a son of a gun. The contract was let in New Zealand to build these splice plates. And then we had to drill the holes in the trusses at McMurdo to match the splice plates from New Zealand. And now I've got these trusses with jagged edges that I can't match up, and I thought, well, we've got to go with what we've got.

So when we got to the Pole, we had a tough time with those trusses. I remember taking trusses into the garage at McMurdo and beating them with a sledgehammer, beating them to death trying to straighten them out to correct the toppling of the train and also the rough handling that they got in shipping. And again, as I say, we used the best trusses for McMurdo, and the worst ones went to the Pole.

DOB: The trusses were made of . . . ?

CB: Steel. They were steel trusses. We made out because we just worked them. So it took us twice as long to get a truss bolted together and there were a jillion bolts. I mean I didn't have to do it because I was the chief, but . . . I'm sure I pitched in to try to get some done when we fell behind at the Pole. But that's what we did during the winter night, was to get everything ready for the Pole.

And then of course we had the fiasco of the airstrip at McMurdo filling up with snow from a bad storm and then everybody having to work in the mess hall, except the equipment operators out on the airstrip. So I guess we had a week of that, that we took off to work in the mess hall, although I can't remember that. Lieutenant Bowers may have kept me still doing the South Pole stuff, because I really can't remember working in the mess hall like everybody else did.

DOB: Maybe you didn't.

CB: Well, the officers and chiefs and everybody did. I remember Canham waiting on tables and ladling out soup. But I can't remember that week. Something tells me that I probably spent most of the time still working on the South Pole preparations.

DOB: Dick Bowers, the officer in charge of building Pole Station, set up a twenty-four-man crew for that construction project and divided it into four-men survival teams, Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 19

construction and survival teams. Were you worried about survival and all of the preparation that had to be done for that?

CB: Very much so, but I kept it to myself.

DOB: What specifically did you worry about?

CB: Well, nobody knew . . . I mean Amundsen and Scott had been to the Pole and a few planes had flown over, and everything that the planes threw out, pieces of cardboard painted black, disappeared. All the markers that they threw out, and then they circled around to try to find them, they couldn't find them. So what's going to happen? We're going to get up to the Pole and we're going to go right in and kloomp! They are going to leave us there and what will happen weather-wise and how to survive so long on that Polar Plateau.

Then also I remember them telling us that we're pretty sure we can get you into the Pole, but we're not sure we can get you back out again. But we're going to do everything we can to have you guys survive. We'll fly B-36s—that's what they had then—we'll fly B- 36s down to New Zealand and they'll airdrop stuff to get you out. We'll airdrop dogs to get you guys out, or you'll winter over again and we'll make the effort again next year to get you guys out. I was a bit concerned, but I was a . . . now I'm a twenty-six year old— I'm a year older—chief petty officer. It's my job, and I'm going to be embarrassed to back out of this thing. But I wanted to go to the geographic South Pole, among the first. Now Smokey Lease, he was the chief surveyor, he backed out. He was the one specially trained to find the South Pole, and he had to dump that on Lt. Dick Bowers. Dick Bowers is up here as far as I'm concerned. I highly respect that guy. I tell everybody in the world about him, the American who first located and marked the South Pole. He's embarrassed, but I'll keep on . . . for my own good I've got to point him out.

But anyway, so I was very concerned, but I still wanted to go to the Pole because I'd been making these preparations, these are my guys that I've picked out to go to the Pole, and now I'm going to say I don't want to go? When I picked boom boom boom . . . Lieutenant Bowers, I said, "Well, I'd like this guy, this guy, and this guy, but not this guy and not that guy." And so then I'm going to tell him I don't want to go? The big sissy, you know, the chief. And I was a junior chief. There were three chiefs going to the Pole and I was the junior chief, but I was the chief builder. We had Slaton and Hubel who were senior to me. Chief Hubel was utilities and Chief Slaton was the mechanic. Have you talked to him? Charlie Slaton?

DOB: Yes.

CB: He's something else, isn't he? A great guy and a great chief petty officer. So I was just too embarrassed to back out. I was very concerned because nobody had gone there and stayed, although all the books that I read and even reading more, they stayed on the Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 20

surface, their footprints were only an inch or two or an inch deep, and the sled runners were there a long time and probably still there. So I don't know. I had mixed emotions but I still wanted to go.

DOB: Bowers arranged survival training for all of you. How effective was that?

CB: I can't really remember. I think at this time, and I've tried to remember that, and I remember going out there and doing the survival thing. But I think we made it more of a party than we did anything else, because . . . I have to remember that I was twenty-five, twenty-six years old, in great shape, we had already wintered over, so we were acclimated to the cold and it was sort of an adventure. As far as I can remember it, it was sort of a lark like.

I remember doing it, but nothing was a problem. We could do what we had to do. I don't remember repelling like they do today out of crevasses. We didn't have to do any of that, climbing up cliffs and things. I don't remember that. All I remember is us going out and I think staying in tents and cooking pemmican. It was sort of like a party, away from the camp and away from the hoopla at McMurdo.

DOB: Did that give you confidence?

CB: I can't remember. I don't think I really worried about it, Dian, so it didn't really make an impression on me that I did worry about it. No, it didn't affect me that way. It was something to do to get to the Pole. It was something we weren't going to use and need anyway. I just felt confident that we were going to get in there, do the job, and we were going to get back out again.

DOB: Admiral Dufek landed at the Pole on October 31, 1956, and did get back out, with difficulty. But he would not allow the construction teams to go for another three or four weeks. And then during that period, he sent a number of Pole personnel and others to New Zealand for some—

CB: Recreation.

DOB: Yes. What was that all about?

CB: Not really. I think you might have conflicting stories on that. I'll give you my story on that. The only one of the Pole crew that really got to go back was Lieutenant Tuck, because he now had been selected to winter over again, so they wanted to give him a little bit of liberty. I guess that was his request—I'd like to go back to New Zealand before I winter over again.

Now there were ten guys that went back, but that was a drawing out of a hat of all who had wintered over. They weren't necessarily the Pole people, I don't think. I stand to be Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 21

corrected, but I thought it was a lottery of anyone who had wintered over at McMurdo. The admiral was going to go back to New Zealand; he wasn't going to go to the Pole yet. He got sick; he got a cold, I guess.

We were actually upset because it was too cold for the admiral when he said it was 20 or 30 below zero in cold and wind. Well, we had wintered over. The admiral had never wintered over. We had wintered over, and we had worked outside all winter long—the builders did in this makeshift tent. But this makeshift tent, which was cold, we did have a little bit of heat in it from a Herman Nelson, but that was a pain in the neck to keep that thing going, so we just worked in the cold. We had temperatures of . . . I guess our coldest day was 81 or 82 below zero. But I remember being outside that entire work night—I can't say day—that entire work night-day, whatever it was, under the lights in that makeshift tent doing the panels.

And we were anxious to get up to the Pole because we felt we wanted to get up there, get the job done, get back to McMurdo, and get back to New Zealand and back home.

But as far as the ten guys that went back, I think that that was—I stand to be corrected— had all those names pulled out of a hat, and those guys went back. You can't imagine how many of those guys got married. I think seven out of the ten got married, and I think the other three guys were already married to American girls, something like that. I don't have the figures right, but . . . .

DOB: Now when you flew to the South Pole and the plane lands, what's there when you get there?

CB: The advance party was already there. They were the first ones in. I guess there were six or eight guys there. Dick Bowers was there, Randall, Montgomery maybe, the radioman, and a few others, and some of the dogs. I think Tuck had been up there and I think some of the dogs were there, I can't remember.

DOB: Were they living in tents or were any buildings up?

CB: No, they had just survival tents that they were living in because nothing had been built. And Dick Bowers didn't know where the Pole was yet. I don't think he had really pinpointed the Pole yet. Now the plane that we went in on—I went in with Gus Shinn in the R4D-8 Que Sera Sera—he wouldn't stop. He landed but the plane kept moving. He kept the engines revved up, and he was firing a bottle or two of JATO to keep the plane going, and we had to actually dive out of that airplane. I'm going to go over and get the model of the airplane.

[Pause in recording]

Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 22

CB: —model of the Que Sera Sera, number R4D-8, Navy version of the C-47. And this is the aircraft that landed at the South Pole and that we had to jump out of. Actually, it was landing on the snow but it kept moving, and we actually had to jump out this door that I'm pointing to on the side of the aircraft and dive underneath this tail which was coming over our heads. He was probably going forty or fifty miles an hour, I don't know. But the tail was up, because we could never have gotten underneath the tail. But he was moving and firing JATO bottles.

So now as we jump out—I was the first one out. There were five of us in the plane. There were no seats in the plane, and there was a big 750-gallon gasoline tank inside this aircraft for range. But there were no seats because it was for cargo, so we were sitting on the floor, not strapped in or anything. We were sitting with our legs spread apart up against the pilot's firewall. I happened to be the last one to sit down, so that meant I was the first one out the door.

Well, we had to jump. I think Chief Slaton was with me and I think Hisey was with me. I can't think of some of the other guys who were with me on that plane. But we actually had to jump out, dive underneath this tail, and now buried in this JATO smoke, and the plane is going along away from us.

Well, we stand up—of course I'm twenty-six years old in pretty good shape—and stand up and you can't. And I start yelling for the guys, but I can't hear anything because the plane is making noise going off and we're buried in this JATO smoke which has got us engulfed. Now I'm trying to walk, and I remember falling, constantly falling, because the sastrugi was so big and the plane was so rough. It would bang, bang, bang when we were landing. So it was that sastrugi, which now I'm trying to walk through in this JATO smoke, can't see my shoes. Then I can see my dirty boots, but I can't see the snow, and I kept falling down and getting up and falling down, tripping over sastrugi. There is no smooth landing strip yet. It comes later.

Now I'm kind of concerned about where I'm at and what's going to happen. Is this JATO smoke going to leave? Is this going to hang here for a month or how long is it going to be here? Well finally that JATO smoke drifted away, very slowly, there was no wind that day, and the plane was gone. But we're yelling. I can remember hearing . . . when the plane finally left and it was quiet, the guys are yelling in this JATO smoke for each other, but we can't find each other. Finally it drifted away and then we could see each other.

Then the guys came over, and I think that by then Dick Bowers had a Weasel and Randall was driving the Weasel. The first one broke, the second one, I guess, was okay and they got it fixed or something, the crankcase or something, and they gathered us up.

But we lived in survival tents now on the snow and we boiled some water and pemmican. We're all out of breath because it's almost 10,000 feet high, and we'd just come from sea Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 23

level. Even though we were in good shape, we're still at 9,300 feet elevation and trying to do this and do that and a-huffing and a-puffing. But we got acclimated pretty quick. As I say, we were young.

DOB: How did you work around the problems with the airdrops? Did you get the materials that you needed in the right order and on time and in such a way that you could keep the project going?

CB: I don't remember any major difficulties in that. Of course we put up our survival tents to start with, and then they airdropped us some Jamesways so we put the Jamesways up. It was only a day or two that we were really in the cold because then we had a stove and some fuel in these Jamesways which were an insulated tent. They were pretty good. I hope they're better today than they were then because the floors were very weak in them and you're forever shaking, but at least you can get a decent sleep. We slept on the floor to start with, and then we got some cots.

But the building material when it started coming down came down in pretty good order. If we ran out of materials for one building, we just did another project. But we were anxious to get a building up, and the difficulty was, one of the things was, they wanted the tops of the buildings all the same heights. Well, all the buildings weren't the same height, so some had to be dug down. This was my big job. I had a good crew. I had some good builders that had proven themselves in McMurdo, and they wanted to work and they could work and they were able to work, and they were strong and young.

My big job was to survey the buildings in to the right level and keep the survey, because we didn't have our surveyor now, to get the buildings dug down so that we could set them and take into consideration the thickness of the snow sills, some had trusses underneath them, some had thick snow sills, some had thin snow sills. So I had to take all this into consideration for the eventual top of the buildings to be basically the same height.

Then I had to get the foundation in and make sure it was square, because once that was done, once I felt it was square and level, then I could let the crews do the building and I'd move on to the next building with one or two other guys and we'd start the site for the next building. And then getting the trusses and get a crew to put the damn trusses together, which were a son of a gun because they weren't marked and the problem we had of trying to bolt these trusses together. As I say, we eventually got it done.

DOB: It must be hard to do in the cold when you don't have much dexterity.

CB: Well, the bolts were big, and we had what they call a spud wrench which you could jam in the hole and wiggle back and forth to line the hole up. But the bolts were kind of big. They were probably half-inch or three-quarter-inch so you could kind of do it with gloves on. You could do it with the smaller gloves on. You didn't have to use your bare hands. They weren't small bolts—they were kind of big bolts. As I say, I was the chief so I Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 24

didn't have to do too much of that. I usually had another crew on bolting trusses together. I was busy with getting the buildings lined up and the right heights.

DOB: And the whole job was done in about a month?

CB: The whole job was done in about a month. It was supposed to take us longer, but these men knew their jobs. This was second nature to us now, and we didn't have to build any of the Quonset huts at the Pole. We just had to build these pre-fab Clement huts. And as the time went on, the buildings went up quite quickly.

As I say, we could . . . I guess we set a goal, once I got the foundation down, or I got the right elevation, and we set the snow sills, we said, okay, everybody work until we finish this building. And I checked it out. We had all the right panels and all the right boxes for that particular building, and I think we just worked until we . . . we worked maybe twelve or fourteen hours, everybody helping us, because they couldn't do their work until we built the building. Basically everybody helping us and it was a simple job to put those panels . . . once you got the thing leveled off and square, then everything fell into place.

So with a big crew and everybody willing to work and everybody wanting to work and everybody right there, you didn't have to ask for somebody to do something because there were three guys standing there to do one person's job as we did all this, because everybody wanted to get a building up and get the job done. And we took pride in just getting the buildings up as quick as we could.

DOB: Well now, once the shell is up and it's time for the plumbers and the electricians to do their job, then do the builders in turn help them?

CB: I assume that they did. My job as a builder, the chief, just went on because we had the tunnels to build and the rawin dome to erect. I'm sure that some of the builders pitched in and helped the other trades. I'm not conscious of that, I don't remember, but I'm sure that they did because we all helped each other. And some of these builders were real close buddies with an electrician or plumber or mechanic. They got very close at McMurdo, so they wanted to help their buddy out. Everybody just worked long hours, and you did what you had to do.

I never remember a problem that . . . I didn't remember a problem at McMurdo—very little—and I don't remember any problem at the South Pole. Any words of . . . well, one chief got a little angry and got a little carried away, and I guess he had a little problem with Dick Bowers. But other than that, I don't remember . . . and then he apologized the next day about it. And they're fast friends today.

But I don't remember any problem. I never had to get upset with anybody, other than the guy that wouldn't mark the trusses. And I still selected him to go to the South Pole. I Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 25

still took him because he was a good builder. And then later on in his Navy career, he turned out to be an excellent builder and received a commission. When I heard later on in Vietnam, somebody was telling me about so-and-so. He turned out to be an excellent chief and officer and did real good in the Navy Seabees.

DOB: Do you want to name him?

CB: No, I do not. We are friends today and I wish to keep it that way. Plus a name is not important in this incident. He did great. After we left, I guess he was second class petty officer, and I got to talking when I was in Vietnam in 1966 to some guys and they mentioned how good a chief he was. He probably never remembers the problem of not marking the steel trusses before cutting them in half.

DOB: Tell me about Christmas at the South Pole.

CB: We decided to have Christmas I think a day early. Has that come up? We'd have it a day early because a plane was going to come in and take some guys out. We had some alcohol, and at that altitude, and because we were tired and because now we're in a good warm building, it really didn't take much for guys to get feeling good is the way I look at it. I got a little high, but I get mellow when I get feeling good.

But I remember Spiers, the cook, staggering around and falling into the Christmas tree. Has anybody mentioned that? He stumbled and he fell into the Christmas tree. We had a Christmas tree airdropped, and I remember him falling into the Christmas tree and the Christmas tree falling over. But it was a good time. [Spiers was one of our main sources of entertainment. A real joy to have about, our cook, who wanted to be a Seabee mechanic. He eventually did become a mechanic in the Seabees.]

But I now remember, and I didn't remember until I read it in my diary, Roberts, who was a super good guy, Colon Roberts, was a steelworker, and he was just a jolly guy to have around, but he needed oxygen the next day. Woody, our medical corpsman, had to give him oxygen the next day to get him straightened out. He was leaving, but he was too sick and his body was too oxygen-depleted to get him on the plane, so Woody had to pump him with oxygen out of a bottle to get him well enough to get on the plane.

DOB: Did it leave you with any special feeling to be in a place that special at Christmas?

CB: No, because I had missed many others. I don't remember making a Christmas home until later on. I enlisted in '48 and it's now '56 . . . I think I made it home for one Christmas before that, so I had already lost that feeling of being home for Christmas.

DOB: I meant more about being there. This was quite an unusual place to spend Christmas.

Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 26

CB: Well, I wasn't looking for Santa Claus. Maybe Mrs. Claus but not Santa Claus. But no, maybe somebody else has mentioned that and that's why you ask. I don't recall any other special feelings other than a good party, and then some of the men left that Christmas Day, I think. I didn't leave until the end. It was 4 January 1957 before I left Pole Station.

DOB: Why did you stay longer?

CB: Because I was the chief builder, and I kept a couple of builders . . . we still had tunnels to do, and perhaps, I don't know if their builder had come in yet or not. I don't believe the winter-over builder had arrived yet. Tom Osborne was a first class petty officer that was coming in. We still had a lot of things to do. And the rawin dome on tall legs hadn't gone up yet and that was going to be way up on top of another building.

And I wanted to stay anyway. I wasn't that anxious to go back. I would've wintered over again if they said, "You want to winter over again?" I would've said, "Yes, I'll stay." I was intrigued by the whole thing, and we had done the job we came to do. And all was well, getting better each day.

Fortunately I went back just in time for Willie's ceremony. I went back on about the 4th of January, and Willie's ceremony was the 6th of January, 1957, a year after we lost Willie on the 6th of January 1956.

And then I had the privilege of flying out with Lieutenant Frankiewicz. He was the pilot of an R4D. The other guys went out I think on P2Vs, which could go all the way to McMurdo. But Frankiewicz was going to land at the foot of Axel Heiberg Glacier, and I'm a big history buff now. I'm intrigued by the whole thing, and I was the only passenger on the plane, I'm pretty sure. And I wanted to go with him because he was going to make a landing to take on gas at this historic site.

It's hard to imagine these planes couldn't get all the way from McMurdo to the Pole and then back to McMurdo again. Whereas today they fly down, they can fly all the way from New Zealand, they can fly over McMurdo for twenty minutes, I guess, and if they can't land, they go all the way back to New Zealand again. We couldn't even make it from McMurdo to the Pole and back. But maybe one of the reasons was because they . . . I heard later on that they dumped gas before they landed at the Pole. They dumped some of their gas in the air to make the plane lighter for landing and then taking off from the Pole, so that's why they had to put the fuel bladders at the foot of Axel Heiberg Glacier. But I wanted to go there because a friend was there, Chief Baronick, and I wanted to visit with him out there manning that little fuel bladder station.

DOB: Anything else you want to tell me about South Pole, and then I want to move on to some other things.

Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 27

CB: My big thing about the South Pole is you're talking to one of the guys that painted the South Pole. And of course Admiral Byrd and Admiral Dufek wanted a symbolic red and white candy-striped pole for the South Pole like the is. Of course there's no pole up there, but there's going to be one at the South Pole.

During the winter night, I got to thinking. I picked out the best bamboo pole I could, that was still in the pile, the longest and straightest one, and I came up with the idea of painting it orange and black, which was my Woburn, Massachusetts, high school colors. There was one other person there at McMurdo by the name of Jim Rooney, he was in VX-6 that wintered over with us, and he was from Woburn also. I said, "Jim, do not even say anything about orange and black. They want a candy-striped pole, they're getting a candy-striped pole, but it's orange and black." Because I was a junior chief petty officer, and I'm kind of going against somebody's orders, whoever it was. I don't know if it came down from Dick Bowers or where it came from, but I was delegated to do it.

So we painted the pole up in the garage and outside orange and black, and it took a long time to dry because it was oil-based paint. But it eventually dried and somehow it got out to the airstrip and came in, I think, with Dr. Siple. I don't think they airdropped it. But the question came up, why was it orange and black and not red and white, and my answer was that was the only paint that wasn't frozen. Well, lead paint and oil-based paint doesn't freeze. But anyway, they were worried now about dog food and wrenches and hammers and panels, and the pole was an insignificant thing to worry about.

So the pole went up orange and black, and I put a sign on it at the South Pole "Woburn, Massachusetts City Limits." I took some pictures of it and sent them back home to the local newspaper. The pole is red and white now, but I understand that a section of the original pole is in a museum in Christchurch, New Zealand. I understand they were cutting pieces off of it and giving it to dignitaries when they came to the South Pole. Cutting an inch or two off and giving them a piece of the original pole. I don't have a piece of it, but somebody told me they've seen a six- or eight-foot section of it, orange and black, with some writing on it in the museum in Christchurch.

It was just a great experience for me. It actually helped me out in me advancing rapidly in the service. I made senior chief and master chief my first time up. I made every rate E1 to E9 my first time up. When I made master chief (E9), I was actually the third youngest master chief in the whole United States Navy. And then eventually getting a warrant officers commission. I'm sure that my time and good record in Antarctica had a great deal to do with my selection when they reviewed my record, along with many other things that I did to enhance my career—going to schools, taking college courses and Navy correspondence courses.

DOB: Have you been back to Antarctica?

CB: I have not been back, but in memory many, many times. Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 28

DOB: Would you go back?

CB: I would go back at the drop of a hat. I want to go back really to . . . and I've written a letter to the National Science Foundation—a real strong letter—requesting to go back. I would even pay my way down to New Zealand. I just need to get across the pond, and I'd like to stay a month.

My big reason to go is to restore the shrine. The shrine is not in the same—to Williams—the shrine is over Scott's hut looking out to sea where Williams was lost. It's not in the same condition that we originally built it with Father John Condit. And of course I'm the one that did the plaque that's there now. I conceived the plaque, most of the words, raising the funds and getting the arrangements made for the ceremony in Scotia, New York, and the transfer of the plaque to McMurdo on a 109th Airlift Wing C- 130, New York Air National Guard, making arrangements to have the plaque shown to the nuns at the Carmelite Monastery in Christchurch, New Zealand. The priest taking it out there to show the nuns who restored the Virgin Mary statue—that's another story— and then getting the ceremony started down in Antarctica for the 40th anniversary of the dedication of that shrine to Williams and now to all others lost in Antarctica.

And getting the family of Williams to agree to the fact that that shrine, although it was originally intended for Williams . . . and this is a good point. The shrine was built for Petty Officer Williams because he was the first casualty of Deep Freeze Operation, as we weren't going to lose anybody else. There was only going to be one death. Nobody else was going to die, so let's build this shrine to Willie, the only guy that's going to die in Antarctica. Nobody else is going to die.

I have stayed in touch with the Williams family all these years, and I'm still in touch with them and I still visit his family in the Mohawk, New York, area. I obtained their verbal permission to rededicate the shrine to everybody lost in Antarctica from all nations, and that's what the wording is on the plaque, that that shrine is now dedicated to everybody, not just to Petty Officer Williams. If you read the wording on it . . . have you ever seen the wording on it? So it's now dedicated to everybody.

Are you going to ask about Sir Edmund Hillary? Has that ever come up?

DOB: Would you like to tell me about Sir Edmund Hillary?

CB: Well, I got back from the South Pole just in time to be a part of the ceremony on the 6th . . . I guess I came out on the 4th of January of 1957. The ceremony for Williams was on the 6th of January. That was a year after Williams' loss, and I was part of the ceremony for that because he was my friend and also I went through the ice of McMurdo Sound with him on 6 January 1956.

Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 29

Shortly after that, Dick Bowers asked me if I would go over and help the Kiwis, the New Zealanders, over the pass at Scott Base, three miles away. They were coming in and they were going to build a base over there. I said, "Sure," because now we're not really part of the other things that are going on at McMurdo. We'd been away for two months from McMurdo, and the new people are in, and things are getting turned over to the Deep Freeze II people, and we're just basically waiting to go home. So I went over, and it turned out to be a great experience.

I remember talking with this great person—this is Sir Edmund Hillary—and talking about laying buildings out. Well okay, and I'm saying, "Well, sir, we've got to do this and we've got to do that and get this and that," and Sir Edmund said, "Okay you guys. Let's get going here. The chief says and we're going to do this." I thought, wow! Here's Sir Edmund Hillary taking my suggestions and then ordering his people around.

Actually our big job over there was to go back to the base at McMurdo and steal construction items to help the Kiwis out because I mean they were just great guys, and they had so little to get that base started, and especially the little Ferguson tractors.

We all really liked the Kiwis. They were just great party people and they always seemed to be in such great humor. They appreciated what we were doing, helping them out getting the buildings started, and we were a good asset to them. And to be associated with Sir Edmund Hillary, who became even more important later on in life, so it was a great experience to be over there with those New Zealanders.

DOB: Thank you. We haven't talked about the long winter night and the long summer day. How did this seasonal darkness first affect you, if it did?

CB: The long winter night . . . you've probably heard the expression the Big Eye?

DOB: Yes.

CB: You've heard of the Big Eye. I think that the Big Eye affected the people who worked inside more. Now you have to remember that my builders and I were outside working in this makeshift tent, which was built of Quonset hut ribs and battens and then some canvas thrown over it. So we basically had to get up early every day, eat breakfast and go out into the cold and work for long hours . . . and hustle, because we had a deadline to meet. So I never remember having the Big Eye. I remember getting a good night's sleep and sleeping through the night.

DOB: Did it bother you not having the sun come up?

CB: No, it didn't. No, because . . . I never remember it bothering me. If it did, I don't remember it. I guess I dwelled on it because other people were talking about it, but I never thought about it. It did not affect me. Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 30

Now I do remember . . . and we didn't have good washing and bathing facilities, you know. We had a shower we could take every two weeks, a real quick shower, because we had to melt the water. But we had, on our space heater stove in the chiefs' quarters, a big aluminum pot, and we used to dump snow in that and melt water down, and each night I had a little basin and I would use this to bathe—to wash my face, and let me put it bluntly, okay? Wash under my armpits, wash my feet and wash my crotch, and brush my teeth. But not in that order. [Laughs] I hope to hell I brushed my teeth first. But anyway, I remember that pan, which was oval shaped, and that was sort of a nightly ritual.

I'd go out and get some snow, because you had to add to the pot if you wanted to use the water that was in there. But putting that pan of used bath water under my bed every night at McMurdo, and in the morning it would be frozen. It would be a block of ice, but that was no problem because I'd get up and I took the pan upside-down and drop it on the floor and the ice would fall out. Because it was cold, it would just drop out because it was oval shaped. And then when I went to breakfast I'd just toss the chunk of ice down the hill we lived on.

I do remember the guy that slept above me. He was a chief also, and his name was Patterson, he was a utilitiesman. When he woke up—he slept on the top bunk—and he would flop out, he'd drop down, he'd sit on my bunk, and before he'd say good morning, he lit up a cigarette. A cigarette today—I can't stand the smoke. But I guess in those days, so many of the chiefs smoked, but I never did. Chief Patterson has since long passed away from lung cancer. And he was a handsome guy, well built, a great person, we were good buddies, and those damn cigarettes have taken his life. As I say, I remember him just waking up, coughing and sitting on my bunk smoking a cigarette, a couple cigarettes, before he did anything.

DOB: Did you ever get lonely or think, I don't want to look at these same people anymore?

CB: No, not that it has made a lasting impression on me that I would remember it today. And I never remember a confrontation, other than that one incident with the guy that wouldn't mark the trusses. After all, I just gave up because I had other things to worry about. I said, "Okay, they're not marked, we're going to have a problem at the Pole," and we did. I've got other things to worry about. I've got panels and many things in construction to solve. I can't keep worrying about those trusses.

And I can't make a big deal about it because he's a good worker and I want to take him to the Pole anyway. I had other builders that I didn't have any trouble with, but they weren't as good a worker as this builder was and as strong as he was, so I wanted to take him to the Pole even though I had a problem with him. It wasn't that big a problem that I did not want to still take him to the Pole or that I complained to Bowers about it. No, I don't remember any other problem; I don't remember anybody getting on my nerves. Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 31

And of course I did a lot of work on the chapel. See, we had to build the chapel on our own time, and we built the chapel—you've heard that story? Yes. Father Condit. We did that on our own. And then I had to build the steeple, and he had designed the steeple and had sent that design back home in February 1956, but the steeple wasn't on yet. It wasn't there, and I remember it's later and later and he said, "Charlie, you've got to get that steeple on. You know, newspapers have already printed it in papers back home from my drawings." So I remember working pretty much myself building that steeple in the garage on my own time so it would be up when the first plane came in so that Father John would have his chapel up with steeple and bell in place.

He'd stolen the bell. Did you ever hear of that? He stole the bell off of a Navy ship, but he blessed it. He blessed it to Saint Dismas, the angel that's supposed to steal . . . the good angel that steals stuff and then gives it away. He blessed it before he put it up and had a ceremony. He blessed the bell in his name, Saint Dismas. So that was a big project, to pre-fab that whole steeple and then paint it and then get that up.

I never remember the winter night as a particular problem. I was intrigued by the aurora australis. Anytime I would hear it was out there, I'd jump up and run outside to look at it. The sun popping up was a big deal to me. I was just intrigued by the whole experience.

DOB: Was there one particular thing that you're the most proud of?

CB: I was most proud of being able to spend the winter down there in such close quarters with so many great people, with so many things going on and not having any problems. Getting along with everybody . . . and again, I have to go back to our commanding officer, Dave Canham, our chaplain, Father John Condit, and our doctor, Doc Taylor. These men I thought so much of and so highly respected and I had association with them.

[End Side B, Tape 1]

[Begin Side A, Tape 2]

CB: Those three people and Dick Bowers, and some of the chiefs in the hut that I lived with, were exceptionally outstanding people. And I was one of the youngest. I was certainly probably the youngest chief petty officer. I turned twenty-six years old, I had a lot that I had to make up for to try to come up to these men's standards. So I wanted to be a good chief and I overlooked a lot of things just to get along with everybody.

DOB: Is there anything that if you could do it again you'd do differently?

CB: Well, of course the 6th of January I certainly would've made a stronger recommendation, some kind of recommendation not to cross that fateful crack. I don't really know, Dian, if I can think of anything differently. We all go through life making mistakes, mistake after Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 32

mistake, but you do a heck of a lot more good and hopefully the good that you do corrects most of the mistakes that you make.

DOB: The military, a major part of your life, no longer has a role in Antarctica. What difference do you think that will make?

CB: I think it's a sad occasion. I wish the Navy had certainly stayed there. You have to go all the way back to Lieutenant Wilkes, I guess, when he first sailed to Antarctica in 1839- 1840. But him sailing down there in an old wooden ship and Nathaniel Palmer discovering the Palmer Peninsula in 1820 . . . perhaps the first one to sight Antarctica, between him and the Russian, Bellingshausen, whoever was the first one to sight Antarctica.

And certainly Admiral Byrd and his perseverance in going to Little America 1929 and 1934. The things that he did in this country during the Depression to make people aware that there was a place called Little America and it was ten jillion miles away from the United States and these people were living on this floating ice in this cold, wintry place down in Antarctica and wintering over and just subsisting on the bare necessities. And his first flights over the geographic South Pole.

DOB: And now the Navy role is over.

CB: And now the Navy's role is over and so civilians are taking over everything except the fly-in of the C-130s, and maybe the Navy cargo-handling battalion is still going to go down out of Williamsburg, Virginia. But there's a Navy cargo-handling battalion, I believe. They're there to offload the cargo ships and they'll play a small but important part. I don't think they're there very long. But I'm glad to see the 109th Airlift Wing out of Scotia, New York, still has a military role down there and the U.S Air Force flights to McMurdo.

But basically it's civilians and anything you hear is civilian oriented to the point that now anybody that connects with Antarctica will think it was started by civilians and that they're the ones that did all the work down there. And actually the United States Navy paid the dearest price in not only logistic cost, but in lives. Certainly civilians are being lost down there now, but the lives that were lost in . . . I guess the first ones lost were in Operation Highjump in 1946 when we lost four U.S. Navy aviation types and I think two Navy Seabees or one Seabee and one sailor. They died there in Operation Highjump. The four aviation types are still there buried underneath the wing of an airplane. Do you know that? Those four bodies are still there, and I don't know why they don't go out and get them out of there. Those four guys are still there. The Seabee and the sailor that died at Little America 1946, through accidents, I'm pretty sure their bodies were taken out.

And of course CD3 Max Kiel is still buried in his tractor out there in Marie Byrd Land, of our particular group. And Williams, of course, his body has been consumed and gone. Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 33

And we lost another one, Omar Bachelor, a Seabee, but I believe his body was brought back.

DOB: Did you ever meet Admiral Byrd?

CB: Yes, I did.

DOB: What did you think?

CB: He was kind of aloof, but I was impressed by just being in his presence. He didn't have much to say because he had so many other things going on. At the time, I didn't know about the problem that he was having, the controversy between him and Admiral Dufek. I wasn't privy to that. I just saw two admirals, and I had read his books so he was kind of a God to me for all the books that he had written. And to this day, his daughter, Bolling Byrd Clarke, is a very personal friend of mine. Bolling and I have been in contact . . . we talk often, three times a week sometimes, then we go two weeks and then we're talking every day. And of course we're going up to Nova Scotia on the 11th and 12th of September 1999 for the . . . I don't know if you know that story. That's not for this part.

DOB: Did you meet Admiral Dufek?

CB: No. I don't think I ever . . . other than to see him off or see him walking someplace or doing something. I did see, as I say, Byrd with Paul Siple earlier on in the expedition. But in my particular case, working so hard and not in any part of the staff I didn't get to spend any time with him other than just a casual handshake and a few words.

I'm sorry for his part of the difficulty they were having with Admiral Dufek and himself and the staff. I guess it was a bad decision on the Navy's part to put the two admirals together with conflicting duties, so it was embarrassing and I guess Admiral Byrd left early along with his staff. And it was very difficult for the staff to try to get along and then side with each one of their respective admirals. But that's not for my part and I wasn't really aware of it until afterward.

DOB: A big issue on the ice today is pollution—air pollution and water pollution and garbage on the land and all of that. Did you worry about that when you were there?

CB: Absolutely not because it was not an issue anywhere. It wasn't even an issue here in the United States. Nobody was worrying or thinking or talking much about pollution. We just casually dumped everything. Our feces went out on the ice in barrels and it floated to sea and was gone forever. It went to the moon, as far as we were concerned. Oil spillage or something like that. We didn't worry about it in this country. Nobody was talking about pollution, air pollution, ground pollution, water pollution. It was pretty much an unknown factor. I didn't know about it and I wasn't concerned about it. I am Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 34

today, very much so. In 1956 in Antarctica, we had no other choice, to get rid of trash properly.

DOB: How about the living resources? Did you worry about them then—the seals and the penguins?

CB: Absolutely not. No. We could touch them, we could grab them, we could kill them. We could bring a penguin home in those days. I think we were supposed to pay fifty dollars, but I don't know if they ever paid the fifty dollars, but we could kill a penguin, strip it and stuff it and bring a penguin home. I didn't. I don't know if anybody else did, but the offer was there.

I got into Scott's hut, and I took a few things, which was okay then. When we first got there, we subsisted on especially his chocolate which was far superior to ours. His powdered chocolate was great. I guess it sustained our life because it was the only good thing in the very, very early days that the cooks could prepare that we enjoyed. I didn't like coffee then and I didn't smoke cigarettes, so the hot chocolate was great. And the biscuits and some of the canned tin meat was okay for us, and nobody thought we shouldn't do it. I brought a little bit of it back home with me, but unfortunately I put it in the Woburn library and then somebody stole it from out of the showcase.

DOB: Did you think much about what was going on in the rest of the world at that time? I'm getting at the fact that this was in the depths of the Cold War, and yet the International Geophysical Year was a cooperative international effort. And I'm just wondering if those of you who were there doing other things thought about that.

CB: A little bit, but it was actually the scientists that were getting along with the Russians. So it wasn't the construction crew so much intermingling as it was the scientists, so they were probably very pleased that the Cold War wasn't affecting them. If they were, they weren't letting it known.

Oh, I guess the big thing that I remember was they were talking about home ports and per diem and had figured out that they were going to change our home port, so we were somehow away from our home port so we were going to get a whole lot of per diem when we came back. Everybody's writing up figures and figuring out their per diem and how many days they were away from their new home port, or something like that, and we came up with these astronomical figures of thousands of dollars that we were going to get, and money was much more valuable then, and we were all going to be independently wealthy when we got back. Well, it all fell flat on its butt, and we didn't get that. We just got our regular sea pay.

I was a little disappointed that some medals weren't given out. The only medals that were really given out were the ones that the guys got at the last reunion, and I strongly . . . being in the service for thirty years and seeing what I had done on other Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 35

deployments where I had gone to Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Guam, some outstanding jobs that I did, some great work, I still felt that everybody that went to the Pole or Marie Byrd Land should've gotten the Navy Commendation Medal, and everybody that went to McMurdo or Little America should've gotten the Navy Achievement Medal. These are basically the lower medals. These are the lowest medals of the so-called hero medals. The Navy Achievement Medal is the lowest and the Navy Commendation is higher. I was glad to see those guys get it. They deserved what they got, but I felt that there should've been more of them awarded for what we did.

But the Navy wasn't medal oriented then. Hardly anybody, especially in the Seabees, there was hardly any recognition of jobs well done. You were expected to do a good job. You did a good job because you were expected to do it. You got your pay, and you weren't expecting any more than that other than "Well great, you did a good job." It was expected of you. Those were the times we lived in. Today's military is different. There are more recognitions and medals awarded.

DOB: Today a big issue in Antarctica is tourism. Do you think that's a good idea?

CB: I have mixed emotions on that. Basically I lean toward yes, I think it is a good idea because as long as they keep the pollution down, as long as the ship contains its sewerage and brings its trash back out again, I think that the more people that see it . . . why should just a privileged few get to see Antarctica and enjoy its beauty? I feel that tourism, if people want to take the time and effort and expense to go there and do that, that they should be allowed to, with no pollution. Most of the tourists go to Palmer Peninsula, which is beautiful. Most of it's outside the anyway. But if tourism does become even more prevalent, it should be closely monitored. A few ships have even gone into McMurdo Sound.

Especially I want to say here and now for the Navy's part, that's why I put on the plaque "the initial construction at McMurdo Sound by the U.S. Navy Seabees." I wanted to point it out on that plaque. That wasn't my purpose in doing the plaque. My purpose in doing the plaque was to honor Willie and everybody else that was lost in Antarctica, but I had to get the word known that the U.S. Navy Seabees started the initial construction at McMurdo Sound and Antarctica.

Yes, I think that there is a place for tourism in Antarctica, also to support the scientific work to give more of a knowledge that people will back up and not be reluctant to part with their tax dollars for the scientific work that's going on down there. Some of the scientific work that's going on down there I don't wholly believe in. I think that some of these scientists have been going down there fourteen, sixteen, eighteen, twenty years studying why fish have antifreeze in their system and haven't come up with an answer yet. But they keep going back down again. That's just pointing out one simple thing. I'm not a scientist, I'm a construction person, so that's not for me to pass judgment on.

Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 36

Yes, tourists belong in Antarctica as long as they take out what they bring in.

DOB: Do you think that science can keep going on there indefinitely, and I'm thinking in political terms. The Antarctic Treaty in 1959 said we'll just dedicate the continent to peace. Do you think that'll happen?

CB: I hope it will. I think it will. Of course the United States' position, and you've probably read this before, claims no part of Antarctica and recognizes nobody else's claim either. Because basically, although we were in Antarctica quite early with Lieutenant Wilkes and Palmer and Admiral Byrd, we really didn't claim anything. But we have actually seen and mapped, for the first time, more of Antarctica than all other nations combined. They just went down there and claimed their pie shape and then in many cases had never seen what they claimed. But we're sort of Johnny-come-lately and we didn't want to upset the claims. So our claim is good that we recognize nobody else's claim.

DOB: If you were an artist, Charlie, and could paint on one canvas the essence of Antarctica for you, what would you paint?

CB: Off to one side would certainly be Mt. Erebus, that's for sure. But the mountains across McMurdo Bay . . . and why? Because I spent most of my time at McMurdo Station and South Pole Station, although I did go to Little America. I was awed by the Great Barrier, and especially to know the hugeness of it and what it contained. But just to be at McMurdo Sound on a clear day and look out and say I just can't believe that they're paying me to be here to enjoy this beauty when so few people have even seen this place or even know it exists, at that time.

But actually Mt. Erebus, I understand is—I'm not sure—but it's supposed to be the second most recognized perfect volcano, just behind Mt. Fuji in Japan. Mt. Fuji's supposed to be the most conical, beautifully shaped, and Mt. Erebus is supposed to be the second most beautiful volcano in the world.

But actually, that's what I would do is Mt. Erebus off in the distance at 13,200 feet high with a plume of smoke coming out of it, and then the mountains across the bay. The Scott Coast of the Transantarctic Mountains—just spectacular!

DOB: You wouldn't put Seabees in your picture.

CB: No. I don't think I would want a human being in there. I'd want perhaps some animal life in it, but I don't know if I'd want . . . if I had a person in there, I'd want his backside. I wouldn't want to recognize anybody as a Seabee or an airdale or a corpsman or a cook or anything like that. I wouldn't want him identified. And I don't want to take away from the civilians that are going down there. They're doing equally difficult and hard . . . amazing projects. I go to Denver and I've been to four of their seminars so far—the Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 37

week-long post-season seminars—to see what they're doing down there. They're doing such amazing work.

DOB: Paul Siple wrote that Antarctica wields a profound effect on personality and character and that few people are the same after they've been there for a while. Would you agree with that statement? And if you do, were you changed and in what way? CB: I would absolutely agree with that a hundred percent. It certainly changed me. The loss of Williams . . . now I was in Korea before that; I went to Vietnam later on. We lost people in both wars. But the loss of Willie right next to me there and a friend of mine, that certainly changed me to make a better person out of me. But yes, the immensity of the continent and to know that I played a part in it—

[Interruption]

CB: So I am grateful for my time in Antarctica, especially to be on Deep Freeze I. It would have less significance going down later on, but to be the first ones to be into McMurdo Sound and to go to the South Pole, and my privilege of being the chief builder, to be in charge of the first buildings at McMurdo and then the South Pole. Each and every one of us feels that we did the most important part. I'm sure that the electricians feel that nothing would have worked and we couldn't have stayed in Antarctica if we didn't hook up to electricity, the plumbers chief would say hey, you'd have never made it through the winter if we hadn't melted water and kept the facilities going.

But I feel that as the chief builder to be in charge of McMurdo and the South Pole Station, that's just a special privilege. I'm the first guy that did it. Other guys are first in what they did, and that's why I look up to Dick Bowers. He is the first guy that found the South Pole. Only one can do it, only one did it, and he's the one that did it!

DOB: Well, what haven't I asked you that you wished I would?

CB: We've covered so much, I don't know, Dian. Thank you for the privilege of coming here and interviewing me, and I thank the National Science Foundation for granting the funds to do this oral history of Deep Freeze I, because it's so important.

We have lost such valuable people. To name a few, back again to Canham, Siple, Doc Taylor, Father John Condit, Flynn, Whitney . . . these people could've added so much more than what we are even telling. And you've seen David Canham's writings, which is a marvelous report of our time at McMurdo.

Bob Chaudoin, he probably has a multitude of things to tell you that none of us even know about. Bob is certainly somebody probably you should talk to again because I'm sure as far as McMurdo is concerned, he's just got so much information that isn't written down that only he knows.

Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 38

DOB: Well, thank you very much. It's been a wonderful morning. I appreciate talking to you.

CB: Thank you very much for coming to Meredith, New Hampshire, Lake Winnipesaukee and my home.

DOB: Thank you, Charlie.

[End of interview]