During
that summer [1941], my opportunistic brother, Dick, teamed up with one of our
mechs named Bill Greer. Greer fancied
himself as an Edward G. Robinson type and he did, indeed resemble that actor
playing a gangster role. He was short
and stocky, swarthy complexion, black hair, and a thin black mustache. There was always a cigar butt in the corner
of his mouth around which there was an almost perpetual sardonic smile. He was a much better “card mechanic” than he
was an airplane mechanic and brother Dick was an apt pupil. (It was not long before I would no longer
play poker with either of them.)
Actually,
both Greer and Dick played it straight in most games with squadron shipmates
except for a little practice now and then to keep their fingers supple. They confined their card sharking to games at
Army or Marine bases. They would go into
a game separately and, with one of them on each side of the table and apparently
strangers to each other, they would take turns “third basing” for each other
and invariably come away with a nice profit—enough that they solved the problem
of liberty transportation. Greer, in
gangster tradition, turned up with a big black Cadillac sedan. Dick went for a flashier “date buggy” and
showed up one day with a big baby blue 1937 LaSalle convertible sedan equipped
with chrome spotlights, fender mounted spare tires, and a powerful
straight-eight that was a real gas guzzler.
Our
life at Kaneohe Bay was truly idyllic through the summer of 1941. We all agreed that it had to be the best
duty in the entire Navy. We spent most
of our working hours on the ramp scrubbing and polishing those old airplanes
and using liberal quantities of yellow zinc chromate to fight the inevitable
salt air corrosion on the aluminum structure.
Every three or four days we would go on a three or four-hour training flight—the
pilots practicing navigation and giving us strafing and bombing practice.
The
PBY had no internal bomb bays. Our
armament of bombs, depth charges, or torpedoes were carried on external racks
up under the broad wings. We could carry
either twelve one hundred pound bombs, four five hundred pound bombs or depth
charges, or two 21-inch torpedoes. We
were provided little lead practice bombs to drop wither on smoke markers or on
target sleds towed by ships. Infrequently,
we went on high altitude bombing practice over the bombing range on the island
of Kahoolawe off the west side of Maui.
Those were long flights because, at the PBY-1 cruising speed of 100 knots
and a climb speed of ninety coupled with a laboring rate of climb, it took a
while to get to our maximum altitude of 12,000 feet.
In
September, we got some welcome news. We
were to fly the creaking old PBY-1s stateside and pick up thirteen brand new
improved model PBY-5s at the factory in San Diego. We were ecstatic—a trans-Pacific mass flight
and we would get brand new airplanes!
Many of us on assigned flight crews did not get to make the flights,
however. Leading Chief Duke Byron re-shuffled
flight crew assignments so that the ferry crews were made up of the older men
who had been in the islands long enough to qualify for annual leave. Dick, Greer, Glover, Joe Brooks, and I would
be among those left behind to more or less twiddle our thumbs until the ferry
crews got back with the new planes in early November.
When
the airplanes had departed on their stateside flight and we had received word
that all planes made it without incident, we settled into an even more
leisurely routine at Kaneohe. Duty sections
were small and liberty very plentiful.
Our VP-11 acting commanding officer, Lt. Delaney, was soon faced with a
problem—how to keep the 150-odd men without airplanes busy. He tired several special activities such as a
boxing tournament that went over like a lead balloon. When he tried organizing softball teams he
struck out entirely. Most of us did not particularly
like Delaney and simply would not play ball for him. He finally gave up and simply gave all the
special liberty that was requested.
I
did stumble onto one special activity in which I offered to participate. The wife of our executive officer decided to
form a VP-11 drama group and the play she selected for an opener was “Seven
Keys to Baldpate”—the senior class play in which I had the leading role of Magee
in 1939. I could still remember most of
the lines without looking at the lay book.
At the tryouts, without reading from the script, I was selected to play
Magee once more. It was not to be,
however. The group was formed shortly
before the arrival of our new airplanes and rehearsals were scheduled to begin in
earnest the second week of December so the play could be presented in
conjunction with the holidays. The Japanese
were to put a stop to that.
During
those halcyon days of October and November in 1941, Richard and I had a
reputation in the squadron for frequent verbal scrapping as sibling will
inevitably do. We went on liberty
together often in the blue LaSalle, usually accompanied by Glover, but we
occasionally had a few arguments.
Sometime during that period I forget exactly when, we became “those
fighting Frieze brothers” purely by accident.
Since
civilian clothes were not allowed on the base, we had each rented lockers at a “locker
club” in Honolulu and had purchased some basic civilian clothes to wear on
liberty instead of our uniforms. I had a
pair of slacks, some sports shirts, and a lightweight jacket.
On
one liberty both Glove and a shipmate Art Grace had gone into town with us. During the course of the evening Grace
managed to get himself thoroughly drunk—and when he was drunk he was mean. The rest of us had a few drinks as well. Sometime in the shank of the evening we went
back to the locker club to change back into uniform to go back to Kaneohe.
I
do not recall what started the argument between Grace and Dick, but Grace got
mad and stomped out of the locker club declaring that no way would he ride back
to Kaneohe in the blue car. We just let
him go although we knew that the last Windward Transit had left and that he did
not have money for a cab. “Hell,” Glover
said, “let the bastard walk or hitch hike—might sober him up a little!” We went to the Black Cat and had a couple
more drinks.
Somewhere
up in Nuuanu Valley on our way to the Pali we caught up with Art Grace trudging
along the shoulder of the road.
Apparently he had been unable to thumb a ride. I insisted that, after all, he was a VP-11
shipmate and that we should stop and pick him up. Dick pulled over.
Grace
had not sobered up appreciably. He
proceeded to cuss us out soundly and finally got so mad that he pulled a very
small penknife out and opened the blade, declaring as he did that he would uct
one of us. I had enough to drink that I
grabbed his arm, got the little knife away from him and threw it off into the
brush getting a cut on a finger in the process.
Art was so drunk he really did not offer much resistance at that
point.
Later
I recalled only that Glover said, “Shee-it, we ought to Sunday punch the
bastard and throw him into the car!”
In
my alcohol fog I thought I was just the man to Sunday punch Art and swung a
hard right at him. It was unfortunate that
Dick was standing directly behind Grace, half supporting the frunk. Just as I swung, Art’s head slumped forward
(he was apparently passing out) and my fist missed him and caught Dick on the
cheekbone. I was wearing a heavy Navy
ring on that hand and it laid open a pretty good gash on his cheek. We shoved Art into the back seat and went on
to Kaneohe.
At
muster the next morning Dick showed up with a bandaid on his cheek and a
beautiful purple shiner. Of course the
story inevitably got twisted and scuttlebutt was simply that I had done it to
him—which was true, but I had not meant to hit him. It was an accident. When I would explain that, eyebrows would
raise and someone would snort, “Oh sure!”
Art
Grace, it turned out, was an ornery s.o.b. and his story was that Dick ahd held
him while I tried to clobber him and that he could whip us both only one at a
time. Since he did not have a mark on
him, he was ignored and it was assumed merely that Dick and I had a fight and I
belted him. Our reputation as “the
fighting Frieze brothers” was really quite undeserved.
Except
for the inevitable occasional squabbling of siblings, Richard and I got alone
more as good friends than brothers. He was
reluctant to lend me the big blue LaSalle to go off in liberty with others but
we used it frequently, often with glover or other friends.
I
sometimes double-dated with Dick when he took his little Japanese friend from
the saimen stand out for an evening or for a picnic. She had a friend named Vivian, a beautiful,
slim little half Chinese girl who sometimes came along as mu date. We never developed more than a casual
relationship but she liked me well enough that on one occasion she presented me
with a good luck charm. It was a small
teak statue of the Laughing Buddha.
Supposedly, rubbing the Buddha’s fat belly would bring good luck.
One
of our favorite spots for a night beer party was Haunama Bay which would later
become famous for a steamy beach scene in Jack Jones’ “From Here to Eternity”. It is a developed Hawaii state park now with
asphalt paths, lights, and restrooms; however, in those days it was a very
isolated cover reached only by a steep, winding path down the cliff from the
Kam Highway. With that car, we could
always recruit a few girls. I never
asked Glover where he found some of the dates he would have. They were usually haole and seemed quite
familiar with the South Hotel Street area.
