An Inspection and an Examination

Although I was barely twenty-one years old and had been in the Navy less than three years, I considered myself an “old salt”.  I wore my white hat at a cocky angle over an eyebrow and my liberty neckerchief was non-regulation pressed black silk.  My tailored white uniforms were also non-regulation with wide bell-bottoms.

The imaged I had of myself was reinforced from the unlikely source one weekend shortly after we reported at NATTC.  On Friday afternoon just after we secured for the day, Lieutenant Dugan, the division officer for our class, informed us that there would be a surprise admiral’s inspection the following morning.  The class would fall in for inspection in the central passageway on the first deck.  Since the weather had turned warm the uniform of the day for inspection would be dress whites.

Come Saturday morning when I started to dress for inspection I was dismayed to find that I did not have a fresh clean suit of regulation whites.  Except for the gabardine tailor-mades I had bought in Honolulu, my white uniforms were in the laundry and for some unknown and unexplained reason our laundry, due on Thursday, had not yet come back.  Also, I could not find my regulation issue neckerchief that was worn rolled.  I had only the pressed black silk.  I knew that if the admiral was a hard-nose I could wind up on report for a non-regulation uniform but I had no choice.  I put them on.

When we fell in for inspection and Lt. Dugan looked us over, the division officer sharply ordered me to go get into regulation uniform.  I said, “Sorry, lieutenant—my issue whites are all in the laundry which didn’t come back this week.  It’s this or nothing.”

Lt. Dugan shrugged and turned away looking down the row of white-clad sailors, most of them looking as if they were just out of boot camp—many were—with baggy blouses and stovepipe-legged pants.  Their rolled black neckerchiefs were uneven and did not tie neatly.  Their crimped white hats sat squarely two fingers above the eyebrows.  They were regulation all right and were quite a contrast to my crisp white gaberdines that were pegged at the knee and had flared bell bottoms.  My white blouse was tailored to my slender frame so that I had to have a zipper under one arm to get it on and off.  The division officer shook his head and said, “Okay, Frieze,--don’t say I didn’t warn you!”

I never knew the inspecting admiral’s name but when he came down the line he had the appearance of a stern officer that went by the book.  I heard him cite two or three for non-regulation haircuts or for unsatisfactorily shined black shoes.  At least, I thought, I was in the base barber shop two days ago and I knew that the toes of my black shoes could have been used for shaving mirrors.

The admiral halted directly opposite and looked me up and down.  He took in the crimped but crisply clean white hat tilted just a bit over the right eyebrow, the three campaign ribbons over my pocket, the first class AMM “crow” and chevrons, and the gunner’s badge on my lower sleeve.  I was at rigid attention,--my back ramrod straight, my thumbs precisely on the inverted side creases of my trousers, and my gaze fixed in the distance past the admiral’s right ear.  The admiral’s scrutiny went to my bellbottom pants then he said softly, “What your name, sailor?”

I am happy to say my eyes never wavered as I responded, “Frieze, Sir,--Frieze, C.R.”

I waited for the senior officer to tell the yeoman at his elbow to take my name and offense but then my gaze fell to his as the admiral said, “Been in the Pacific, eh?”

“Yessir—two years, admiral.”

“Well done, son.”

Then the grey-haired admiral made my day.  He turned and looked back alpong the long line of baggy regulations uniforms, then turned to Lieutenant Dugan.  “Now there, lieutenant,” the admiral said mildly, “is a sailor!”

I never knew the admiral’s name but I went on liberty that Saturday evening feeling as if he had given me the Congressional Medal of Honor—or at least a Navy Cross!  Dutchy and I celebrated sufficiently after she got off work at the lounge that I did not make it back to 87^th & Anthony until after noon Sunday.  I woke up in Dutchy’s tiny apartment in the murphy bed between she and her blonde roommate Alicia.  “Allie” was a bit out of sorts that morning because she had not been able to find her nightgown the night before.  The missing nightgown bothered her a lot more than getting from bed to the bathroom stark naked.  I got my bellbottoms on and the three of us had breakfast before I headed back to NATTC.  It was a causal relationship and Dutchy, Allie, and I kept it that way.  The two were more than used to the sailors who came and went as the war went on.

One afternoon, still in April I believe, the NATTC education officer came looking for me.  The eager young lieutenant junior grade explained that he had been going thorough personnel records and he believed that with my high school record, I should apply for the Navy V-12 officer training program.

Until then I had never heard of the V-12 program.  When the lieutenant explained that it was a training program that would provide a complete college education to officer candidates followed by a commission in the Navy after midshipman’s school.  I tipped back my head and laughed.

“Hell, lieutenant, sir, I ain’t a college boy—I’m a fleet sailor!  They say they’ll make me a CPO when I get out of here in two months, then I can help form a new squadron and go back out to fight the Japs.  That’s where they started it and I aim to be there when we end it!  Besides, I got my application for AP school to learn to fly.”

Looking at the record of my high school grades that was in the personnel file in his hand, the JG—as I recall—said something like, “Okay, Frieze.  Fine.  Do me a favor though—let me fill out the application for the program.  You may not make it anyway.  They only need sixteen people form here this spring.”

Somehow that riled me a bit.  I thought about my Annapolis ambitions, the preparatory courses that I had taken in high school, and the injustice of my Annapolis examination being burned during the Japanese raid on Hawaii. I laughed and said, “Okay, lieutenant.  Fill out the papers and I’ll take the exam!”

The next Friday evening Byrd, Rineman, and I were at our usual table at the Crown Propeller Lounge.  I was reasonably sober when we got back to 87^th & Anthony but, I must admit, had a pretty fair hangover the next morning when Rineman woke me and said, “Hey, Frieze, aren’t you supposed to be taking that examination today?”

I groaned.  It was nearly oh eight hundred and the examination was scheduled for 0830.  I had a quick shower, but was still foggy when the education officer put the examination packet in front of me.  

It was not a snap exam.  There were sections on English, American History, World History, Geography, and Mathematics through solid geometry.  The answers came hard to my aching head.  At the four-hour deadline I turned in my papers with the thought, “Well, that takes care of any chances to go to officer candidate school!”

I went back to my classes on Monday feeling sure that I did not have a chance at V-12.  I recall clearly that I had just finished a class on the Stronberg-Carlson pressure injection aviation carburetor when I encountered Rineman in the passageway.  “Hey, Frieze,” he said, “they just posted the results of that exam you took for V-12.”

It wtas not exciting news and I figured that I probably finished way down on the list; however, I went by the bulletin board to have a look.  The names were listed in order of grade and a red line had been drawn beneath the sixteenth name.  To my astonishment that sixteenth name was “Frieze, C.R., AMM1/c”!

It was dizzying news.  I immediately called my parents to tell them I was going to go to college.  I also called Shirley and told her to put aside any wedding plans.  Officer candidates were not allowed to be married until they received their commissions and, going to school year ‘round, college and midshipman’s school would take more than three years.  I offered to break off the engagement, but she would have none of it and insisted that she would wait.  I let it ride.

On 21 June 1943 my orders arrived.  I was to report to the University of Notre Dame ion South Bend, Indiana, for my pre-major semester in the Navy V-12 college training program.  The orders included a seven-day delay enroute.  That was not enough to make a trip back to Vancouver, but I did not care.  I decided to go down to the Ozarks to see my grandparents and relatives.  I took the train to Kansas City, then the bus to Greenfield.

I had deliberately not notified my grandparents, but wanted to surprise them and easily found their little white house a block off the courthouse square.  When I walked up carrying my zippered blue ditty bag, Grandpa Stanley was out back painting the tailgate of the small pickup truck that he had in retirement.

It was a joyful reunion and my grandparents were flabbergasted when I told them that I was on my way to college.  I recall clearly that Grandpa blew his nose on his red bandanna and said, “Well, boy, we have been real proud of you and Richard and now we are especially proud of you!”  Grandma promptly got a dozen eggs and made me one of her fabulous angel food cakes.

The author's grandparents in Greenfield, MO 1943

We had three pleasant days of visiting.  The weather was clear and balmy and one evening we sat out on the front porch.  At my urging, Grandpa got out his old violin and played several pieces that had people stomping on the street in the twilight to listen.  His “Marching Through Georgia” was rousing and toe-tapping and when he played “Amazing Grace” there in the still and balmy twilight you could see and hear bagpipes in the Scottish Highlands.  (My mother told me in later years that it was probably the last time he touched his fiddle.  He already had the first signs of a terminal illness and died the following year.)

Heading into the Unknown

The plan was that Grandpa would take me to the bus stop over to the north of Fair Play where I could get the bus to Kansas City.  One of my many relatives in Kansas City would meet me, then I would stay for a couple of days with my Aunt Ora and attend the wedding of one of my Kansas City cousins.  Someone up there would put me on the train to Portland, Oregon.

Grandpa was to take me to Fair Play in the green Chevrolet sedan while Grandma tended the store.  I recall that it was a bright and sunny morning when Grandma gave me a big tight hug on the store porch, admonished me to be a good boy and to be careful on the trip by myself, and said that they were going to miss having me around and all the help I had been.

I looked back as we started off down that familiar road north that I had walked to school so many times.  The familiar plump figure in that ankle-length dress stepped down into the red dirt of the road and waved.  I waved back and I guess it must have already been warm out there in the sun as, the last thing I saw of Grandma as we went over the hill, she was wiping at her cheeks with a corner of her apron.

I do not recall that Grandpa and I talked very much during the trip to Fair Play.  I mostly watched the familiar scenes going by that I was not to see for a long, long time.  There was the little white schoolhouse, closed now for the summer.  We went up the hill past the Lindley house, but I did not see anyone around nor did I see anyone around Rollo Lindley’s place where my erstwhile friend Roundtree lived.

We went through the Little Sac River bottomlands where I had plowed Dad’s rented cornfields with that mis-matched team, then across the steel bridge that Dad had helped to build two or three years before.  In a couple of miles, we turned past the Doc Hunt place where our dog Pal had died and where Richard and I had milked all those cows.

At Fair Play we only had a short time to wait until the Kansas City bus came.  I noticed that Grandpa’s kindly voice was a bit gruffer than usual when he said, “We’re going to miss you, boy.  You have been a great help to your Grandma and me.  We are right proud that you did so well in school and we expect you to make us even more proud of you out there in the west.  I don’t expect we will see you for a pretty long time.”

I suddenly felt that I should comfort him somehow, but he was still that tall figure of authority that everyone looked up to—standing there in his striped overalls, black coat, and black Homberg hat above his gold-rimmed spectacles.  I think I just said sort of lamely, “Well, Grandpa, I sure hope I was not too much trouble for you.  I was real glad to get to stay a while with you and Grandma and I reckon it won’t be too long before we can come to visit.”

(I had no inkling, of course, that the next time I would see him would be in Vancouver, Washington and I would be wearing the dress blues of a first class petty officer in the Navy with a row of ribbons and three major battles in the Pacific behind me.)

The bus pulled in before we could talk anymore and Grandpa helped the bus driver stow my box and suitcase.  Then he handed me the sack lunch Grandma had made for me to have on the bus and he pressed a two-dollar bill into my hand.

“Goodbye, boy,” Grandpa said gruffly.  “That is for you to have something a little extra along the way.”

“Gee, thank you, Grandpa!”  I pocketed the money then started to shake hands but he suddenly did something that he had not done since I was little. He put his arms around me in a bear hug then pushed me toward the door of the bus and turned abruptly away.

On the bus I took a seat on the right side then opened the window and leaned out as the bus pulled out.  Grandpa turned back around and waved his black hat.  I guess it was warm out there in the sun in Fair Play for Grandpa, too.  The last thing I saw he was wiping his face with his big red bandanna as his tall, straight figure receded into the distance behind the bus.

Life in Hard Times

Chapter 4

…and the star skunk

During the early thirties it seemed as if the drought and Hard Times would go on forever.  The sun rose each morning into a clear blue sky and, long before noon, it was a brassy ball under which the heat became oppressive.  The red soil of our Ozark cornfields and that of the dirt country roads turned to powdery dust and, in summer, the corn shriveled more than it grew.  The cows spent as much time in whatever shade they could find as they did in grazing on the parched grass.

Walking through the woods in the heat of the day was like walking in church—a stillness because the squirrels were enervated and the many songbirds were muted.  Many times during those hot summer days the only sounds might be the distant ker-thump of someone’s hydraulic ram pumping water from a dwindling branch, the listless caw of a distant crow, or perhaps the plaintive call of a mourning dove.

Typical dress and method of clothes washing in the Ozarks 

When we moved onto the little farm spang in the middle of the drought years, not much of a living could be made on forty acres so Dad had to rent other land to try to grow corn and he often went out looking for other work.  Once, in the mid-thirties, he got some road work when the government was improving the dirt road through Bona to a “farm-to-market-road” and during that time he helped build new bridges over the Little Sac river north of Bona and over Maze Creek between Bona and Dadeville.  By the sweat of his brow and the labor of his strong arms, he kept some sort of food in the house and clothes on our backs—albeit often faded and patched which Mother kept clean with her washtub and scrub board.

Josie Stanley on porch in Bona, MO

I have already described Grandpa Stanley’s general store at Bona.  His house was just north of the store, across a grassy yard.  It was a white, two-story (one and half actually, as the upper floor with two bedrooms was an overgrown attic with dormer windows) farmhouse type building.  It had a small front porch that was covered on each side by a red climber rose.  The porch was just large enough for Grandma to sit in her rocking chair out there in the evening and piece quilt tops or tat lace (her small hands were never idle).  When I stayed with them, Grandpa and I would sit on the porch step after he closed the store for the night and he would sometimes get out his fiddle and play for us.  He was a good old-time fiddler and could really saw out a tune, all by ear and memory.  I especially liked his lively rendition of “Marching Through Georgia.”  Right there you know that he was on the side of the Union during the Civil War, although he could play “Dixie” and the old Stephen Foster southern songs with the best of them.  Most old-time fiddlers played with the fiddle resting on their chest, but Grandpa played in a more modern style with the fiddle tucked up under his chin.

Great-great-great-grandson of C. B. Stanley

I like to believe that somewhere Grandpa Stanley looks favorably on the violin ability of his great-great-great-grandson.  

C. B. Stanley on the porch of his general store, Bona, MO

The house and store sat on a big double corner lot and there was a small barn down in back that Grandpa used for storage and for a garage for his car and truck.  At one side of the barn, behind a large lilac bush, was the two-holer outhouse (big hole for adults and a small one for us kids).  On the other side of the barn was the kitchen vegetable garden.  Between it and the big back yard Grandma always had a row of tall hollyhocks.  She was very fond of flowers.  In the front yard there was a frame for roses, sweetpeas along the fence by the town row of mailboxes, and in the side yard a combined flower/herb garden.  A big black walnut tree shaded that east side of the house.

In my earliest memories, the northeast corner of the Bona crossroads was vacant and was used for a hitching rail for wagons and buggies coming to the store or to church; however, sometime around 1932 or so, my Uncle Hubert from Kansas City built a new store building there for Tom Humbert.  We did not trade there much as he was a competitor to Grandpa Stanley but, of course, we kids often hung out there.

Although gambling was a mortal sin, Tom Humbert one time put in a penny slot machine that some slick-talking traveling salesman talked him into.  It resulted in a lesson for us boys that gambling was a sin.  One afternoon my little brother Rex was at Humbert’s store and he had a penny.  He put it into that slot machine and won a small handful of pennies.  Rex was only about six years old so, naturally, marched proudly home and showed Mother what he had won.  She scolded him good and made him march right back down to Humbert’s store and give back the pennies because he could not take money won at gambling.  I think Tom did away with that little contraption shortly thereafter, most likely the church elders got on him about it.

(I guess that lesson took pretty well on Rex as I never knew him to do much in the way of gambling in later years.  It did not take too well on Richard and me, however, as when we were in VP-11 in the Navy he was known as a sharp poker player and I had an undeserved—I was just lucky at times—reputation as a crap shooter and poker player.  I still play poker with some of my old cronies, but only nickel, dime, and quarter pot limit.)