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Did you meet the real King Ol Thom?
(Thom Stewart) wrote in message ...
No Joe,
I never met Adm. King. I did met Nimitz, Halsey, Kincaid, McCain. I met
them but
never on a buddy,buddy basis. Only McCain, who I worked for, when he
was a Two Star. It was a "Yes Sir, No Sir" relationship.
Sounds like cush duty.
For a while I was TAD to the Admirals gig. Admirial Toups was in
charge of cruiser destroyer group 1 out of San Deigo and the Gompers
was his flag ship. Our ship was in the shipyard. It was great duty,
The gig was new so very little work, and a crew of 4 for a 40footer.
In 6 months we made 2 runs. One from the 32 street base to Coranodo
Island with the mayor of San Deigo, and the other time was to take the
admiral and his family to watch fireworks than to dinner on the
island. All the other days, all we had to do was call the admirals aid
and check in. Play football fish ect. Usually 2 hours a day work, and
we were off to do as we pleased.
Learned how to tie a bunch of fancy knots. Made spare money making
boat fenders out of old line and selling to the yacties on Coronado
island. When the ship was finished with the yard we all went back
work. We were able to get some great parts for our boats on the ship.
We had a LCM that we decked out with big blowers and turbos, AC, cushy
leather helmsmans chair, radios ect.....That boat became know as the
body snatcher. We had the duty of picking up all the jumpers off the
coronado island bridge. Remember on time my buddy got under the bridge
and put one engine in full forward and the other in full reverse, we
were spinning so fast on the bow I bet we were pulling 4 G's, and
doing everything we could to hang on while Roger the coxian was
lauging his ass off. Some officer saw us but we talked our way out of
trouble....
Thing that sucked about it the more senior BM's were the ones that
took it over 99.9% of the time, unless we were doing nuke weapon
movements, I was one of the few BM's that had a Top Secret
Clearence(failed Radioman). We got stuck with the open liberty boats
and the old slow plywood Higgens boat.
Joe
While on the gig we got any supplies we ordered, usually the next
day.
Joe
OT
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