Tag: Long Beach

Rat Remorse – Part 3 of 3

Maybe, just maybe, there wouldn’t have been so much fallout over the rat story if we hadn’t had an admiral on board USS Los Angeles. But we did.  The admiral didn’t think the “Rats in Long Beach!” story was funny and he made that  clear to the ship’s captain.

USS Los Angeles {CA-135)
The admiral on USS Los Angeles (CA-135) didn’t think the “Rats In Long Beach!” story was funny.

The captain, who wanted to be an admiral someday, told his second in command that the rat story was not funny at all and he was disappointed, very disappointed, that something like that had happened on his watch. The captain made it crystal clear that he wanted something done about the rat story forthwith.

The executive officer, a commander who wanted to be a captain someday, shoved that poop right on down the hill and by the time it got to our lieutenant it was a full blown poopie storm.

The officer who dreamed up the “Rats In Long Beach!” story and ordered the editor of the ship’s paper to publish it was ordered to apologize, personally, to every man aboard ship, all 1,000 of them.  And ask them to sign a paper saying he had apologized. He tried to weasel, approaching several men at a time, trying to make a joke of it, and asking them to sign his rat book.

But word of the lieutenant’s punishment spread quickly and the crew was not about to let him off the hook.  Enlisted men would say to him, words to this effect: “I was so worried about my family when I read that story in the paper.  I’ve heard you made it up and worried me for nothing.   Aren’t you supposed to apologize?”

And the lieutenant would say, “Well, yes.”

And then the enlisted man would order the officer:  “So apologize, lieutenant.  And then maybe I’ll sign your book.”

This would have been humiliating beyond words for a normal naval officer but the lieutenant was not a normal officer.

[When we were overseas, and underway, officers stood a lot of watches, way more than the average enlisted man. But the lieutenant stood no watches.  He wasn’t allowed. I asked him if that embarrassed him, not standing any watches when other officers were bleary eyed from standing so many.  He replied, “Did it embarrass Br’er Rabbit when they threw him in the brier patch?”]

When the lieutenant finished apologizing he bound all of the signatures into a book and got a friend to draw a cartoon of rats climbing all over a ship’s compartment. That was page one.

He titled his little book, “Rat Remorse.”

Postscript:  I don’t know what happened to the lieutenant but I do know he was transferred and left Los Angeles an hour or so after our ship  returned to her home port, Long Beach, California.  I was ordered to carry his belongings to the gangway, including a glass ball that was cracked.

“This ball is cracked,” I told him.  “What do you want to do with it?”

“I bought it like that,” the lieutenant said. “It was cheaper.”

Coming Monday: The Ku Klux Klan

Rat Remorse – Part 1 of 3

Jayne Mansfield, actress
Jayne Mansfield, actress

It all began with Jayne Mansfield, an exceedingly well endowed actress popular in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, who claimed to have been lost at sea on Feb. 7, 1962. Whether she really was lost at sea I don’t know but I sort of doubt it.

Anyway, Journalist Third Class Gary D. Greve and I put out a daily paper when we were overseas so the crew of our ship, USS Los Angeles (CA-135), would have some idea of what was going on back home.  Greve, who had also worked for a newspaper before he joined the Navy and was senior to me, was the editor, thank goodness.

There wasn’t much to our little newspaper.  Stories were radioed to our ship.  We typed them on mimeograph paper, the ship’s print shop ran off about 400 copies on 8 x 10 paper, stapled them together, and left stacks of them here and there in the passageways.  Not much to it but since our paper was the only one around it was avidly read and passed around among the ship’s 1,000-man crew.

We ran a short item about Miss Mansfield’s boat capsizing but, as sometimes happened when we were overseas and radio traffic was interrupted for one reason or another, we didn’t learn for several days that she had been rescued.

When we found out that Miss Mansfield was safe our boss, who was a lieutenant junior grade, decided to have a little of what he called fun.

A friend of his had worked for the Associated Press and could write stories that read just like the real thing.  Between them they cooked up an explanation for Miss Mansfield’s survival –the buoyancy of her bosoms.

He told Greve to put the phony Mansfield story in paper.  

Greve did not like the lieutenant –hated him is more like it– and he certainly didn’t like the idea of putting a made up story in his newspaper, but for some reason he did it. And no one was the wiser.

The lieutenant loved it, and his private little joke emboldened him.

After the success of the made-up Mansfield story, the lieutenant and his friend, the former Associated Press reporter, decided to go big: they fabricated a story about an epidemic of rats in Long Beach, California, our ship’s home port.

Rats were everywhere, the story said.

When the mayor of Long Beach drove to Pier Echo to get a first-hand look, the rats attacked. The mayor barely escaped.  Surrounded by rats, he was plucked from the roof of his car by a helicopter, the story said.

And there it was, a few graphs down, the local angle.

The story said the heavy cruiser Los Angeles, on its way home from the Western Pacific, was expected to tie up at Pier Echo within the week. That sentence, at least, was a fact. The LA had already left Hawaii, headed home.

The lieutenant told Greve to put the rat story in the paper, but Greve didn’t do it. The next day he told the officer there had been too much news, and not enough space left to run the rat story. Well, the officer said, get it in there tomorrow.  But Greve held the story again.

That’s when the lieutenant told Greve, “I’m ordering you to put that story in paper.”

The trap was set.

I did mention it, didn’t I? Greve hated the lieutenant.

Continued tomorrow:  Rat Remorse, Part 2 of 3