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

 

Be Good Or Be Gone

When I was a petty officer aboard USS Los Angeles (CA-135) one of my duties was to put a little fear in the hearts of new guys in my division: stay squared away or else. I did that by introducing them to an old Navy tradition.

The Executive Division, my division, got the smartest of the seamen and firemen apprentices coming aboard ship right out of boot camp, the ones who had a year or two of college or who had high test scores.  That wasn’t exactly fair, but that’s the way it was — the ship’s personnel office was part of our division.

And if a new guy didn’t work out, we got rid of him.

On these special teaching mornings I would have the watch wake me real early. Then I’d tell the new guy to get up, get dressed, and come with me. We’d go to the compartment where I worked, right below the main deck, and  I’d make coffee, light up a Crook cigar, and wait.

There was no talk.  I’d just let him sit there, wondering what was going on.  When I heard a low rumbling coming from the main deck, and sailors counting, “A-one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. A-one, two…” I’d tell the new man, “Let’s go.”

Sailors holystoning the decks of USS Los Angeles.
Sailors holystoning the  USS Los Angeles.

We would climbed the ladder to the main deck and there before him would be a pretty remarkable sight –scores of sailors, pants legs rolled up, holystoning the deck, like American sailors had done for almost 200 years. 

The Los Angeles had teak decks and they had to be kept spotless — we were a flag ship, we had an admiral on board.  Holystoning was the best way to do that.

A holystone is a piece of soft sandstone, about the size of a brick, with a hole in the middle that didn’t go all the way through. Sailors stuck what looked just like a broom handle into the hole, bent over, and pushed and pulled the holystone back and forth, scrubbing and whitening the LA’s decks.

There would be six or eight sailors in a line here, four in a line over there, 15 working on a wider spot over yonder. All of them would be chanting, “A-one, two, three…” When the count got to eight they would move forward four inches and started again.

Saliors assigned to deck divisions holystoned in good weather and bad and always in the early morning hours, before breakfast.

We would stand there a few minutes, watching in silence.   And then I would tell the new guy, “If you [mess up] we are going to send you to the deck. Now let’s go back to sleep.”

NOTE from the USSConstitution.org web site:

“In the 18th and 19th centuries, Constitution‘s sailors began their day by cleaning the ship with the unwelcome task of holystoning the decks. A hand old time holystonepump wet the deck with seawater, and men with buckets cast sand over the planks. The watch then scoured away the previous day’s dirt and grime with soft white stones and stiff brushes. Some believe “holystoning” got its name because scrubbing sailors looked as if they were kneeling in prayer. This was the “most disagreeable duty in the ship,” wrote Samuel Leech, a sailor aboard during the War of 1812, especially “on cold, frosty mornings.”

Coming Friday:  If I Were The Boss Of Everything