When the Ship Came In

When the Ship Came In

I just read an article written by Julie Counting the Days Laughlin’. Her husband is coming home from Iraq in just eight days. I know just how she feels because I married a career navy man during WWII. He took a discharge when his six-year enlistment term was up, but things didn’t work out for us in civilian life, so he reenlisted just a year later.

That was in 1948, and although he was an aviation machinist mate, he was assigned to the brand new USS Midway as ship’s company, and his job was to keep track of the firefighting equipment. He hated it.

I sold our house in Tampa, moved to Norfolk and rented a little beach cottage on East Ocean View Ave. The Midway was out to sea on a six-month Mediterranean cruise at the time. Communication was by only by mail, and my husband often got my daily letters all at once after weeks of waiting to hear from me. The ship’s captain wasn’t very forthcoming with their schedule so my husband couldn’t even tell me when he was due in.

I could be resourceful when I put my mind to it, so I called the Norfolk harbormaster who told me exactly what day and time I could expect the Midway, and I wrote to my husband and let him know, too.

The day dawned bright and clear, but I had been out on the beach before dawn watching the eastern horizon. A half an hour before the sun came up, I saw the stacks of the first destroyers and other escort vessels in the carrier group rise up out of the sea. As I watched them come closer, the giant stacks of the USS Midway, the newest heavy carrier in the fleet, came over the horizon. What a thrill!

I didn’t watch long. I ran back to our tiny cottage, woke and dressed my little son and daughter, and fed them breakfast. I timed it wrong, and the Midway was already docked at Pier 7 when I got onto the base, and parked out near the docking area. The USS Missouri was tied up on the other side of the pier, and sailors were lined up all along its side watching all the activity around the Midway.

After finding a place to park, my children and I joined the group of wives and children already there waiting impatiently. A line had been tied across the pier to keep all the wives and children in check longer than it took to tie up the ship. The gangway was down and we could see that two sailors were stationed at the foot of it. Still we waited, getting more impatient every minute. At last one nervy wife without any children jumped over the line, and started running down the pier toward the ship. It didn’t take the rest of us long before we all ran pell-mell toward the gangway. The sailors on the USS Missouri cheered us on loudly.

At about the same time the sailors on the Midway were released, and they arrived at the bottom of the gangway at about the same time as the wives reached it. What a joyous reunion that was! It turned out my husband was one of the unlucky guys in the duty section that was stationed at the bottom of the gangway, so we weren’t free to go right away after that first big hug and kiss, but it wasn’t long before we were on our way home, with him driving of course, to my freshly cleaned cottage, and the meal I had planned for later. But first the kids had to be given the presents my husband brought for them from Europe, and then they were sent out into the yard to play with them. Those were the days. We might have been poor but we were very happy.