My time as a Naval Reservist
My brother, Norvel went into the Army and my older brother, Dewitt, convinced me to join the Naval Reserve in Brownwood where I went to meetings for a couple years. I spent my first two-week cruise in Port Hueneme in San Diego at the Naval Training Center. The following year, our cruise took a ship for two weeks to Cuba, but first we sailed to the seven islands of the Dry Tortugas located about 70 miles West of Key West, Florida. There, we spent a day at Fort Jefferson, a Civil War prison which had been built between 1846 – 1871, to protect the coastal area from foreign intruders but later became a Federal prison. The fort was known as America’s Devil Island and had 25 acres within the one half mile of 50 foot high walls. It’s most famous inmate was Dr. Samuel Mudd, the doctor who unknowingly set the broken leg of John Wilkes Booth after he had killed President Lincoln at the Ford Theater. While Dr. Mudd was in the prison, he became famous for his work with the prisoners who were suffering from Yellow Fever. While we were there, we saw the nearby islands where thousands of birds (terns) nested and bred. The officers aboard our ship also fished for sharks from the deck of the ship.
We also spent two days in Havana, Cuba while President General Fulgencio Batista was still in power and before Fidel Castro led his coup d’ etat in 1959. At the time, Cuba was a well-known playground of the rich American gamblers, many of whom were friends of Batista and many who shared their spoils with him. Many of the top dogs in Batista’s casinos were the syndicate boys or members of the Mafia from the United States—the ones who had been lucky enough to have stayed alive during the days of the Al Capone era. They saw Cuba as a playground for the rich and mighty from the United States and made many millions of dollars in the brothels and other illegal businesses they controlled. I have heard that there were many of these unsavory characters who were kicked out by Fidel Castro and they returned to the the United States to continue their operations in Florida. In my opinion, Fidel Castro’ coup d’etat was probably the best thing that ever happened to clean up Cuba.
I graduated from Brownwood High School in May of 1950, the same month that North Korea invaded South Korea in an attempt to reunite the two Korea’s which had been divided since 1948. I was not called into service at that time so I did other kinds of work.
Later, my cousin, Jack, called and wanted me to come to work with him and his brother-in-law, James, in building Quonset huts around West Texas. We built one in Balmorhea, Texas and then we built several in Dell City, within sight of Guadalupe Peak, the highest point in Texas.
I would drive from Brownwood to San Angelo where my cousin, Jack, was living with the his sister and her husband and then we would drive on to Dell City on Sunday evenings. We would then work all day on Monday through Friday and reverse our drive back to San Angelo on Friday evenings after we finished work. Dell City had no motels so we slept in the shacks originally built for the braceros who would came in October and November to pick cotton. We were then obligated to move out and forced to spend our nights in sleeping bags on the concrete floors we had just poured for the Quonset huts. There was a small Quonset hut grocery in what might be called the town of Dell City but the store had very limited supplies. The crop dusting airplanes would take off and land on the one road in the middle of town. The water we had available came from the pumps in the cotton fields. It was plentiful and cool but had a terrible taste because the farm land was heavily loaded with alkaline and this kept us running for the nearest bushes which served as our bathroom while we were working there. The difficult job of driving the nails into the strand steel beams would sometimes get difficult as you had to hit the nail hard to get it to penetrate the steel beam. As a result, if the nail slipped to one side, it was easy to hit your thumb nail with the hammer. On a couple of occasions, I hit my thumb so hard that I knocked the thumb nail off. I would have quit immediately but Dell City is located about 90 miles from the nearest town and I had no other choice but to stay.
To my great relief, I was told by the Naval Reserve Unit that I was being called into duty. I returned home and went to Dallas for examination and entry before beginning my training at Great Lakes Naval Training Center near Chicago on January 19, 1953, the same day that General Dwight Eisenhower became the thirty fourth President of the United States. Even later, as I might have felt that I was suffering one of my worse days in the Navy, I never looked back and longed to be back building Quonset huts in Dell City.