A Father’s Understanding

This is the second of the series of sea stories out of sequence to honor my father who is 109 years old today, passing to the other side eleven years ago a month shy of 99. It was one of my columns in the series “Notes from the Southwest Corner” in the Lebanon (Tennessee) Democrat, published there in 2009. The are are several parts of this that are included in previous sea stories in The Tale of the Sea and Me (For Sam):

SAN DIEGO – As the new year ramps up, I am back in the Southwest corner considering why I made the Navy my career.

My father also has wondered why a boy from Middle Tennessee would choose the sea for his livelihood. Others have wondered the same thing.

The sea called me during my midshipman cruise on the U.S.S. Lloyd Thomas (DD 694) in 1963. We steamed from Newport, RI, to Sydney, Nova Scotia; to Bermuda; and back to Newport as part of the U.S.S. Intrepid (CVA 11) battle group.

My last four weeks were in engineering with two watches and normal work requiring 16-hour work days. Having no more sense than now, I went from my last watch to the crew’s movie in the Drone Anti-Submarine Helicopter (DASH) hangar – “DASH” was a weapon which did not last long. Sailors called it “CRASH” instead of “DASH.” But its hanger on the 02 level just aft of amidships was perfect for showing movies.

This night, I watched “The Quiet Man” for the first time. As I left the theater and traversed the torpedo deck, I walked to the port side and gazed at the full moon.

The ship was making 15 knots. The moon’s reflection cut a wide, rippling, reflective path straight to me. The boilers roared through the forward stack. The bow wave was white, curling from the side and swishing its whisper as the ship cut through the water. “Darken ship” allowed no lights except those for navigation. At least a billion stars blanketed the black sky.

The sea grabbed me. She came down that path from the full moon, wafted across the bow wave, and reached deep inside. I felt her grab my heart and take it away.

I have loved her in her fury of the winter Atlantic, when she tossed a 500-foot ship around like a cork, ripping off protruding metal like dandelion bristles, and tossing sailors around the ship like matchsticks. Her intense fury blanketed the sea surface with froth.

I have loved her in the doldrums of the South China Sea where not a breath of wind existed, and the sea surface was glass for a week. I saw my first “green flash” then.

In the summer of 1973, steaming in the operating areas off of Newport, Rhode Island, my father saw why I went to sea. My ship, the U.S.S. Luce (DLG 7), was undergoing a major inspection. My Commanding Officer learned of my father visiting and invited him to ride during our underway day.

As a lieutenant, I was the sea detail officer of the deck. My father was by my side as I had the “conn” while the ship stood out of Narragansett Bay. As soon as we reached the operating area, we went to 25 knots for rudder tests, rapidly shifting the rudder to max angles both ways. The commanding officer, CDR Richard Butts, and I went into a frantic dance, running in opposite directions across the bridge to hang over each wing checking for small craft in the dramatic turns.

After the rudder tests, I took my father into the bowels of the ship to our anti-submarine warfare spaces. My father stood behind me as I directed prosecution of a submarine contact. In the darkened spaces with sonar pings resounding, he watched as we tracked the sub on our fire control screen and simulated firing a torpedo.

After lunch, we set general quarters and ran through engineering drills. Finally, we transited back to Newport.

With mooring complete, the captain gave my father a ship’s plaque. My wife and mother were waiting on the pier when we debarked from the ship’s quarterdeck. As we walked the brow to the pier, my father said to me, “Son, I understand why you would want to make this a career.”

I did. Somewhere in the latter stages of that career, I met a woman, a native of San Diego, and we got married. After a brief taste of being a Navy officer’s wife, she and I returned to San Diego for my “twilight” tour, the last four years on shore duty.

So now when I walk up our hill to raise and lower the flag, I look out to sea and check to see how many ships are pierside at the Naval Station.

And that, my friends, is why I made the Navy career and live in the Southwest corner, far from my home in Tennessee.

This is the first of three posts concerning my father and my Navy career. This first one was a Lebanon Democrat column i wrote in 2013. The lessons i learned from CAPT Max Lasell will continue after these.

i have chosen to post these now because my father’s 109th birthday is tomorrow. Our positive relationship was strengthened as he began to understand why i chose the Navy as a career. These are in honor of him.

Notes from the Southwest Corner: Fathers, heritage and work

by Jim Jewell

SAN DIEGO – Last week on a cool, marine layer grey day, I walked a wooden pier in the Southwest corner.

Crossing the end of the pier to Pamela Ann, a barge used for storage, I thought of my father.

Pacific Tugboat Service was at work that morning: work most marine service companies avoid because it’s just too hard.

I wished my father could see me in this environment.

It’s old-timey work: Men working on motors, chipping and painting, craning heavy loads, rearranging the company’s tiny chunk of bay space so cranes, barges, caissons, crew boats, pusher boats, and tug boats fit like a jigsaw puzzle. There was oiling and greasing going on. There was chipping and painting going on. Beating metal into something useful made ship repair sounds, music to my ears.

Tugboats were hooking up to barges and cranes to tow them where they would be utilized on some job. One ocean-going tug was getting ready to sail up to San Francisco pick up a barge, and bring it back to the Southwest corner. Stores for the journey were being staged on the pier, transferred to the tugboat’s deck by crane, and hauled below for storage.

The 62,000 ton “USNS Bob Hope” moved south from the marine terminal under the royal blue arching Coronado-Bay Bridge to the Navy Base. Pacific Tug’s “Harbor Commander,” a small pusher boat, was dwarfed while she pushed against the big monster, holding her steady in the channel.

The scene took me back to the spring of 1974 and Terminal Island, a two-hour drive north of here. My father, Jimmy Jewell, had come to San Diego, a rare trip without Estelle Jewell accompanying him. Six months earlier, I had become the chief engineer of the USS Hollister, a World War II destroyer named after three sailor brothers killed in combat in 1943.

The engineering plant would have made Rube Goldberg proud. My father and I toured the fire rooms (think boilers) and engine rooms while I explained the operation and maintenance requirements of the massive machinery. While Jimmy Jewell knew engines and mechanics better than most humans on earth having worked on them since he started fooling with cars in 1924, his elder son had jumped around a variety jobs and had been much more focused on writing rather than the mechanical side of the world until he rejoined the Navy two years earlier.

My father quietly took in the multiple pumps, forced-draft blowers, distilling plants, generators, and switchboards of the old tin can as we climbed up and down ladders, and finally ascended back to the main deck. As we crossed the brow back to the quay wall, he looked back at the ship and then to me and said, “It’s amazing you are in charge of all that.”

In the late 1800’s, my father’s family in Statesville faced a crisis when my great grandmother passed away. The two boys, one my grandfather, Hiram Culley Jewell, were sent to separate uncles to be raised. One uncle believed in education and sent my great uncle to college. The other uncle, the one who raised my grandfather, believed in hard work, not education. So my grandfather, my father, and my three uncles worked from that point on.

It was old timey work: steam-engine sawmills, plumbing, automobile maintenance, farming, and a myriad of other physically demanding work.

After my ship department head tours ended, I had not delved into old-timey work until I hooked up with Pacific Tugboat, a thirty year gap. I find it somewhat ironic, even poetic that I am back to what my great, great uncle determined: work is good for you.

In that context, I looked at our country today. Most “work” doesn’t require physical work. It’s brain power, service jobs, financial planning, technical expertise, salesmanship, writing, acting, and even talking, which bring home the bacon (if the family hasn’t gone vegetarian).

It seems we have prospered moving into this type of work. But I wonder. Physical labor used to be part and partial of living. I think it made us stronger, more focused on the moment, less fad and protest oriented.

Sunday in a break between golf and dinner, Father’s Day gifts from my wife, I stopped and thanked my father, my grandfather, and that great, great uncle for giving me an appreciation of old-timey work.