This was supposed to be a copy of one of my Lebanon Democrat columns i wrote about my father, whose 109th birthday was yesterday. But my technically-challenged war with computer searches left me bereft, unable to find that column. So i have reinvented that experience below:

Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii, August, 1975 — It had been the busiest and most rewarding (and unexpected) deployment of my Navy career. It ended with one of the most satisfying and father-connecting moments in our lives.

James Rye Jewell, Sr., lifetime Lebanon, Tennessee resident and master mechanic who had spent his only two years living out of his small country town in the Seabees in the South Pacific cauldron of World War II, arrived a day earlier and took a helicopter tour of the island. The next day, USS Anchorage (LSD 36), with the sea detail officer of the deck and conning officer being James Rye Jewell, Jr., passed through Mamala Bay into the channel and moored pier side at the Naval Station at Pearl Harbor. Unlike most of my stops in Pearl going and coming from a WESTPAC deployment, it was a short stay. About a dozen or so of male relatives and friends, including my father, came onboard for the “Tiger Cruise” back to San Diego.

A “Tiger Cruise,” in my opinion, was a brilliant PR move by the Navy. When the opportunity arose in a non-combat possible time at sea, sailors and officers were allowed to sponsor a relative or friend to join them for a short time at sea. i believe this program still exists.

Our “Tiger Cruise” was the last leg of a seven-month deployment. The tigers were checked in, taken to their berthing and unpacked. It was late afternoon when my father joined me on the bridge to get underway. He stood by my side as i walked the ship from the pier turned it and maneuvered out the channel and turned east north east on a great circle route to the Southwest corner. When we cleared the sea buoy, sea detail was secured and he and i went below. i showed him my stateroom. He went to a meeting for the Tigers, i did a bit of paper work and we met in the wardroom for the evening mess. Afterwards, he walked about the ship and i did a bit more work in my office until the evening watch (2000-2400) as OOD. He joined me.

Daddy spent almost two hours with me. The squadron was returning together but it was almost independent steaming. i gave the conn to my Junior Officer of the Deck (JOOD) soon after relieving the watch. Daddy and i walked out to the starboard bridge wing, watched the other ships while i explained formation steaming. We looked at the heavens and i explained celestial navigation and some adventures we had experienced on the deployment.

Then, Daddy asked me how my sailors, the crew in deck department felt about the cruise.

Now, my father was raised a Presbyterian and became a Methodist when he married a woman whose grandfather had been a circuit rider and became a bishop in the Methodist church. My father’s mother had given him, and consequently me and my neice, Kate Jewell, the middle name of “Rye.” This was in honor of Charles Thomas Rye who was running and subsequently won the governor of Tennessee election in 1915 running as an ardent prohibitionist. Other than a decanter of whiskey to flavor the women’s boiled custard after holiday meals, there was no alcohol in our house.

i told him the sailors were okay with the deployment, but were very unhappy we had spent very little time in liberty and maintenance period at the Subic Bay US Naval base in the Philippines.

When he asked why they were unhappy with the amount of time in Subic, i told him why. Since 1946, the United States Navy had a presence there, and it became the major US base in the South Pacific. the town of Olangapo across the bridge from the base over “shit river” had been built for Filipinos who worked on the base. It had become the closest resemblance to Fiddlers’ Green in perhaps the world. Sailors went on liberty to chase women. Bars, night clubs, and casinos were the primary businesses and sailors found prostitutes, wild women, San Miguel beer, were available for cheap. Fights, street food that could wipe out your innards were available 24/7. The sailors and officers alike loved it. Most of the married ones considered themselves geographic bachelors.

Daddy was taken aback, amazed this was such an desired place for sailors. He wasn’t ready to accept it. We talked some more until he retired around 2000.

The ship conducted tours and activities for the Tigers, and he spent a large amount of the five day transit with me while i stood watch and did my work. When he wasn’t with me or occupied by the scheduled events, he went, mostly to areas under my supervision and talked to sailors. He spent quite a bit of time talking to my sailors.

When sea detail was set as we approached our return to San Diego, he again joined me on the bridge. After sea detail had been set, there was still a lull in my duties before we reached the sea buoy marking the entry into the channel. We went out on the port bridge wing and admired Point Loma. Daddy looked at me and said still with amazement, “Son, you are right. I’m not sure i will ever understand why?”

He was an incredible man, but he wasn’t a sailor.

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.