Excuse the interruption. This sea story is not in chronological sequence. Last night, these thoughts about one particular sailor came into my head. i wanted to capture those thoughts now.

The Navy has grown with the times. Many of the sailors in my time on board ships (from 1963 until 1985, on and off, of course) would not be accepted into today’s Navy. The world has gone technical and the Navy with it. Consequentially, higher scores on aptitude tests and other hurdles to demonstrate smartness is required.

Many sailors, especially in my early days with the Navy, were not mental giants. Oh, we had plenty of intelligent enlisted as the draft was still rolling and many smart young men chose to ride a ship rather than pound the ground or watch aircraft head for the wild blue yonder. But there was a place for folks who did not have an excellent academic record. In fact, many sailors had not graduated from high school. i knew of a number of sailors from those years who were there because a judge gave them a choice of joining the Navy or going to jail.

In numerous cases i witnessed, the Navy was this kind of sailor’s life. They lived on the ship, a place to sleep with food to eat. The civilian clothes they had were in a locker storage place outside the base gate. When they went out, it was most frequently to a bar. There were only a very few who were incorrigible. Many went up and down the ranks like a yo-yo. i knew several that had made it to second or first class petty officers but kept getting busted and spent their twenty years as a seaman or fireman most of the time. Nearly all of them contributed in some way to an effectively run a ship.

The sailor in this tale was one of those. He was a fireman in the after engine room of the USS Hollister (DD 788). i was his Chief Engineer (1973-75). This particular sailor didn’t do much more than stand his watches back aft. He stayed pretty much to himself and was quiet. He had gotten into trouble occasionally, several times getting caught smoking marijuana, but that was about it.

There were two distilling plants on the Hollister, the large one in main control, the forward engine room, the smaller one in the after engine room. These two plants made feed water for the boilers and potable water for the crew. They were vital for operations and feed water, the latter used to power the ship through the four boilers always took precedence of the 300 or so souls in the crew and the wardroom. The forward evap (our term for evaporators or the distilling plants) could produce about 700 gallons an hour. The after evap could make about 250 gallons of water each hour.

i often wondered what evil genius designed these evaps. They made any Rube Goldberg invention look simple. It took genius to maximize their output along with stroking and petting them, believe it or not, TLC. During my engineering tour, i determined that along with everything else, the evaps was possessed by and ran at the whim of gremlins. Today, as i write, i know those gremlins jumped on my shoulders as i rotated to my next ship and now occupy any mobile phone or computer of mine.

The ship had transited to Pearl Harbor from Long Beach with her destroyer squadron. After a week of liberty, we were getting underway to return to home port when the forward evaps went down. Even my master chief machinist mate, an incredible engineer, could not coax the plant into making water. He kept trying, along with his first class and several others. i personally took soundings on the water tanks and kibitzed almost round the clock with the master chief on the next tactic.

The after evap was huffing and puffing and actually was making more water than it was rated to produce. The reason was the fireman i mentioned earlier. It was almost like he had a love affair with that contraption. He would twist the controls, of which there were many, tenderly, moving them just slightly — think of the Wizard of Oz twisting all those controls when Dorothy, Toto, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and the Scarecrow discovered him behind the curtain.

We would have been in big trouble without that overproducing little evap and its master who tended to its needs.

As it was, we were on water hours for almost four complete days before the master chief and his boys got the big evap running again. Our captain sent a flashing light message to the commodore on the destroyer flag ship reporting we were going off water hours. The commodore responded, “Congratulations to CHENG. Please remain downwind for the next couple of days.”

The fireman got out after a month or so after we moored in Long Beach.

i miss those kinds of sailors. They aren’t around any more.