You had to hand it to Bob Hope: no matter how small or insignificant your ship was, if he was in the area during the holidays, he could show up on Christmas day. He might not be able to bring his whole USO troupe, including the band, Ann Margaret, Vic Damone, etc., but he would always bring as many as he could cram onto one helicopter, including Miss World.
I saw his Christmas show overseas on two occasions, about fifteen years apart. I don’t exactly remember when or where, other than it was long ago and far, far away. However, the first show does stand out in my mind.
We only heard that he was coming the night before, on Christmas Eve, and you can imagine the chaos that ensued. The Old Man, who was a “screamer,” went ballistic, somehow convinced that our ship was now the dirtiest in the fleet and that a top to bottom “field day” or scrub down was necessary. He even had us up at dawn on the day of the show, heaved to, doing a freshwater wash down of all topside spaces, which was “something” on that old ship, as our evaporators could barely make enough fresh water to have enough to drink after the engines got their fill, much less take showers. We could have been the inspiration for those famous lines in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798):
Day after day, day after day, we stuck, no breath no motion,
As idle as a painted ship on a painted ocean,
Water, water everywhere and all the boards did shrink
Water, water everywhere nor any drop to drink.
It was so hot we had swim call a few days earlier, but I didn’t jump into the water. I’m afraid of sea snakes, which very poisonous and are aggressive if disturbed, and they are on you before you know it.
The next crisis was “how big is Hope’s helicopter going to be?” He was coming off one of the aircraft carriers on Yankee Station, and the Old Man got it in his head that our flight deck might be too small. We tried to tell him that it probably wouldn’t be larger than a Huey, which occasionally brought us some mail, but he was convinced that Bob Hope was going to die landing on his ship and his, the captain’s, career would be ruined. I, personally, started to think he was more worried about his career than he was about Bob Hope. I had many captains in my 36 years on active duty, and I tried to respect all of them. This bird, however, was a hard man who led by intimidation.
After we got on the radio and sorted that out, the captain melted down over “Who is going to be in charge of Hope’s visit?” I saw that coming and tried to hide. I figured that the Old Man and the XO would be “Johnny on the spot” to meet Hope (and Miss World), but that they would then disappear to “attend to the affairs of the ship” – leaving me in show business.
Which is exactly what happened. I spent the early morning trying to rig, in moderately rough seas, a performance stage. The largest open space we had, however, was the flight deck, and Hope’s helo would be sitting in the middle of that, filling it up. I decided that he would just have to tell his jokes on the tarmac. My next problem was a sound system. I knew we would have to provide one, but ours was so old and weak that we would have to go dead in the water for Hope to be heard.
Anyway, it all worked out. He showed up, about an hour late, just after the noon watch had changed; so, a third of the crew who had been patiently waiting for the show had to go on duty, but we broadcast the show internally over the 1MC. It was vintage Bob Hope – dressed like he was going to play golf, carrying his putter; telling jokes which seemed so much funnier at that time and place; and Miss World was beautiful.
I suppose it’s odd. We knew that someone else wrote Hope’s jokes, and that he had a handwritten card file of at least 56,000 to choose from (now preserved in the Smithsonian Institute), but everything he said was hysterically funny. He said, “Hello,” I’m so proud to be here on . . . where are we?”, and everyone bent over in convulsions. Even when he said things like, “The country is behind you, 50 %!” - everyone laughed. When you are 8,000 miles from home on a holiday like Christmas, at a location so remote that even Rudolph the Red-nosed reindeer couldn’t find it, you, too, would laugh at something as corny as we did when he said: “And for anyone who hates being on this boat – how would you like to be here without it?”
During my third Bob Hope show, not at Christmas and toward the end of his illustrious career, I ended up being kissed by the then young actress, Brooke Shields. She chased me until I caught her. I recently saw her on a television talk show, and I must admit that she has held up a lot better than I have. Or maybe she just has a good make-up artist and a plastic surgeon?
It’s funny, in a way, that in none of the Bob Hope shows that I witnessed, especially at Christmas, was there a priest, minister, or rabbi (Hanukkah) in his traveling troupe. You might be surprised how many in the audiences would have appreciated their presence on the program. The old adage is true: “There are no atheists in foxholes.”
I’ve seen both happy and sad Christmases. Like countless other sailors, cowboys, prisoners, truck drivers, assorted wanderers, and homeless pilgrims, I know what it’s like to be alone on Christmas and to wonder if anyone knows if you are alive. In the old days, before shipboard television and closed-circuit broadcasting, many ships had a channel on the public address system devoted to playing popular music and often carols at Christmas. Many ships even had volunteer DJs spinning records during off duty hours. I remember taking one young DJ to task for adding Merle Haggard’s song, “I Wonder If They Ever Think of Me” (1972) to his holiday rotation. Morale was bad enough without this:
Not a day goes by that I don’t think of mama
And my nights are filled with thoughts of sweet Marie.
And I remember daddy sayin’ you’ll come back a better man’.
And I just wonder if they ever think of me
Oh, I just wonder if anyone thinks of me.
People often ask me how I remember some of the stuff I talk about in my column. I can remember the past – when something is so intense, you tend to remember, but the present is getting a little sketchy. For example, yesterday, I lost my cart in Walmart, got someone else’s and didn’t even realize I was paying for their dog food. I don’t even have a dog.
For me, Christmas is a nostalgic time – so many miles traveled, so many memories growing dimmer by the day. I’m one year older, no smarter, feebler, and the milestones begin to pass like telephone poles disappearing past a speeding car’s window: graduation, marriage, first job, first time fired, death of a loved one, retirement - the beat goes on. In my mind, I almost hear the flutter of wings, the whisper of desperation.
I’ve written before about the many Christmas holidays I’ve spent at sea, but some of my Christmases ashore stand out even more vividly in my memory. On one ship, when I was still in my teens, we spent the day delivering spare parts to the Voice of America radio transmitter that was once located at Thessaloniki, Greece, blasting out capitalistic agitprop across Eastern Europe. We went cold iron for two or three days, and my two friends and I spent our off time down in the engine room playing Jerry Lee Lewis and Muddy Waters on an old record player they had there. Both friends cashed in their chips years ago.
Then, there was another Christmas in Barcelona, Spain, where the destroyer I was on was literally out of gas and ended up staying tied up almost a month. This was back when Jimmy Carter was president and, although he was an ex-naval officer and a Naval Academy graduate, the defense budget crashed during his administration, and there was a shortage of fuel oil for our ships throughout the Mediterranean. Stuck in Barcelona might sound romantic and exciting, but it's very expensive there on a sailor’s pay, and bullfights, flamenco music, and tapas bars aren’t cheap. In fact, Barcelona was the first and only time in my life when I owned a switchblade knife. Being broke, about the only thing to do on liberty off the ship was to stroll up and down the main street near the waterfront, the Ramblas, eating one of the Valencia oranges on sale by street peddlers. You needed a knife to peel it, and switchblades were about the only cheap knives for sale on the street.
Another Christmas, on the other side of the world in the Philippines, we spent the day painting, rewiring, and replumbing a Catholic orphanage in the hills high above the Subic Naval Station. This holiday was unique because I’m pretty sure it was the first time some of the younger children had ever seen or held ice. The only electricity was provided by generators, and we carried our lunches, provided by the ship, in a large ice chest. The children, of course, ate our sandwiches and drank our sodas, and by the way they reacted to the ice, it was obviously unfamiliar to them.
Finally, I remember another Christmas day, in port Hong Kong, after a long transit through the South China Sea, when my best friend and I spent the entire day talking about what we were going to do when we got out of the service. I was still young and dumb and hadn’t settled on the Navy as a career. He was a farm boy, even more “country” than I was, from Monticello, Mississippi, over in Lawrence County. He had a girlfriend there who sent him care packages every month, which he graciously shared with me. He lived out in the “sticks,” from a family of loggers, and never finished high school. My buddy was a “snipe,” a term used by those in engineering to refer to themselves, but outsiders better not use it unless they wanted a punch in the nose – like calling a Marine a “jarhead.”
His dream when he was discharged, which struck me as rather strange, was to buy a baby blue Cadillac convertible, put his girlfriend in the front seat, and a big teddy bear in the back seat. So equipped, he would then ride up and down the main street of Monticello on Christmas day.
I listened to this all day long, and as a car lover, I “got” the part about the Cadillac, and I was envious about the girlfriend; but I was a little vague about the significance of the teddy bear. I thought maybe it had something to do with Elvis. I didn’t say anything; however, because it was his dream, and I had mine, which was probably just as unrealistic. Unfortunately, he was killed that summer when a high-pressure steam line in the engine room burst and scalded him to death. To this day, I avoid Monticello.
I’ve been back on purpose only once, actually twice, because I went to see his mama. A few years later, I was a freshman at Mississippi College in Clinton, having decided to stay in the Navy and needing a college degree to be commissioned as an officer. At the start of Christmas vacation, a carload of girls from Tylertown caught a ride home with me. It was a hot day, my car wasn’t air conditioned, and they wanted to stop in Monticello for a popsicle. I wasn’t too excited about the idea but went along with it.
I didn’t explain why, but after we got back into the car, I took a detour and slowly drove down Monticello’s main street. As we moved along, underneath the Christmas decorations, I was thinking to myself: “This sure isn’t a Cadillac convertible; your girlfriend is probably married; I don’t have a teddy bear; and it’s not yet Christmas Day, but, ole buddy, this Christmas ride is for you!
Light a candle for me.
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Benny Hornsby of Oak Grove is a retired U.S. Navy captain. Visit his website, bennyhornsby.com, or email him: villefranche60@yahoo.com.
