I never saw them, but “old salts” I knew and trusted swore they had – signs posted all over Norfolk, Virginia, saying “Sailors and Dogs, Keep off the Grass!” I wasn’t exactly Herman Melville’s “Handsome Sailor,” as described in his novella, “Billy Budd” (1924), but I didn’t deserve that approbation. In my circles, no one wanted to go there, anyway. We all knew Norfolk by its reputation in the Navy: “Where promising careers go to die.”
If such signs did exist, I suppose it was because the Norfolk city fathers and citizenry were spooked by the multitudes of “white hats” and “black shoes” who flooded their streets every weekend, looking for something to do, even though the local economy was based on emptying the pockets of those same sailors.
My definition of a “Navy” town is simple: it has Navy ships homeported there and sailors recognizable on the streets. Some might not have realized it, but from 1996 until 2006, Pascagoula, Mississippi, fit this description with as many as five active-duty ships homeported there before the Naval Station closed (USS Yorktown (CG-48), USS Antrim (FFG-20), USS Flatley (FFG-21), etc.).
To be fair, I guess Norfolk was a decent place. I managed to stay off a ship out of there, and except for some electronics schools that I needed for promotion, I avoided the place like the plague. I always felt tolerated but not appreciated, and in my mind, I was only “passing through.”
Norfolk was and remains our largest naval base on the east coast, the home of our Atlantic Fleet, and any place with such a large concentration of sailors is bound to have a few hiccups.
You might think that Navy towns were awash with drunken sailors. If so, you are wrong, and I blame it all on the traditional English sea shanties, such as “Up She Rises,” or as it is better known, “What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor?” which was sung aboard English sailing ships at least as early as the 1830’s:
What shall we do with a drunken sailor?
Chunk him in the long boat
Until he’s sober.
What shall we do with a drunken sailor?
Put him in the long boat
And make him bail her.
What shall we do with a drunken sailor?
Put him in the guard room
Until he gets sober.
The Canadian band, “The Irish Rovers,” made that song popular again during the folk music craze of the 1960s. That’s not to say that every sailor I knew was stone cold sober all the time, but back in the day, at an average pay rate of about $120 a month, one couldn’t get too drunk. Most sailors I knew spent their liberty time ashore walking the streets, looking at other sailors, looking back at them, completely ignored by the local civilians, especially the girls. There was generally nothing to do but ride the bus downtown, get a hamburger, marvel at the “boots” right out of recruit training getting themselves all tattooed up (In those days, no one got tattoos except sailors and prisoners in the penitentiary); have your photo made to send home; or maybe buy some overpriced but blingy jewelry on credit from a predatory jeweler to send back home to a girl who had probably forgotten you already.
So, while for some, the phrase a “sober sailor” is an oxymoron, it’s not true. Later in my career, I was an observer at enough Captain’s Masts (Non-Judicial Punishment) to know. Most offenses involved very junior sailors who were insubordinate to superior petty officers, who returned late to the ship, were involved in petty theft, or who were written up for fighting. I saw very few who were up on charges of being drunk and disorderly. I generally knew the offender and tried to put in a good word for him to the Old Man (No women onboard ships in my day.).
I know that most have an affinity for their hometowns, as do I; but when I came home after 36 years, mine was nothing but empty store fronts, tumbleweeds rolling down main street, and a few people standing around wondering what happened. Consequently, I guess my real allegiance lies with the “Navy towns” where my several ships were homeported. To name them sounds like a cook’s tour of the United States: Boston, Newport, Charleston, San Diego, Long Beach, and Bremerton. Sadly, only one of mine, San Diego, can still “lay claim to the name,” with most of the west coast’s Pacific Fleet stationed there.
The town where your ship was homeported was very important to a sailor because it determined where your ship was deployed. In general, east coast ships went to the Caribbean, the North Atlantic, and the Mediterranean, while west coast ships went to Hawaii and the Far East. Usually, sailors identified themselves as either “east coast” or “west coast,” with west coast having the most cachet. By some quirk of fate, out of my eight ships, I ended up on two out of Newport, Rhode Island, and two out of San Diego; consequently, these two cities were my favorites. Both were quintessential Navy towns. Let me tell you why.
Between ships and shore duty, I spent a total of eleven years in and out of Newport, as I did San Diego. My first experience in New England was bad, coming to Newport from three years on a squared away cruiser in the Mediterranean to a tired and worn-out World War II-era destroyer escort. The ship was always underway, often taking the place of another ship that had broken down. The ship was so old itself that nothing worked like it should and, as the leading petty officer in the electronics gang, I spent most of my time patching together equipment that should have been “deep-sixed” (Thrown over the side) years before. My respite was the town itself.
I learned to love Newport for its Old World “vibe,” with numerous houses dating back to the 17th century when, along with Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, it was one of colonial America’s principal seaports. In my day, the main drag along the waterfront, Thames Street (pronounced “Thames,” not like “Tems” as in London), was a hodgepodge of ethnic restaurants, tattoo parlors, sailor bars, and upscale lobster restaurants that I could only afford in winter when the prices were lower. Farther down was the Catholic church where Jacqueline Bouvier had married Senator John F. Kennedy in 1953; and up the hill was the famous Bellevue Avenue, home of Touro Synagogue, the oldest in the United States, and the summer “cottages” of the 19th century railroad “robber barons,” the Vanderbilts, the Astors, etc., built at the height of Newport’s “belle epoque.” Obviously, we mere “white hats” didn’t spend much time on their end of the street. I did join the Redwood Library, the oldest lending library in the United States, also on Bellevue, because there wasn’t a single bookstore in Newport.
Unfortunately, Newport went into an economic slump in 1973 when the Navy abruptly moved the twenty plus ships of the Cruiser Destroyer Force to Norfolk and Charleston. I was in Newport on the USS Dewey (DLG-14) at the time, and the word on the street was that the move had been ordered by President Nixon as punishment for his failure to carry Rhode Island in the 1972 election. The city has since rebounded nicely with the tourist trade, but at the time, signs were posted all over town saying: “Will the last Navy family leaving Newport please turn out the lights?”
Although I had learned to love Newport, when I showed up in San Diego a few years later, it was like I had died and gone to heaven: the tropical climate, no snow, a laid-back lifestyle, and an entirely different culture. I ended up being posted to two of the Navy’s premier ships, the first nuclear-powered cruiser and a battleship, and my two tours of shore duty, including one with the Marines, were also delightful. Again, it was the city itself that made the difference.
I had gone to boot camp there in 1959, but it was entirely different coming back many years later. I was so “green” that I hadn’t noticed much the first time through. San Diego was still a Navy town, but it felt more cosmopolitan with Tijuana a few miles south and Los Angeles just to the north. I had gained some rank by that time and had a little more money, so I wasn’t as poor as I had been in Newport and other Navy towns. I also enjoyed shipping out regularly to Honolulu, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Australia, Hong Kong and other points in the Far East and Indian Ocean. I soon learned that west coast ships were gone from homeport far more than those on the east coast, if for no other reason that longer distances across the Pacific were involved. The most I was ever underway, without once stepping ashore, was 279 days, which is small potatoes compared to the sea time of some aircraft carriers.
During one tour of shore duty, I lived on the island of Coronado, just over the bridge from San Diego, and I shared a BOQ (Bachelor Officer Quarters) with junior officers who were undergoing the basic training to be a SEAL (Sea, Air, Land), the Navy’s elite warriors. They were on the first floor, and my room was on the second. Every morning, at 5:00 A.M. sharp, they would wake me up as they charged out for possibly the hardest military training in the world. Just down the street were the holding pens for the porpoises and sea lions undergoing training to find bombs and to guard Navy ships against enemy swimmers, a program that has come under a good deal of criticism lately.
Although you need a passport to even make a day trip across the border to Tijuana now, one of my favorite hangouts on the town’s main street, the “Avenida Revolucion,” was a tiny restaurant that claimed to be the place where the Caesar salad was invented. I used to sit there, munching away, and watch the tourists, who wisely refrained from drinking the local water, but ordered ice cubes for their soft drinks. As the ice melted, possibly polluting their sodas, I couldn’t help but wonder how many of them would get sick with the dreaded “Montezuma’s Revenge.” I was probably in just as much peril eating my fresh, local salad.
As a history lover, I appreciated the fact that San Diego was the terminus of the Spanish “El Camino Real” (The Royal Road), which ran intermittently from Florida to California. Historians, however, haven’t been too kind to the Catholic religious orders such as the Jesuits, in Baja California, and the Franciscans, who worked farther north, in “missions” whose purpose was to convert the native population to Christianity and loyalty to Spain. Several of these missions, of the original 27, have grown into familiar California cities such as San Diego, Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco, etc. Sadly, in California today, like many places, you hear more about Indian “casinos” than about their stolen heritage, pitiful economic plight, and genocidal treatment by the growing United States.
One final thing I loved about Newport and San Diego, respectively, was the opportunity to go to school at night and when my ships were not deployed overseas. In Newport, I picked up a graduate degree in Shakespeare (East coast) at the University of Rhode Island; and in San Diego, I was able to earn a MA in Asian History (West coast) at San Diego State University. This was long before the internet and distance learning, so I plugged away, one course at a time, with it taking me five years to get the first degree and six years to get the second. Both schools were gracious enough to give me time extensions to write my theses.
You will remember the story of the two campers, one of whom sees the other putting on running shoes. “Where are you going?” asks the first. “A bear is in the camp,” responds the second. “You can’t outrun a bear,” says the first. “Yes,” replies the second, “but I can outrun you.” That’s how it is - attempting to educate yourself under trying circumstances. One doesn’t need to be perfect, just superior to the alternative of staying dumb.
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.
