In the late 1930s my dad was a sailor on the USS Astoria. In 1991 or so he recorded this collection of stories on a cassette recorder and sent it to my sister. She eventually had it transferred to disk. Recently my son ripped the data file from the disk for me. I cleaned up the audio, removed noise and ran it through a transcription program.
Viola!
(The ship shown in the video is wrong. It’s the Arizona. Dad was on the Astoria in these stories. Mea culpa! Mea magna culpa!)
My father, after recording this, died the following year of a service-related illness so it was really something that could have been lost. He didn’t often talk about his war experience, and when he did it was just the funny parts. He had a great sense of humor and that can be found throughout this recording.
He had been in the Chinese civil war, World War 2 and the Korean War. He served most of his life.
Listening to Part 2 of this, I learned something I had never known before. When he married my mother, he decided to leave the navy at the end of his enlistment and go back to Portland to raise his family. Before he could leave, the war started. He was stationed in Pearl Harbor.
It was weeks before my mom could get any news about if he was alive because there was a total blackout on news regarding the casualties of the attack. The government didn’t want it to be known just how much of the Pacific Fleet was now underwater.
Dad, while stationed at the Harbor, was assigned that day to a PT Boat doing reconnaissance. Any chance of leaving the navy was now over.
There’s a great story at the end of Part 2 about being stationed at Oakland in 1942 when the Astoria was sunk in the Battle of Savo. The survivors were processed back in Oakland and my dad spent the evening running into old shipmates and getting blasted. Somebody on Reddit told me that his grandfather served on the Astoria and was one of the survivors.
I wonder if he got drunk with my dad on that night in Oakland?
moon soup 