Half a Century Later, Part III: USS Galveston, CLG-3

Since I had no “profession,” as far as the Navy was concerned, and had never been on a real Navy ship, arriving on the Galveston was totally terrifying. I struggled up the after brow from the ship’s boat with my duffle bag, trying to remember the procedure for getting on a ship, “Request permission to board, sir,” and trying not to look over the edge of the scary drop to the water (a guided missile cruiser is quite a large ship). After that it was all a blur for the next few days.  With no assignment, I was put on mess duty; what else could they do?

While on mess duty, someone came around looking for anyone who could type. I had learned already not to volunteer, but I checked around later and found out the request was legitimate. I presented myself, my typing skills, my year and a half or so of college (no mention of being kicked out, of course) and became a part of the administrative division, X Division, specifically the Training and Education Office. That was definitely a step up from mess duty.

My main job was handling GED exams; I also arranged for correspondence courses for the crew and other menial tasks. The T&E office was adjacent to the personnel office, and the T&E officer (I don’t remember his name) and I were under the direct supervision of the personnel office manager, Lt. Cato. It seemed a satisfactory arrangement.

The ship spent most weekdays on maneuvers, cruising the Pacific. Once we took a group of new officers to Hawaii. While there I and some friends rented a car and drove halfway around the island of Oahu and then down through its center and the pineapple fields. On other cruises we fired our Talos missiles, which were capable of carrying nuclear warheads, although in my lowly position I never knew if we had them on board or not.

But weekends were the most fun. We weren’t allowed to have civilian clothes on board, so we rented lockers at clubs right off the docks. We would change into civvies and, at least in my case, head away from the nearby bars to those farther afield; i.e., those bars away from sailors. I became a regular at Reuben’s Roost, a kind of hangout for artsy types. I still have a book of matches from the place, although the bar is long gone (I checked!). Occasionally, I would splurge and go to the El Cortez, riding its outside glass elevator to the bar at the top.  I fear I saw myself as terribly sophisticated, which I surely wasn’t.

One weekend all this came to a halt, at least temporarily. It was late Friday, I was in a hurry and couldn’t find the T&E Officer to lock up the GED exams, so I just hid them in the bottom of my desk drawer. Big mistake. Unknown to me, Lt. Cato went through our desks every weekend. He found the exams, I was written up for violations of secure materials, sent to a captain’s mast (the level of punishment just below a court martial) and, you guessed it, was kicked out of the administrative division and assigned to the lowest of the low (at least as I saw it then): the deck force. But more on that in the next blog.