A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety (5 page)

My father was a merchant and farmer and was never interested in a government job until he was elected to serve in the state legislature late in life, but he drew a sharp line between two-party national elections and purely Democratic ones for more local offices. He voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 but supported Alf Landon, Wendell Willkie, Thomas Dewey, and Dwight Eisenhower in subsequent elections. Daddy was a libertarian at heart and deeply resented the intrusion of the federal government into his personal affairs. He opposed the New Deal agricultural programs implemented during the Great Depression that required farmers to plow up part of their growing crops and to kill a portion of their hogs in order to qualify for “government relief” payments. I remember listening to the major party conventions on the radio, sometimes throughout the night. When Wendell Willkie was being nominated in 1940, we were still using a battery radio, and after multiple ballots the power was exhausted and Daddy cranked up his pickup truck and carried the large radio outdoors, set it on the ground, and hooked it to the car battery. He later became one of the directors of the Sumter Electric Membership Corporation, which served our area, and we soon had electric lights, kitchen stove, radio, and refrigerator. Our personal lives were transformed, and my parents began attending REA annual meetings in our county seat, Atlanta, and national meetings in Chicago and other convention sites.

I was happy on the farm, revered my father, and could have accepted a career as his successor in the community, but my parents had other plans for me. Daddy had completed the tenth grade at Riverside Academy, a military school near Augusta, Georgia, before serving as a first lieutenant in the army, and I believe this was the highest educational level that had been achieved by the men in his family. He and my mother were determined that I would finish high school and go to college. Money was scarce for everyone, but we knew that there were two notable universities in America where tuition and board were free: West Point and Annapolis.

My father did not have any special affinity for the army in which he had served, and my mother’s youngest brother, Tom Gordy, was serving in the U.S. Navy as a radioman in the Pacific Ocean area. He “adopted” me as a pen pal when I was a child; we established a regular correspondence, and he sent me souvenirs from Australia, Japan, the Philippines, China, and other exotic places. It was soon decided that I would seek a naval career, with the ultimate goal being graduation from the U.S. Naval Academy. Even when I was a grammar school student, this became my avowed objective in life, and we all realized that an appointment could come only from one of Georgia’s senators or congressmen, and might be based primarily on my academic record. Neither my parents nor my teachers ever let me forget, and I tried not to disappoint them. I took all the extra courses that were offered in our school, including typing and shorthand. Throughout my college years I took all my class notes in Gregg shorthand and have retained my typing skills.

Despite Daddy’s best efforts, I could not get any consideration for an appointment by the time I graduated from high school in 1941, so I enrolled in nearby Georgia Southwestern College and became laboratory assistant to the science teacher, Dr. L. R. Towson. I earned a small stipend and gained an extra opportunity to learn about physics, chemistry, mathematics, and astronomy. Dr. Towson was commanding officer of the
local army reserve unit, and he had drill duties twice a week during this early phase of World War II. On those days I taught freshman classes as his replacement.

I was a freshman in the junior college when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, and was very concerned about my uncle Tom, whom I knew was stationed with about eighty other navy men on the island of Guam. After a few days, we learned that Japanese forces had invaded and conquered the small and undefended island on December 8, just one day after the war began. The duty of the navy personnel there was to relay radio signals among American ships and naval bases in the Pacific military theater, and they had been ordered not to engage the Japanese in combat to prevent unnecessary casualties among the natives of the island. We did not know what happened to Tom, but his wife, Dorothy, and three young children moved from their home in San Francisco to stay with my mother’s parents west of Plains, on a farm adjoining ours. Dorothy was a very pretty woman, whom I visited whenever I came home to see my family, always hoping in vain to have some word from her husband. After about two years of assuming that Uncle Tom was a prisoner of war, Dorothy was informed officially that he was dead, and she decided to move back to California to live with her family. From her letters, we learned that her father and several brothers were all serving as firemen in San Francisco. Toward the end of 1944, she informed us that she would marry a fireman who was a friend of their family, because she needed someone to help raise her children.

Tom was found alive when the war was over, having been forced to serve on a short railroad line in Japan that brought coal from the mountains down to the main line. He had been severely abused, weighed less than a hundred pounds, and suffered from phlebitis, or varicose veins. Uncle Tom was hospitalized and near death, but according to law was promoted to the rank of lieutenant, senior grade, and paid the full salary he would have earned if he had served on active duty throughout the war. I expected Tom and Dorothy to be reunited and her second marriage annulled, which was what Dorothy proposed. However, my grandparents and
all of Tom’s sisters (including my mother) convinced him that Dorothy had been unfaithful and that divorce was his best alternative. By this time I was serving on my first ship and exchanging brief notes with Dorothy and sometimes with some of Tom’s children, including the oldest son, who bore my name.

A
fter completing my sophomore year at Georgia Tech with a year of Naval Reserve Officer Training, I received an appointment and entered the Naval Academy in July 1943. During the war my Annapolis class of 1947 was expected to complete four years of classes in just three years, so we graduated in June 1946. While studying naval engineering at Annapolis, I had to learn the rudiments of electrical power, electronics, mechanical design, seamanship, and the construction and operation of ships and the equipment and armaments on them. I could have done much better in my academic work at the academy, but I depended on obtaining adequate grades from my two years of earlier college work, including the even more challenging studies at Georgia Tech. Except for choice of a foreign language, all midshipmen had exactly the same curriculum. In fact, my roommate during my first (plebe) year had already earned a bachelor of science degree from the University of Iowa, but this prior education was ignored.

There were no African-American midshipmen in my class, but during my second year at Annapolis a black student, Wesley Brown, was appointed. I became acquainted with him when he joined the cross-country team, on which I ran. I felt at ease with him, as with my old Archery friends, but was aware that many of the white midshipmen, from all regions of the country, resented his presence and were making a concerted effort among the upperclassmen to force him to leave, either by
harassment or by the accumulation of excessive demerits. Similar efforts had prevented five previous African-American midshipmen from graduating. The word soon went out through the brigade that only negative conduct reports against Brown from commissioned officers would be counted by the superintendent. We assumed that this order had come from higher than the Naval Academy, perhaps from the White House. In his later biography, Lieutenant Commander Brown remembered my friendship and strong support as a fellow runner, and its special value because I was from the Deep South.

Miss Julia Coleman had introduced all her students to classical music in high school, and my roommate at Georgia Tech, Robert Ormsby, had a fine collection of records, so I was delighted my second year to room with Robert Scott, a concert pianist. He and I used all our allotted monthly spending money (seven dollars as Youngsters, and eleven dollars as First Classmen) to buy classical records. We sometimes chose several recordings of the same piano concerto by different performers to compare their techniques. (Later Vladimir Horowitz performed for us at the White House and I told him he compared very favorably to Rachmaninoff, Rubinstein, and others.) We collected and enjoyed a wide range of other classical recordings. Scott had, for those days, a high-fidelity sound system, and for special passages we turned up the volume. I remember that a group of midshipmen would invariably assemble outside our room during “Liebestod,” the final aria of Wagner’s
Tristan und Isolde.

I wanted to learn as much as possible about history, literature, and facets of the U.S. Navy beyond my normal studies. I read voraciously, was an avid cross-country runner, and was fascinated with aviation. Weekends we were permitted to cross Chesapeake Bay and go up for flights with navy aviators as they accumulated requisite flying hours in Vought OSTU observation planes and long-range PBY patrol bombers. I learned to land and take off on water, and to maneuver the two aircraft as directed by the pilots. I also spent many hours practicing the rapid identification of aircraft of many nations, as their images or silhouettes were flashed on a screen for a fraction of a second. At the time, I was determined to become a naval aviator after graduation.

Punitive hazing was permitted in those days, and during my plebe year I seemed to be the target of extra discipline by upperclassmen, especially the Yankees. As a Southerner, I refused to sing “Marching Through Georgia” or agree to any demands that reflected badly on my region of the country. Most of the time I took my punishment in good spirit, and this probably encouraged more good-natured exchanges. Among the senior midshipmen there were a few sadists, and we learned to despise and avoid them whenever possible. I became an expert at running the commando course before reveille and going to several rooms at night to do forty-seven push-ups or ninety-four deep knee bends (multiples of our class year). One of the most difficult “games” forced on us was participating in cruise box races. Each midshipman had a wooden box that we could pack and carry on a ship or use for storage of books or out-of-season uniforms. The race involved squeezing into the closed cruise box, changing uniforms, running around some designated corridors of Bancroft Hall, and then going back into the cramped space to change back to our original clothing. My being relatively small helped my performance.

For any real or alleged violation of orders, we were struck repeatedly with brooms or, much worse, the large metal serving spoons or ladles at our mess room tables. Blisters would often result. One of the claimed objectives of this mistreatment was to inure us to difficulty and to weed out those who could not stand the punishment. One of my closest friends committed suicide, and his roommate moved in with us. On our first day at Annapolis, we had been lined up and told that either we or the one on either side of us would not survive plebe year, and the attrition rate was usually even more than one out of three. If one of us showed any signs of weakness, an extra effort was made by upperclassmen and officers to encourage a resignation or induce an expulsion because of multiple demerits. I was glad to hear that most of the more brutal practices were forbidden after the war.

We made summer cruises into the Caribbean and Atlantic, with one enjoyable visit to Trinidad on the old battleship USS
New York
. Returning, we either were hit by a German torpedo or ran aground while maneuvering to avoid it. One of our propellers was damaged, and we limped
back into port in Philadelphia with the stern of the ship jumping about six inches every time the propeller rotated. We midshipmen were again at sea about a year later, when we sat on deck and listened to President Truman’s nasal voice announce over the loudspeaker that a formidable weapon had been dropped on Hiroshima and that he hoped this would convince the Japanese to surrender. All of us agreed with his decision, because it was generally believed that 500,000 Americans would have been lost in combat and many more Japanese killed if we had invaded the Japanese homeland and it was defended with suicidal commitment by Japanese troops on the ground. We were disappointed when we didn’t return to port in time to join in the celebration when Japan surrendered just a few days later.

I was in the top 10 percent of our class but did not really excel in any aspect of the academic or military life. The brief biographies in our yearbook,
The Lucky Bag,
were written by each midshipman’s roommate. Mine, an obvious exaggeration, included these words: “Studies never bothered Jimmy. In fact, the only times he opened his books were when his classmates desired help on problems. This lack of study did not, however, prevent him from standing in the upper part of his class.” I am grateful to the academy and have always appreciated the value of my education and introduction to military discipline.

Even more important than earning my commission as a naval officer, I was married a few days after graduation. I had actually known Rosalynn Smith, my future wife, since she was born. After we moved to the farm, my youngest sister, Ruth, spent a lot of time with Rosalynn, who visited our home often, so I knew her well as a teenager. I learned later, after we were married, that she and Ruth had tried to bring us together, but I was interested only in girls nearer my own age.

I had spent a month on leave in Plains as I approached my final year at Annapolis and was dating an attractive girl named Annelle Greene, who was Miss Georgia Southwestern College. On my last full night at home, she had to attend a family reunion to which I was not invited, so I was driving around with a boy who was dating Ruth, looking for a blind date for me. When we passed the Methodist church we saw Rosalynn, and she agreed to go to the movies with us. The next morning when I went into our kitchen, where Mother was cooking breakfast, she asked me what I did last night since Annelle was with her family. I responded, “I went to a movie in Americus.” She asked, “By yourself?” I responded, “No, with Rosalynn Smith.” She asked, “What did you think of Rosalynn?” and I replied, “She’s the one I’m going to marry.”