I think all of us have some type of coincident that has happened to us in our lives. I can think of three that happened to me but there were probably more. My problem is that I am old and tend to forget things. See, I have already forgotten 2 of the 3.
My Boat, USS Snook ss(n) 592, was at the end of our drydock period in Bremerton, Washington when Dale and I got married. After our honeymoon we got an apartment in Bremerton but it wasn’t really to our liking so we started looking and found a little cottage on Lower Oyster Bay Road which we rented from State Senator Morgan. It was super as Lower Oyster Bay and a decent beach area were only about 150 feet from our back porch. I think it was only one bedroom, bath, living room and kitchen with a front and back porch. Had a kerosene heater with a 55 gallon barrel on the back porch.
Soon I was getting out of the service and she would be moving back to South Dakota to live with my parents until I got out. We had a small Volkswagen Bug and we loaded everything up or had it shipped and on moving day we were headed for Idaho to stay with old friends for a while. I wanted to get on the road as it was a long haul but she insisted on staying longer as she wasn’t through cleaning and I kept saying let’s go, let’s go. So she won and we stayed a couple of hours longer and cleaned. That was the first of many major arguments we were to have over the years, about these type of things, and she won most of those arguments. Maybe she won all of them but back to my story.
24 years ago I was in the construction business with my brother Bill down in Odessa, Texas. This was about 12 years after leaving Bremerton. On a Saturday we were doing a window replacement job for an insurance agent that had his office in the same office suet’s building that we worked out of. After the job his wife fixed supper for us and we ate and sat around having a few beers and visiting. It came up that he and I were both nuke boat sailors at about the same time and he was on the Scamp. I said “John, didn’t you guys follow us into drydock in Bremerton. He said he did and their Corpsman for their last West Pac tour, before drydock, was from our boat. His name was Roger and was also my Best Man at our wedding. What a coincidence! I asked “John where did you guys live when you were in Bremerton?” “Oh” John replied, “a really neat little cottage on Oyster Bay that we rented from a State Senator, Mrs. Morgan’ and she said some sailor from you boat had lived there before us”, “Isn’t that nice” I replied. I instantly flashed back to the problems we had trying to get on the road from that house because of my “neat freak” wife. I asked John’s wife, ”so was the place clean when you moved in?”. She said “matter of fact it was spotless, why do you ask?” “We lived there before you did,” I ventured. That night I called my wife in South Dakota and relayed the story. She just said “See”!
And that was that!
5 comments:
That's the way us gals are,(well most of us) we like to leave things clean for the next folks.
Just imagine how you would have felt if John said "it was a dump"
Guess that means us gals a right 99.9% of the time.
dude, i must remind you of the two words all husbands learn if they want to keep the peace: "yes dear".
it almost always works.
This story took place in 1968 and it is probably where I actually learned to use the words "Yes Dear"
that doesn't quite look like the Snook and the picture says USS Greenville
Your right William, it is the Greenville. When I wrote the story I was looking for a fast attack sub in drydock photo. I think I came up with this one as a Bremerton yard drydocked sub photo. I tried to relocate my source for that photo but I couldn't trace it back. I probably should have properly ID'd the photo in my story but I really didn't think it necessary at the time. I left the jpg title intack so no deception was intended. Thanks for pointing this out. Are you a sub sailor?
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