Lead and Line - naval officers' association of vancouver island

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say to another that “the neighbourhood was going to
the dogs. An English couple had moved in”.
For some reason NDHQ had appointed me as the
senior officer of our five. That simply meant that I
was the contact point in case any issues of pay, travel,
leave or other administrative matter ever arose. They
never did and the only time I wore that hat was on the
occasion of a visiting Lieutenant Commander from
Ottawa. I assume his purpose was to justify his junket
and report on our progress or otherwise. We were the
test group for a somewhat radical experiment in cross
national training. The powers in Ottawa recognized
that the RCN was moving away from years of
following Royal Navy manuals, procedures and
systems to the more modern USN. In the longer view
it was necessary to have junior officers with an
understanding of how a very large navy did business.
THE SCHOOL AND STAFF NSCS was located
on a long spit of land, possibly reclaimed, that
stretched eastward into Upper New York harbour. At
the extremity were jetties with numerous mothballed
ships secured alongside. As part of a field trip we
once visited the Battleship North Carolina. To the
south on Staten Island was a large oil refinery. When
the wind and tide were right (or wrong) the smell
invaded the school. We then referred to NSCS as ―the
Indian reservation, nosum smellum certain stinkum‖.
Entrance to the spit of land was controlled by Marine
sentries. That duty must have been saved for men
undergoing punishment! But our life consisted of the
school buildings. Margetts claims that they were
originally for enlisted men and still housed the
original cockroaches. The Admin area had offices for
the staff, a Manuals office, a post office, a dry cleaner
and a gymnasium, on the right branch were the
kitchen and mess hall plus the Bachelor Officer
Quarters (BOQ). The school also included a
Commissary research facility headed by a USN
Commander who had earned a PhD for research into
the cooking of French Fries!
The BOQ consisted of hallways with eight cabins
on each side. My cabin was the last one in BOQ ―E‖
which I shared with Ensign Jack (8 Ball) Haberthier.
A billiard room completed the hallway. To the left
from Admin were the classrooms. They were spartan
and basic holding about 32 students who comprised a
Company. When we arrived in that summer of 1949
Companies G and H were in residence. They
graduated in the late Fall of that year. We became
Companies A, B, C and D. We Canadians were
8
spread with Davis and Fricker in A, Lambie in B; I
was in C and Margetts in D.
Outdoors were military and sport facilities. I recall
a few times we fell in by Company on the ―grinder‖
which is a USN term for parade ground. There was a
tennis court area where our rather elderly
Commandant whipped the best of the young students.
There was a softball field where each Company
fielded a team. I pitched for C Company and we did
well until we met G Company. Their first baseman
was Mel Sorge who had played professional ball at a
very high level. He missed my first pitch. He looked
at the next for a second strike then hit the third pitch
far out of the area for a home run. He was impossible
to strike out.
Each Company was assigned a lecturer who stayed
with his Company for the whole curriculum. My
instructor was Lieutenant (JG) Bob Fisher (known as
Fishhaid to some of the southerners). I believe he
went on to be the first Supply Officer in the first
nuclear submarine USS Nautilus. The curriculum was
taught in blocks. The largest blocks were for
Disbursing and Supply. Much of the instruction was
of a standard we had never faced. It consisted of
filling in forms, called ―Specimens‖. We were to
pretend that we were serving on a cruiser. When the
Korean War started the course was reduced to six
months.
US Navy ships operated on a budget for
maintenance and the Supply Officers were expected
to keep within budget. Smaller sections covered such
important subjects as Courts Marshall and Naval
Justice, Canteens (non-public funds) and Public
Speaking. The commandant was Captain Austin who
gave every student a book on the subject. Lieutenant
Irving Grodstein gave one whole two-week period of
public speaking instruction. That officer punctuated
every sentence with personal references until he
became known as ―I Grodstein‖ with a heavy
emphasis on the ―I‖. One Company started a game
consisting of counting the number of times Irving
used the term ―I‖ or ―Me‖ or similar. The number
kept rising until the Friday lunch arrived when your
Company presented its contribution to after lunch
speeches on a subject of your choice. One Friday the
stage was given to a Reserve Officer course and
became known as Black Friday. One officer went on
and on until we wondered if we would ever get leave.
For the Canteen phase we learned such important
details as ―how to set the percentage on slot