bucket for cleaning themselves and their clothing. Today’s sailors often rail against taking “sea showers,” that is, briefly turning on the water, turning it off while soaping up, and turning it back on just long enough to rinse. The traditional bucket method is a far cry from sea showers and can be considered a lost naval art.
As McKenna drew his freshwater, a Jimmy Legs used a measured stick to ensure that the engineer didn’t draw too much. Richard then took his bucket into a large compartment with his shipmates. The problem with the bucket method “was to keep the limited volume of fresh water from getting soapy too soon.” First, he scooped up freshwater in his hand to brush his teeth and rinse his mouth. He rinsed his toothbrush in salt water and then washed it out in freshwater. Next, he had to shave. He rinsed his shaving brush and razor in salt water before “sloshing” them in freshwater. Then he lathered up and shaved, rinsing the razor with salt water. When he was finished, he rinsed himself with salt water and then freshwater to remove the lather.
Now McKenna was ready to bathe. In Gold Star he dipped a small hand towel into the bucket’s freshwater and sponged it over his body “to wet down.” He worked soap into a lather in the towel and used the towel used to scrub himself. He then rinsed the towel in salt water. Next, he wrung out the towel, dipped it into the remaining freshwater, and sponged off the salt. Finally, he wrung the towel dry and used it for drying off. Gold Star sailors preferred to use small towels rather than larger regulation ones, as the small ones were easier to dry out in the small clothing lockers. McKenna thought the crew preferred the smaller towels because of their experiences of bathing in Japan.
McKenna did all of his washing squatting over a bucket in a room crowded with other men doing the same thing. The sailors were so close together, there developed a saying: “You had to scrub three strange asses before you came to your own.” After they had bathed themselves, McKenna and his shipmates used the remaining freshwater to scrub their uniforms, again rinsing them with salt water. Although the ship had a laundry, it was too expensive for the enlisted men and was usually used only by officers, chief petty officers, and passengers.7
Before the cleaning-up ritual, Richard retrieved his canvas cot. The evening meal began at 1700, and movies started shortly after sunset on Number 4 Cargo Hatch. Lights out was around 2100. Unlike most Navy ships, Gold Star did not have a normal time for taps—lights out and no moving about the deck. The sailors could stay up as long as they wished.8
Gold Star offered little in the way of recreation for the sailor’s leisure time at sea, there being no radio or phonograph for the crew. Some sailors played cribbage and pinochle, and Acey-Deucey, a Navy variant of backgammon, was popular. Some deck sailors filled their leisure time by vying with each other to make intricate knots and by weaving belts and doing other “fancy work” for the ship. Engineering personnel hammered out rings and bracelets. When the ship was anchored, many sailors tried their hand at fishing. Few Gold Star sailors wrote or received letters.9
At the top of McKenna’s personal priorities when he first settled into his new ship was finding Gold Star’s library. The library turned out to be a small bookcase of two shelves in the corner of the crew’s compartment. It was the perfect height for the mess cooks to set their coffee pots on. The bookcase had locked glass doors and contained only three books. They were The Snow Man, which Richard took to be a novel; Bowditch’s Practical Navigator; and volume 2 of The Collected Letters of Lafcadio Hearn. When the newly arrived McKenna asked older shipmates if the single bookcase was the entire library, he was told that “it used to be clear full” before “guys left ’em laying around on deck and they got rained on.”
McKenna kept a sharp watch to see who unlocked the cabinet and what the hours of the “library” were. No one opened the cabinet. He eventually learned that the mail clerk had had a key but had lost it. McKenna became obsessed with reading The Snow Man. Finally, one night some shipmates came back to the Gold Star drunk and belligerent. They woke everyone up with their shouting and shoved each other against the lockers. The commotion centered in the area of the bookcase. McKenna listened carefully for the sound of breaking glass but heard none. He slipped on his shoes, went quietly over to the bookcase, and “kicked in the glass.” Everyone in the morning presumed the drunks had caused the damage. “Snow Man turned out not to be a novel,” McKenna later wrote, “but it was quite an interesting book, and I read it several times.”10
The few sailors in Gold Star who read bought their books ashore and sought out others who read to exchange with during underway time. Because the lockers for sailor’s clothing were small, storage of the books was always difficult. Richard began hiding his books in the nooks and crannies of the engineering spaces, a practice he continued for most of his career at sea.
The young McKenna quickly learned that even though it was classified as a station ship, Gold Star spent a large amount of time under way and visiting foreign ports. Two days after McKenna had reported on board, as he was still trying to learn the ship, Guamanian stevedores began loading copra into the ship’s cargo holds. The commanding officer, Lt. Cdr. William C. Faus, USN, had his navigator lay a course to Kobe, Japan.
Fireman 3rd Class McKenna, for reasons known only to him, chose to strike, or learn through on-the-job work, for the rating of machinist’s mate. He began his training in enlisted engineering in the fire room, and as he mastered the basic routines, he found he wanted to work in the refrigeration area, known as the “ice plant.” McKenna eventually did move into the ice plant as he gained more and more experience.
As the date for the departure for Kobe fast approached, McKenna watched, puzzled, as passengers came on board. Civilian passengers had been boarding naval ships since the early days of the Navy occupation of Guam, when authorities declared the tropical environment of the island “unhealthful.” The same authorities recommended that American women and children living on the island take at least one “health cruise” a year to a cooler area. As public health on Guam improved—and some argue that health was never a real issue on the island—the reason for the health cruises evaporated, yet the custom continued. Some Guamanians also made journeys via the Gold Star, especially to the Philippine Islands, and members of the Guam militia were recorded in the ship’s logbooks “as troop passengers.” By the time McKenna joined the ship, every trip Gold Star made away from Guam was a health cruise. Whereas troopships carried women and children in addition to troops during transfers between assignments, Gold Star’s travelers were usually on board just for travel. McKenna in later years remarked that he never saw another ship in the Navy act as what amounted to a cruise ship for families, and one would be hard-pressed to find a vessel in the modern Navy that does so, making Gold Star truly unique.
Second-class women passengers (wives of enlisted men) lived in the staterooms aft and had their meals in the chief petty officer’s mess. To help escape the heat of the cabins, women used the large top of the Number 6 Hatch cover as a deck lounge. Women passengers in first-class staterooms lived in the officer’s area amidships and had a deck above the general crew quarters. Gold Star even had a few penthouse quarters for the wives of important men. On McKenna’s first voyage, the wife and two adult daughters of Capt. George A. Alexander, USN, the governor of Guam, were among the passengers. The women passengers in first class took their meals with the officers. As Gold Star slowly plodded into foreign ports, “her clotheslines flapping with panties and bras, rompers and diapers,” sailors on other ships did double takes.11
On 11 August Gold Star departed Apra Harbor, on the western side of Guam, bound for Kobe. McKenna thus started to fulfill his wishes for sea duty and experiences with different cultures. Richard quickly learned sea duty could be dangerous. Three days out of Apra, at 2345, on 14 August, a crewman found Matt1 Silvino Yabut “lying on the deck of lower #1 hold.” Yabut had “apparently accidentally fallen between [the] bottom boards of upper #1 hold.” The medical officer declared that Yabut had died of a “fractured
