Hobo Final Chapter

After 3 years away I had been wondering how things were going at home. I was a little homesick. I gradually drifted back towards Cleveland. I didn’t go directly. First I went to Wakeman, Ohio. They had a river there and the farmer let us use the low lands next to the river to camp. There was one guy named Hank that we know. After I visited with him I went down by the campers and I went back to Cleveland with them.

Since I had been working with a sign painter Mmy Dad put me to work painting the house. I learned how to use linseed oil to treat the windows. I had a few ladders there and they were hard to handle but I did manage to get the house painted including up in the peaks. After the house was done, my Dad got me a job. One of the first jobs I had was doing finish work in a new house. My job was to put down the baseboard in all the rooms. I had to be careful when I used a hammer not to make hammer marks. Every time I would make a hammer mark my Dad would spot it.

When it came time for payday the contractor gave my
Dad the money that I had earned. Instead of turning over the money to me my Dad was going to give me an allowance and keep my money. At an earlier time when there were 9 kids to raise there was some reason for the older kids to kick in their money to help keep the household going. But by that time there weren’t nearly as many kids living at home. The necessity of this kind of arrangement no longer existed.

I was willing to pay room and board. Since I had been living on my own for around three years, I was used to making my own way. We locked horns and I packed my bags and left again.

For the next few years I drifted east and south. In order to support myself I was doing odd jobs. Some yard work, washing dishes, and doing a little carpenter work even though I didn’t have my own tools to do that. I went to New York City and then through some of the southern states. Usually I traveled on the trains and sometimes hitchhiking.

The War Years

When I finally came back home we were on the verge of going to war with Japan. My brothers were going into the service. My oldest brother, Ralph, was exempt because he had a family. Howard went into the Army. His job after he was in there a while was as a bartender in the officers club. Some of the officers told him he ought to apply for a commission, which he did. He went through some type of course and he became a commissioned officer. Al went into the Marine Corps. He took his course of training and became a full-fledged Marine.

Elmer was in the Air Force and one of his jobs was working on the new American bomb site in England. At the bomb site they calculated how far the bombs were from the targets. So he spent a lot of time in England. While he was there, he met this woman and he wanted to make it a permanent attachment when the war was finally over but the woman elected to go back to her husband. In the meantime, after he returned to the United States she was pregnant with Elmer’s child.

Bob joined the Navy and spent just about all of his time aboard a destroyer. Most of that time was spent in the Pacific.

Norbert joined the Army or was drafted. I am not sure.

With all of my brothers already in the service I didn’t want to miss out. I didn’t think of it as getting killed, I thought of it was the great adventure of the day. So, I joined the Navy.

There was many people joining at the same time and the biggest part of them joined the Navy because they didn’t want to go into the Army. When it came time to leave there were almost 100 from the Cleveland area that were packed aboard trains and sent to Chicago where the Great Lakes Training Center boot camp was. We were put up in barracks there. We did some marching and they gave us a duffle bag and all of our clothing that we were to wear including dress whites and in the barracks we had to learn to keep our bedding made and to clean the barracks. We were taken out and marched around. We learned how to handle a rifle. They took us to the firing range where we practiced shooting. All the time they were giving us tests. After about three months of basic training we were sent out on our next assignments. I was sent to machinist mate school which was set up in Lawrence, Kansas on the University of Kansas property. There was an obstacle course, rooms with all types of machinery (lathes, drill presses, etc.). At the end of about three months they gave us tests and I graduated 4^th in the class. This entitled me to more schooling. During this time when we were at training was where I met Ken Kalbfliesh. We became friends and we went on liberty together. We were a little like Mutt and Jeff because Ken was tall and I wasn’t. We made a great team and we had a lot of fun together.

My next assignment was to refrigeration school. This was at the Carrier Corporation in Syracuse, New York. There were about 15 in the total class that went there. We found housing at different peoples homes. In the daytime everyday we went to the Carrier Corporation buildings where our class was set up. They taught us the basics of refrigeration and then the refrigeration machinery that was being used in the destroyer escorts.

After that course, I went to Massachusetts around Boston at the Hingham Shipyards where our ship was under construction. There was a whole line of DE’s under construction. The purpose of these ships was to do convoy duty. It was all types of commercial ships going back and forth across the Atlantic, mostly to England. The reason for us escorting the convoys was because the U-Boats were very active at that time in blowing up the cargo ships. We had aboard the sonar and we carried depth charges and we carried torpedoes.

When I first came aboard my ship, the U.S. Blessman, DE 69 it was still under construction. So I showed up every day and had to be aboard for so many hours. We did fire watch – we kept an eye when welding was going on. I was there at my station very often and I watched how they constructed the coolers. There were two coolers. One was at colder temperature than the others. This was mostly for meats. The other room was at a lesser temperature for all of the other food provisions. The walls were very well insulated and there was a metal skin over the insulation and all of the joints were soldered. They had very experienced people doing that.

At the time I was sleeping in a barracks and often on my time off I would go to the Boston Commons where all the Revolutionary War buildings and lots of other things to see in Boston. Finally the work on the ship was done and we were christened and slid out from the dry docks into the water and we went on our shake down cruise.