The experience of two-a-days, ironically, was to prove invaluable to me during my incarceration in North Vietnam twenty years later.
Classes commenced and I found myself enjoying them from the outset. I have been blessed with an excellent memory, which enhanced my ability to absorb knowledge, and I sought every morsel of it I could. We had quizzes regularly, and the key to passing them was memorization. There are those in the academic community who criticize this “memorize and quiz” process as inhibitive to genuine learning. They believe this concentration on answering quiz questions rather than absorbing the subject in a more all-encompassing manner is self-defeating. To me, preparing for the quizzes instilled an “intellectual discipline” in our routine, while at the same time compelling us to acquire the knowledge.
I liked the courses at the Academy for their variety. They included the humanities, a particularly enlightening course on the U.S. Constitution, another memorable one on the diplomatic history of the United States, and what I call the “trade-school” classes: ordnance, gunnery, and, especially, marine engineering, which included the basics of boiler design and function. Our teachers and professors were excellent. Most were civilians; the remainder were active-duty officers assigned to the Academy.
We had little time for frivolity or relaxing, elemental in the introduction to military life. We marched everywhere, had to keep our uniforms sharp and our shoes polished to a luster, and were required to hit the books at designated study times as well as during every spare moment we could contrive during the day.
I was lucky, because I had athletics to break the tedium. Midshipmen spent plenty of time on physical fitness through intramural sports. But as a member of the football, basketball, and baseball teams, I got to travel, usually by train or bus, to other universities and colleges for our games. We also had our own training table, where we consumed a hefty forty-four hundred calories a day per man. Apart from this, athletes were totally integrated into the student body, except for my sophomore year, when the new football coach, George Sauer, got approval to bunk us in a separate section of Bancroft Hall. This practice was abolished the next year when senior officials saw little benefit to the arrangement.
The food at the Academy was marvelous. The Academy had its own dairy, which produced the milk we drank and the ice cream we devoured. The ice cream was frozen hard in large stainless steel bowls, which were placed in the middle of the rectangular dining tables. It had softened just right by the time we were ready to eat and was richer and creamier than any I ever had in Nashville.
Playing on the football team earned me no favors. The marine engineering course required us to make detailed drawings of boiler construction, and I was pretty good at this until I broke my left wrist during practice. Although I’m right-handed, this injury impaired my ability to work a T-square and to draw straight lines. This didn’t seem to matter to my instructor, and my grades in this course plummeted. I never did learn whether or not that professor was a football fan.
I’ll never forget the Army-Navy game of 1948. Army was an overwhelming favorite, but we played them to a stunning 21-21 tie. We celebrated at a postgame dinner with guests at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia, where the game was played. A teammate, Bob Rennaman, had arranged a blind date for me. As my date and I walked in, we were greeted by waiters with trays of drinks on them, drinks that I later learned were old-fashioneds. Obviously more experienced at this sort of thing than I, my date plucked one off the tray and sipped away.
Before this evening, I had never consumed an ounce of alcohol. The euphoria of our performance in the game prompted me to follow her lead, so I took a glass as well, sipped the drink, and hated the taste. We sat down to a steak dinner, and after twenty minutes I became ill, never having felt so sick in my life. I abandoned this lovely lady as Bob Rennaman escorted me to my room, where I spent the next hour throwing up. Our evening did not blossom into a romance.
The superintendent of the Naval Academy my first three years was Adm. James Holloway Jr., a highly respected and well-liked leader. His principal claim to fame was authorship of the “Holloway Program,” which rapidly expanded the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (NROTC) in colleges and universities across the land. He brought a liberal mind-set to the school. He allowed first classmen every other weekend off, they could store civilian clothes in their rooms and wear them on the free weekends, they didn’t have to march to class, and taps was at 2300 (11 PM), an hour later than for the rest of the brigade.
In those days, varsity athletes, especially football players, were respected to a degree you’re unlikely to find at the Academy today. They came to be recognized as leaders, in part because of their prowess on the playing fields and their visibility on campus. In most cases these were academically sharp and dedicated midshipmen, deserving of the respect accorded them. Although I was not a star like our great quarterback, Reaves Baysinger, I was his backup (and later played halfback), and my participation on the basketball and baseball teams gave me visibility I might not have had otherwise.
My ROTC training at West End High contributed to my ability to adapt to life at the Academy. I gained a certain degree of popularity and was elected president of my class in both my junior and senior years.
The Academy occasionally held social activities. Although we didn’t need to be reminded that members of the opposite sex existed, there was a heightened awareness of them when they graced the campus for dances and football weekends. I had dated in Nashville, had a sweetheart now and then, and was no stranger to tuxedoes and pretty girls in long gowns. But at Annapolis, thoughts of romance were held in abeyance as we traveled the hurdles and mazes of the educational process at a military institution, especially in the first two years.
In my junior year, I invited a girlfriend from Nashville, Betty Jones, to the June Week graduation festivities. She stayed with the family of an Academy officer, Cdr. Dusty Dornin. We had a terrific time and have remained friends through the years.
Time passed rapidly because of our round-the-clock schedules, and when Christmas came, the two-week’s leave we were accorded was exceedingly welcome. During the summer, we also earned a month off. The balance of the summer nonacademic interlude was spent on a variety of duty assignments in the fleet.
On my first summer “temporary-duty assignment,” I traveled with the football team when we were assigned as a unit to the USS Coral Sea (CVB-43) in the Mediterranean. The ship was commanded by Capt. A. P. Storrs (USNA 1925). Storrs, a legend in naval aviation, had been one of the pilots on a stunt team called the Sea Hawks, predecessor to the Blue Angels, the Navy’s Flight Demonstration Squadron. Coach Sauer wanted us to work together as much as possible, knowing our nonfootball commitments were considerable and left little time for extra training. We conducted drills on the flight deck between flight operations, and at every port call, we found a soccer field or stadium and trained under the tutelage of Assistant Coach Vic Bradford, who had starred on the 1938 Alabama team that went to the Rose Bowl.
Playing football in the sunny Med was wonderful, as was shore leave in the south of France. It gave us a chance to spend our lofty pay of three dollars a month. I was inspired by watching the pilots launch and recover on the flattop and by talking to the flight crews in the ready rooms. I had read much about the exploits of naval aviators during the war and held these men in awe, especially those who flew from the carriers. I was also interested in submarine duty, one of the three prongs of the Navy triad, the other two being surface ships and aviation. This interest was rooted in the influence of two World War II submarine heroes, Cdr. Dusty Dornin and Cdr. K. G. Schacht, who were members of the athletic department and who endeavored to steer me in the direction of the subsurface Navy. Schacht had been a prisoner of war for three years in World War II.
In my youngster summer, we spent three weeks on a light cruiser (CVL), or light carrier, and in my senior year I deployed aboard the battleship USS Missouri. These “cruises” were rewarding, bec
ause we gained hands-on experience standing watches, observing the operational Navy at work, and whetting our appetites for the adventures that awaited us upon graduation.
Sports and studies were my life at the Academy. I played on the plebe football team the first year and then went up to the varsity. I joined the varsity basketball and baseball teams in my sophomore year and played under two terrific coaches, Ben Carnavale and Max Bishop, respectively. We had a colorful trainer named “Doc” Snyder, a retired chief corpsman.
I wasn’t a star at Navy, but I never missed a practice regardless of injuries, and I considered myself a solid competitor. I was exhilarated just to be able to play at a level of competition that included games against not only Army, but also Notre Dame, California, Southern California, Missouri, and Duke.
I was relatively short but pretty fast and at one point led the basketball team in field goal percentage with a 35 percent average. That figure would bring laughter nowadays, because to be really on the mark, you’ve got to shoot closer to 50 percent today. However, back in the 1950s, our tallest player was only six foot three.
During my second year at Annapolis, I got to know the assistant athletic director, Commander Dornin, a bona fide war hero. He was from the Class of 1935 and had played end on the football team. He had commanded the submarine USS Trigger, which sank more enemy tonnage in the Pacific than any other U.S. submarine. He and his family lived in quarters at the Academy, and I spent much of what free time I had at their home.
Dornin was but one of many impressive combat veterans who were in our midst on the Academy staff either as professors or in some administrative capacity.
We had a company officer, Marine Major Antonelli, who was among several Marine Corps heroes on campus. He was one tough cookie. The story goes that he had jumped into a foxhole on one of the Pacific islands, grabbed two Japanese soldiers, banged their heads together, and captured them. When we’d see him walking down the hall, a palpable sense of trepidation came over us as we visualized the major in that foxhole.
For the most part, these heroic men were approachable, modest officers who had measured up to the extremes of combat and prevailed. We revered them for their valor and knew, in our hearts, that there was a good chance we might have to replicate them in the inevitable armed conflicts to come, such as the one brewing in Korea in 1950. They were role models and icons of the highest order, just as my teachers and coaches at West End High were. I was grateful for having been exposed to them at a relatively young age.
Capt. John L. “Jack” Chew was the executive officer of Bancroft Hall, a position that was the precursor to the deputy commandant billet today. His predecessor was Capt. Frank Ward. Bancroft Hall, the largest dormitory in the United States, is where all midshipmen lived. Chew was an accomplished surface warfare officer, destined for three-star rank, who repeatedly tried to persuade me that destroyer or battleship duty was the way to go. But my enthusiasm just wasn’t in surface training.
Chew nevertheless played an instrumental role in my young life. His close friend was Capt. MacPherson Williams, Class of 1930, an aviator who had been shot down in the Philippines and who, with the help of Filipino guerillas, evaded capture for several months while in the jungle before being rescued. In my senior year Chew introduced me to Captain Williams, who at that time was commanding USS Greenwich Bay, a transport ship and flagship of the Middle East Force. Mrs. Williams, who resided in Annapolis while her husband was deployed, had been pressuring Chew to find a date for their nineteen-year-old daughter. The cross hairs of their site scope fixed on me. Consequently, in February 1951, I was introduced to intelligent and attractive Anne Williams, who would later become my wife.
Captain Williams fascinated me with sea stories illuminating the carrier war in the Pacific. His love of flying and operating from the carrier was contagious, and it intensified my interest in aviation. Meanwhile, Anne and I began dating frequently my senior year.
The commandant of midshipmen in 1950 was a feisty and colorful naval aviator, Capt. Robert Pirie, U.S. Naval Academy Class of 1926. He won the Silver Star as a carrier pilot during the war and later commanded the escort carrier, the USS Sicily (CVE-118). He eventually became a three-star admiral and, at the apex of his career, was deputy chief of naval operations for air. Years after his Academy tour of duty, he was nicknamed “The Beard.” His hair had turned gray, almost white, and reportedly because of a skin condition, he was allowed to wear facial hair, accentuated by a distinctive Vandyke triangle around the chin. He was a well-built, distinguished looking man and, with the beard, could have posed for whisky advertisements. He had a fiery temper; it was best not to rile him up.
Pirie had been ordered to the Naval Academy to establish an aviation department. I took some of the aviation courses and found them rudimentary, mostly nuts and bolts stuff, and I felt the courses needed to teach the strategic aspects of naval aviation—how it was used in the past, how it would be employed in the future. But, it seemed to me, the course was a good start for aviation aspirants.
One day in my senior year we held a pep rally at Tecumseh Court, which is adjacent to Bancroft Hall, before one of the football games. The new superintendent, Adm. Harry Hill, had invited Gov. and Mrs. Theodore McKeldin of Maryland to observe the exuberant pre-football game festivities. While the crowd of midshipmen cheered for the home team, some midshipmen who had remained in the building, hoping to enliven the event, heaved rolls of toilet paper from the upper floors of Bancroft Hall. Unfortunately, an unfurled roll of toilet paper scored a direct hit on the head of the governor’s wife. That soured the moment and infuriated Captain Pirie. The rally ended when an enraged Pirie mustered the entire brigade onto the grounds, directing them to clean up the mess, which was rather mild punishment actually.
Because I played three sports on top of academic responsibilities, I felt as if I were running on a perpetual motion machine. I remember years later trying to catch up on events that occurred from 1947 to 1951. I hardly ever touched a newspaper or listened to news while I was at the Academy.
Meanwhile, in the quest to succeed in the classroom, a phenomenon called the “dope system” had evolved at the Academy. Essentially, it entailed cheating on exams, one class passing on questions to another that took the tests at a later time. As class president in my junior year, I became embroiled in this major issue of discussion among the leaders of all the classes. A group of first classmen had detected the practice in 1949 and began to express concern among themselves. This practice had probably begun on a small scale with a suggestion from one midshipman to another but then increased in size slowly until there was a large number involved. I didn’t know it at the time, but the dope system led to what one might call my “defining moment” at the Academy.
We had a “lock-step” curriculum in those days. All midshipmen took certain basic courses. One of the two regiments would attend classes in the morning, the other in the afternoon. Those who took quizzes in the morning began passing on the questions and answers to counterparts in the other regiment, knowing the identical questions would appear on the quizzes in the afternoon. This worked well for the afternoon group but was of no benefit to the morning unit.
All were fundamentally honest students, but in the zeal to get good grades in the competitive environment of the Academy, they succumbed to “passing the dope.” It reached a point where midshipmen were telephoning with regularity from regiment to regiment to acquire answers to the quizzes.
During my first year, little was said about honor and integrity. The leadership at the school, from the superintendent on down, probably figured these qualities were so thoroughly ingrained in the ethic of the naval service that there was really no great need to discuss them. Perhaps, through a kind of osmosis, midshipmen in their daily observation of senior officers would automatically acquire what the father of the U.S. Navy, John Paul Jones, called “that nicest sense of personal honor.”
Passing the dope was flagrant at the athlete’s training
tables as well, so there was absolutely no doubt it was a pervasive practice. It bothered me that basically honest midshipmen were engaging in an unethical practice without fully realizing the seriousness of their actions. I did not consider myself a “dogooder,” but to me the dope system was bound to detract from the trust and confidence we needed to have in each other as warriors in the years ahead.
I, as the president of the Class of 1951, and the leaders of the Class of 1950, Chuck Dobony, the president, and Wayne Smith, Ames Smith, Don Fraasa, and Tom Ross, agreed that doping was a problem. During the first semester of the 1949–50 academic year, an ad hoc committee was formed to study ways of improving honor standards. As a result, Dobony and second class president (1952) Jim Sagerholm and I decided to assemble our respective classes and to seek their pledge to eradicate the dope system.
I was a bit nervous when my 725 classmates filled the auditorium at Memorial Hall. I stood at a podium, gaveled the men to silence, and got right to the point.
“I’ve asked you here to talk to you about the doping system,” I began. There was silence in the ranks, all eyes leveled directly at me. The phrase, “dope system,” conveyed a sudden sense of dread. “Simply put,” I went on, “it’s got to stop. Leaders of the other classes are making the same pitch to their groups. We’re all under constant pressure to pass the tests. But that’s part of the challenge we asked for when we came to Annapolis. All of you know what I’m talking about, and I won’t waste any more of your time. Therefore, I seek your pledge to eradicate the system.”
After a pause there was a resounding “Yes!” from the class. It overwhelmingly vowed that the dope system would die forever. Not surprisingly, the other classes responded likewise.
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