View From The Front Porch
The U.S Navy Offers A Moveable
Stage...
by Stan Hitchcock
I
graduated from Pleasant
Hope High School
in May of 1954. I
had turned 18 on the
21st
of March, had
never been out of the hills of the Ozarks and was
looking for an adventure where I could travel, have a secure place to
sleep, 3
meals a day and some walking around money….hey! let’s join the
Navy! So, three
months later, on August 12, 1954, I
headed off to bootcamp to learn the finer points of sailormanship. Figured it couldn’t be too
hard to learn
about boats, ships and big body’s of water since I had grown up on a
creek that
ran through our farm, had been baptized in the Sac River
and knew how to swim fairly well.
I had
also studied about Jonah and the whale that swallowed him and then the
Lord
spoke to the fish and it vomited him up on dry land, if the Lord could
do that
for Jonah then I was sure He could get me through 4 years of the Navy.
I
remember standing at the Frisco
Depot, waiting to board the train to Chicago
and
the Great
Lakes Naval
Training Center,
and seeing tears
in my Dad’s eyes. Unusual
cause I don’t
believe I had ever seen him tear up like that before.
Course, Mom was crying like Mom’s do, but
Dad……nope, that was something. Years
later, he told me he was choked up because he
knew that when I left it would be
for good, never looking back, following my own way.
And, he was right, I’ve been doing just that
ever since.
About
a month into basic training
I got to missing something really, really bad.
Yeah, it was the first time I had ever been separated from
my guitar
since I started playing it at age 12.
I
went to the First Class Bo’sun Mate
that was trying to teach us something and
ask him if I could send for my old Gibson J45.
I got permission and sure enough it arrived in a couple of
weeks so we
got to finish boot camp together.
Right
after Christmas, and a few
days at home on the farm, I again boarded a train (probably the same
one I used
to lay in bed in the old farm house and listen to the whistle as it
headed
across country) and rode all the way to California to meet my ship. In the first week of
January, 1955, I came up
the gangplank of the USS Bryce Canyon (AD-36) carrying my worldly
belongings in
my sea bag across my shoulder, and my J45 Gibson in my other hand. Seeing that ship for the
first time was just
awesome. It was the
biggest thing I had
ever seen or heard of. It
carried more
people than half our county back home.
The adventure started when I stepped aboard.
I’d
been on board a couple of
days, got assigned to the second division (deck force), had a bunk
and was
learning to chip paint and grease cables with the best of them. That evening I went up
topside with my guitar
and sit on a hatch cover and started picking a little.
Wasn’t long before a little guy with a
mustache and the look of an old salt came over and sit down on the
hatch beside
me and listened awhile.
He introduced
himself as PeeWee Garrison from the great state of Georgia
and allowed as how he
played the fiddle, and some of his shipmates played other instruments
and maybe
I would want to pick a little with them.
I allowed as how that would suit me mighty fine and so I
did and we became
the Bryce Canyon Troubadours and, finally the official ship’s band. I sang every
Hank Williams, Roy Acuff, Webb
Pierce and Carl Smith song that I knew and the boys played so fine
behind me. I
didn’t know it then, but now I see that it
was the start of what I would do the rest of my life.
I
turned 19 on March 21, 1955, in
the middle of the Pacific Ocean, playing and singing my heart out up on
the
Main Deck, all of us
standing in a circle on the main hatch for a stage, the
ship plowing through the rough water, and heading for the Far East. The Troubadours and I
established a pattern
we would follow for the next 2 ½ years on board the Bryce Canyon,
singing on
board every night when we were underway, and playing at every EM Club,
Chief
Club, and even occasionally Officers Clubs, in Hawaii, Philippines,
Japan, Hong
Kong, Okinawa, Taiwan and then back in California when we
returned from
overseas. It was
the best school of
music I could ever have been a part of.
PeeWee from Georgia
on fiddle, Smoky from Kentucky
on the dog
house bass, Roger Bigcraft from Minnesota
on the big electric guitar, and a mandolin player that changed several
times
when they’d get transferred. I
played
rhythm guitar and sang my old hillbilly songs on that movable stage and
got to
see the world at the same time.
What a
deal. This was at
the end of the Korean
War and a lot of our boys were in hospitals and I remember one show we
played
in Kowloon at the British
Army Hospital
there, when our ship was in Hong Kong. They treated us like we
were Opry Stars,
giving us escorts from the families of the British foreign service
people and
it was pretty heady stuff. The British
ambassador’s daughter escorted me, the other boys had beautiful young
escorts
and we were taken to a fancy restaurant in Hong
Kong
called the Parisian Grill. I
remember
that was the first time I ever had Sweetbreads.
I saw it on the menu and ordered it, not having any idea
what it was,
but, man, it was good. In
the middle of
the meal I quietly asked the waiter, who spoke almost no English, what
the meat
was. He started
describing and talking
in Chinese and I stopped him and asked him to tell me really slow…..He
held his
hands up and gestured and said, “the
hangy down thingee on cow”.
I lost
my appetite instantly because I believed I was eating COWS UDDER! It was years later, in
another fancy
restaurant somewhere on the road that I found out it is actually the hangy
down
thingee between the cows FRONT legs and is quite good.
Anyway, the show at the British Army Hospital
was just
fabulous and we ended up feeling like celebrities.
On the boat taking us back across the Hong Kong harbor I even got to
sneak a kiss from the
Ambassadors daughter. Yessir,
Show Biz
Is My Life! We must
have been pretty
fancy in our white bell bottom uniform pants, topped off with the
loudest
Hawaiian shirts known to man, PeeWee sawing away on Orange Blossom
Special, me
singing wide open the Webb Pierce song of, “I’m In The Jailhouse Now”
or “Don’t
Do It Darlin’”, followed by “Fire Ball Mail”, “Kawliga”, “Pilipino
Baby”(a big
request number in Subic Bay), “Your Cheating Heart” and
ending up with the
great Carl Smith number ,”If Teardrops
Were Pennies, And Heartaches Were Gold”.
In
1957 I left the ship for Shore
Duty, posting to US Naval Air Station, Chase Field,
Beeville,
Texas
for my last year of active duty. As
I
was saying goodbye to PeeWee and Smoky, on the quarterdeck of the Bryce
Canyon,
I realized that somewhere between coming on board and now leaving I had
made
the change from teenager to sailormanship, green kid to manhood, and it
felt
pretty good. I
was 21 and life was an
adventure and I still couldn’t wait to get on with the rest of it.
Now
I’m way down life’s road,
still excited when I wake up, wondering what adventure is just over the
next
hill and saying Lord keep me strong and ready for whatever comes. And if I get swallowed by
a whale, stand back,
cause he’s fixin’ to spit me up on dry ground!
Praise God from whom all blessings flow.
Stan
Listen Here: Don't Do It Darlin'