Sailor Vake

   Vake had received his letter from Uncle Sam:  “Greetings:…” But on Monday, Dec. 8, 1941, he volunteered for service in the United States Navy. His daughter Sandy recalls that there were so many volunteers that he was sent home, and asked to return in January.

   He was inducted into the United States Navy. He served at Hampton Roads on Chesapeake Bay,  VA; Navy Pier in Chicago, Ill;  Pearl Harbor in Hawaii;  Seattle, WA  at  both Sand Point Naval Air Station and Whidbey Island Naval Air Station; and the Naval Air Station at North Bend, Oregon, where it was said that the Norden Bombsight was being developed. (There are good photos of Navy Pier on the internet, all carefully copyrights so I can’t add them here. There is a Wikipedia article about the Norden Bombsight.)

   While he was serving in Chicago, Vake caught pneumonia and lost weight. In his dark Navy uniform, he looked skinny. He didn’t like Chicago any more than it liked him. “It’s the only place I’ve seen where snow is dirty before it hits the ground,” he complained. He hung out with his Finnish friend from Coos Bay, Charlie Wisti, who was several inches taller than Vake’s 6’, and just as skinny. Milly complained that they looked like a pair of skeletons. While there, Vake received his training as an aviation metalsmith’s assistant.

   While he was serving at Navy Pier, Vake met Milly Goers, a gal of German ancestry who lived in an Irish neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, near the stock yards.  They met when Milly and her cousin Muriel were coming out of a bowling alley. Some sailors whistled at them. Milly ordered her cousin, “Don’t respond, we aren’t dogs.” She saw her cousin turn around and wink. The sailors caught up with them, and walked them home. Vake said he would write; Milly didn’t believe it. But he came calling. However, sometimes he got distracted along the way. Milly’s  neighbor Brigit, an older woman,would invite Vake to have a drink of whiskey with her before he proceeded down 143^rd street to Milly’s house, and of course, he obliged.

   When Vake mentioned daffodils, Milly didn’t know what they were. He escorted her to a florists’ shop, but saw that daffodils were $.25 per stem. He was horrified at the price, and said that she would have to come to Oregon to see daffodils in bloom.

   After Vake shipped out, Milly enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps. She wasn’t called up immediately, so when he was stationed in Seattle, she caught the train west to visit him. When he was on duty, so Charlie Wisti escorted  her around town. Among other sights, they saw “Ye Old Curiousity Shop” on the Seattle waterfront, that featured a mummy retrieved from the Arizona desert. The mummy was still on display in the same shop when I moved to Seattle in the early 1970s.

    When Vake got some time off (“Liberty,” in Navy parlance) Milly and Vake took a bus to Wenatchee, WA, where his older brother Gene was a flight instructor for Navy fliers.  On the way back to Seattle, the brakes on their bus caught fire while it was winding down the hill next to Snoqualmie Falls, WA.

   Before their vacation together was finished, Milly's father notified her that she had received her orders to report to the WACs. She caught the train home, using her military orders to get a seat on the train, but she said she had to fight off advances from soldiers the whole trip.

   In the Seattle area,Vake flew from Sand Point (now Magnusson Park) to Renton, and observed that the roofs of the Boeing airplane facilities had been painted in camouflage to look like a residential neighborhood. At nearby Whidbey island, he was trained at aerial free gunnery school.

   At Pearl Harbor, Vake told of catching an inter-island flight with a Chinese man wearing a new straw hat.  The man became seriously airsick, and there were no vomit bags available on the short flight.  Reluctantly, the man removed his new hat and held it in front of his face.  But they landed soon, and nobody was ever happier to replace his clean hat back on his head.

   Vake was assigned to guard duty at Pearl, and was scorched by the tropical sun reflecting off the water. Whether or not that was the cause, he developed lupus erythematosus, an auto-immune disease that can attack one’s blood vessels. The Navy attempted to cure the condition by injecting him with every element that was known at the time—that’s how he learned the periodic table of elements.  But it didn’t work, and they issued him a medical discharge, but not before he was sent to North Bend, OR, Naval Air Station.He was bitter at the dermatologist charged with his care for referring to him as a specimen, not like a human. Years later, the doctor was involved in a divorce that was so acrimonious that it made the news. Vake said it served the guy right.

   Vake admitted that he had changed orders with another sailor to get sent back to North Bend, OR, the neighbor city of his home town, Coos Bay, OR.  Vake made service at North Bend sound fun, like service in the TV sitcom, “McHale’s Navy.” He took his commanding officer, Armstrong, duck hunting.

   After his discharge and the end of the war, Vake began dating an old girlfriend, but Johnnie’s wife Evelyn sent a note to Milly, telling her that she'd better get home. Milly had the choice of staying with the WACs and serving in occupied Japan, but instead, she hurried home.  She and Vake were married Chicago in January, 1946.

   Vake said that the Navy served beans for breakfast on Saturday mornings. Years later, when he and Milly  had four kids, the family consisted of three early risers, Vake, Sue and Mark; and three night-owls who liked to sleep in, Milly, Sandy and Tina. The early risers carried out a Navy tradition: they opened a can of Campbell’s Pork and Beans for breakfast.