On May 31st, I had reached the draft age of 18. The draft was a lottery. The higher your number, the later you were drafted. I was somewhere in the middle.
With the hope that working in an essential industry would stave off being drafted, my family advised me to apply to the Apprentice School which trained workers to do shipbuilding jobs that included such things as electricians, pipefitters, painters, etc. I wound up being a pipefitter’s helper. My enrollment was too late for the academic portion of my schooling. So, I worked full time starting at $.50/hr with a raise to $.64/hr shortly thereafter. Pay was cash in small envelopes (I still have one of the envelopes).
As a pipefitter’s helper, my jobs included helping to locate the correct pipes for each job assignment. This was not an easy job. Pipes from many parts of a ship were often heaped together but identified by serial numbers on the pipes. The pipefitting plans showed which pipes went where according to the numbers being shown on the pipes in the plans.
One day while Mr. Schwerdtfeld and I were looking for pipes, we looked up to see a huge slab of steel so large it took two overhead cranes on tracks to carry it. Schwerdtfeld told me it was a crash bulkhead being put into place at the prow of the ship. I exclaimed “Holy Cow! You mean to tell me that thing’s gonna float!?”
The ship we were working on was originally going to be named the Bonhomme Richard. But, because the original Yorktown had been sunk by the Japanese, this ship was also going to be named Yorktown.
We were working on the very bottom levels of the ship called the inner-bottoms. Some of the piping we put in was very small tubing with an inverted glass shaped part called a bell. The connecting tubing ultimately rose through the decks until it reached the gauges that showed how much liquid was in the tanks (which is where we were actually working). I don’t think we knew what kind of liquid- it could have been fuel or water.
Being 18 and having registered for the draft without knowing when I would be called up, I continued working in the shipyard until I finally received notice.
Mama was in Miami for her health. So, I went down to see her before being inducted. Even so, she still insisted on coming back to Newport News to see her baby off to war. Knowing Ruth & I were “spoken for”, Mama offered me a deal. “If you stay ‘clean’ until you return, I will not object to your getting married when you want to.” I did. Ruth and I were married 6 months after my Discharge.
