My Turn: Sailor's compass was steady and true

An old man told me this story. His memory was a bit clouded, he confessed, but he confidently said that he knew what he knew: “Trust me.”

In early 1952 he was in the Navy, getting ready to ship out to Europe on the destroyer the USS Albany. Because he was a “short timer” — his enlistment ending in a few months — his commanding officer instead offered him a stint close to his home. A year before, he and his bride had eloped during a weekend pass while he was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia. Now he was supposed to go to sea, but the sailor had a wife and an infant son living with his parents in Hicksville. He asked, “Could I get the Brooklyn Navy Yard?”

That wasn’t possible. “Then how about Bayonne?” The Navy held a mothball fleet there.

Request granted.

The old man said he arranged to have his leaf-green 1937 Plymouth parked in Brooklyn, at Fort Hamilton, near where the Verrazzano Bridge would be built years later. He would hop a launch from Bayonne to Brooklyn on weekends, then drive to see his wife and child.

It all went well until one morning, when working on the famed USS Enterprise in Bayonne, he reached into a pail for a welding rod, lost his balance in the scaffold netting, and plunged 25 feet to the pier, fracturing his left ankle. He spent weeks in the St. Albans Naval Hospital in Queens, now long since shuttered — unable to drive, missing his family.

One day, he’d had enough. Back in Bayonne by then, but on restricted duty, he jumped into a launch to Brooklyn. Throwing one crutch in the back seat of his automobile and keeping the other in the front, he started out for Long Island. Pressing the clutch with his broken left foot, he eased the manual transmission into third gear, and then pulled out the throttle, which kept the gas flowing — a sort of prehistoric version of today’s cruise control. He could now take his right foot off the accelerator so that he no longer needed to shift with his left, bringing some relief to his aching ankle.

His path through Brooklyn and the Belt Parkway, though, was suddenly blocked by construction and detours. His usual route was closed, littered with chunks of concrete, wood and bottles. Unfamiliar with any alternative in the surrounding neighborhoods, he pressed on — bumping along, passing the bright warning signs that gravely forbid traffic.

Not long after, he heard the wail of a siren and saw the flashing red bubble of a police car racing from behind. He threw his crutch behind him, and tried in vain to cover them with a jacket. The cop, peering into the car, wasn’t fooled.

“What’s the crutch for?”

“Fractured my ankle. Fell off a ship working in Bayonne.”

“Navy?”

“Yeah.”

“How are you managing to drive?”

The cop listened to the peculiar explanation, rolled his eyes, then gruffly said, “Get the hell out of here, sailor.”

He said he was eventually able to navigate his way to the house on Lee Avenue, back then just a two-lane road that rolled past cabbage fields, sod farms, and budding suburban homes. Once there he kissed his wife and cradled the baby, as if out of a scene painted by Norman Rockwell and sold in Sears.

It’s so different now, of course. People call in sick if they have a mild headache, or they cancel dinner reservations at the first sight of a snowflake. But the sailor, irrepressible, made the journey with the persistence of a badger.

I asked him why he would take such a chance, driving while his ankle throbbed, through lumpy terrain, risking the wheezing Plymouth and relying on merciful police. He looked at me with a trace of a smile, the kind you have when a treasured memory is still fresh, despite the gathering years.

“Why?” he asked back, with a catch in his throat. “Because I had a young son that I wanted to see.”

That old man — he’s my dad. The young son was me.

 Patrick Calabria

 Seaford