Rememerances-By-Lyon5

REFLECTIONS OF THE
PAST With
By Lyon

Humor In The Galley
Vignette, January 28, 1996

During WWII, the "Reader's Digest" had a section called, "Humor In Uniform" covering the trials and tribulations of KP, rank, misunderstandings, etc.. My early life on the RATON gave me some food for this column. You see first duty as the lowest officer included being Commissary Officer, in charge of all provisions, food, cooking and service during the 60 day war patrol. In this capacity I relieved R. J. "Bobo" Strassenberg who was the previous most junior officer. We quickly signed off on the inventory after he had shown me where the dry storage, frozen locker and "reefer" were, not worrying about the count of everything. His best story involved a wardroom dinner where "Old Jim" Grant, upon seeing the offering on his plate, without so much as touching it with a fork, took his knife and with great pomp, summarily and silently scraped it into the trash basket and strode out of his seat.

Brock, our chief cook, was an old hand and I left the ordering of provisions for my first patrol from Perth based tender to him. Brock was assisted by Patterson in the galley and then for the officer's wardroom, Sherman and Jones, two mess boys took portions of the cooked food and brought it up to the wardroom, dressed it up onto officer plates and served officers. All hands helped load all food into the sub and promply noted what was coming aboard Subs had "open galleys" meaning that the crew could open the fridge or freezer anytime and help themselves to a snack. Our first good surprise happened when we were a couple of days north of Perth, at Exmouth Gulf for fuel topping off, having our second chicken dinner. The barrel of frozen chicken we had gotten from the Aussies turned out to have chick on the top, all the rest filled with rabbit meat. Brock and i kept the secret to ourselves.

By now I had read the Navy regs on commissary and found that we had not been publishing weeking menus in advance so the crew could tell what to look forward to. Brock insisted they didn't care and we shouldn't but I needed to do it right. So he and I laboriously planned the meals for the week and canned peas became "Hot buttered tinned peas" and apricots, "Chilled tinned apricots" nobody seemed to notice or worry one way or another. Just like a good mother, I asked officers and crew for suggestions for future meals and although eating was a pretty big part of daily life, they preferred to take what came and complain rather than come up with ideas.

Frequently our weekly menu called for "Roast prime of beef with brown gravy" when this appeared in the wardroom it was dark brown shoe leather which could only be made palatable by smothering in catsup. Since I was partial to rare roast beef, I took a look at the cut from which Brock was roasting this stuff and found it to be excellent sides of beef. Sherman and I had a little conference around it and I asked him to pull the officer portion out while still rare before it got hard and dry. At our next wardroom roast beef dinner, he had done this well and I smiled as he laid the beautiful rare slices, mashed potatoes and cauliflower down in fron of the captain who was always served first. Now, I should explain here that Captain Davis was extremely conscientious about wearing his red night vision glasses when he was in bright lights so his night vision would not be impaired when he might go up on the bridge in the dark of night looking for a target. In addition to making the general scene darker, they turned everyghing into red, except red things which became white. Sherman had also put some au jus gravy in a center gravy boat for those who wanted it. This made the capt's dinner pale white on a white plate. "What the hell is this?" as he lifed up his red glasses and peered under the bottom. "This isn't meat, it's not even dead!" Take it back Jones and get me some meat". That was the last of rare beef for the officers.

This patrol took us submerged just off the coast of Indo-China where it bulged out and we could wait at periscope depth for shipping rounding the bend going north or south. Periscope sweeps were made frequently during the day close enough to the shore to see some activity. Many days were quiet because the Japanese had caught on and were doing most of the passage her by night. One quite afternoon while I was "JOOD" diving watch, in the submerged sub we could smell smoke, always a fearful sign. The culprit turned out to be from the galley where some non-cooks had spilled some fudge they were making on the hot burners and it had burned to a crisp, filling the whole boat. Well, it didn't seem like a fire worth waking the captain for so we let the smoke hand until about time to surface. The smoke must have gotten to the captain who came tearing out, "What's the fire? Why wasn't I called" What the hell is going on?" When he found out his obvious place to go to have a piece of somebody was the commissary officer, who also happened to be on watch and that was the end of informal fudge making.

My successor commissary officer was John B. Randolph from Altus, Arkansas who was the next green horn aboard. During his first patrol I woke him from lunch-sleep to check out one of "his lunches", three different kinds of beans, and that was all on the plate. Barely awake in his skivvies and hair tousled, he came in to glance at it, "What's the matter? That's good eat'n." Perhaps in Altus.