In 1964 I considered myself to be an old salt. For the past seven years I had been assigned to various destroyers first as a weekend warrior and deck seaman and later as a full time junior officer. I expected to be transferred soon to a shore billet where I would have a desk and a couple of assistants so I could sit around, drink coffee and make important decisions. When my orders arrived I was on a destroyer bouncing around in the north Pacific where high frequency radio was spotty and the fleet broadcast was received by teletype. Routine messages were repeated about every six hours and it sometimes could take 24 hours to get the entire message.
The first few legible words of my orders were: “LTJG Bradberry, when relieved of duties and detached report to … Moscow….”. For the rest of the day I was thinking that I was going to be assigned to the ambassador’s embassy staff. But late in the evening the rest of the message arrived. I was going first to a training course of several weeks at Marquette University in Milwaukee and from there to the University of Idaho as Assistant Professor of Naval Science, where I was to teach Naval History and Gunnery at the NROTC Unit.
The training course at Marquette was a good deal - Donna was born in northeast Indiana and she had a lot of family there, in particular her oldest sister. She stayed with her sister and family while I was in Milwaukee. It was about a four hour drive to the farm so I could spend weekends with Donna and her relatives.
The training course was easy and the most memorable part was our living situation. There were about 20 or so young officers in the class and we were given rooms in the Nun’s dormitory. We were assigned one floor exclusively which I believe was the top floor of the 3 or 4 story building. The dining hall was on the first floor, and we spent a good deal of time in the elevator, often with nuns. The nuns were very hospitable and after a while we were all friends, but I have never forgotten that some of the nuns had vocabularies that would make salty old sailors blush.
After the training course we headed for Moscow, with our two year old daughter Keri and our dog Snoopy, and Donna was pregnant with our next daughter. As a LTJG my pay was roughly $400/month. We expected to be in Moscow for at least two years and perhaps three, so we bought a house for $12,000. It was, and still is, a well built concrete block house at 608 W. C St. When we left after three years we sold it immediately for a few hundred dollar profit.
I could walk to and from the Navy Building on the UI campus (if the weather was good) and I had no watches to stand. When Donna and I were married she was about a year short of graduation from Pepperdine, so she took enough courses to graduate from UI, while I took graduate courses to receive an M.S. in math. This was a terrific deal since faculty members and their spouses could take any courses without any cost. We fell in love with Moscow and the UI and years later when I retired from the Navy we came back to Moscow.
Our three years in Moscow on the UI faculty was as good as shore duty could be. We kept busy with two little daughters and both teaching and learning. There are a few details which I remember that stand out.
The UI president at the time was Donald Theophilus. He held a meeting for new faculty members where he informed us that Idaho had three capitols: Spokane, Boise and Salt Lake City, and north, central and south Idaho had distinctive cultures. This lecture has stayed with me for years.
In these days chaperones for college parties are a thing of the past. But sixty years ago Donna and I were popular chaperones, probably because we couldn’t stand the loud music to the extent that we generally stayed in the next room. Who knows went on when we were out of sight? Also I was a Scoutmaster for the Elks club Explorer Scouts and one evening we had a party at the Myklebust’s house for the scouts and their “dates”. The kids wanted to have a Mexican night and make tacos because they had heard of these things. Having recently come from San Diego Donna and I were the “experts” so we were game. We had to go to Spokane to get tortillas, etc. The Norwegian grandmother was curious about tortillas; after examining them she decided they were a form of lefse and were possibly edible. The party was a success and Donna and I may take credit to have introduced tacos to Moscow.
For the first year I was “George” which is the name for the lowest ranking officer. “Let George do it” applied to every dull or unpleasant job. The first job I recall as George was the inventory and burning of a couple of large boxes of classified documents. During WW2 the Navy operated a training program for radio operators on the UI campus, and the boxes were full of classified manuals for radio training. The manuals were twenty years outdated, and so far as I could see none of the information was any longer useful or secret. But in order to get rid of all the manuals I had to inventory each manual and burn it page by page. It took me all day to burn everything in a steel barrel. When I finished I was covered with soot and I
probably could have regurgitated a copy of the training manual from memory.
I recall quite a few off-campus assignments as “George” and other assignments for which the Commanding Officer wanted a more seasoned officer. The one job which we all tried to avoid was the CACO; the Casualty Assistance Calls Officer. The formal definition hasn’t changed in the last sixty years: “The CACO is the official representative of the Secretary of the Navy who provides information, resources and assistance…..in the event of a casualty….”. Normally the CACO would be a Chaplain. But we had no Chaplain. Our territory of responsibility was northern Idaho and eastern Washington and none of us had any training; all we knew is that we had a packet of information we were to deliver to the next of kin in person and to offer condolences. We were not to notify the next of kin by telephone.
The CACO mission which I will never forget involved Starbuck. Starbuck’s was founded in 1971 in Seattle; Starbuck had nothing to do with coffee. It is a town of about 120, near the Snake River roughly 20 miles south of Washtucna. We had been informed that a Chief Petty Officer had been lost at sea a few days ago; probably due to heavy weather but no other information. He had possibly been eligible for retirement but we had no other details. His wife, or widow, was living on a farm near Starbuck. This was long before GPS and road signs were sparse, so it took me several hours to find the farm. I spruced up my uniform, picked up my briefcase and knocked on the door. A middle aged woman came to the door so I introduced myself and asked if she was Mrs —---. She said “Is this about him? I heard he got killed”. Obviously the grape vine was faster than the
official word. She didn’t seem to be upset and she went on to say that she hadn’t seen him or heard from him in over a year. I gave her the packet of forms to fill out and phone numbers to call so that she could receive all the benefits for which she was eligible. I offered to help her with the forms if she wanted, but she didn’t want any help. She thanked me for coming and I gave her my phone number and told her to call if she had any questions or problems later. I never again heard from her and it was after dark before I got home.
I finally realized that shore duty had a whole set of problems that were quite different from being at sea.
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