The inside back cover of the WESTPAC II cruise book is above. The scene of a single sailor standing on the fantail musing about an absent love likely resonated with quite a few crew members. Duh.
Here’s some information about how that photo was produced from Rich Franke, then SFM2, the shipmate who did it:
“I took both photos. The five-inch on the fantail with a sailor I posed and the girl that was taken from a Playboy magazine (down home girl-type photo). I did not want it X-rated. [Some of us might have wanted that, but it wouldn’t have seen print.]
“In the BT berthing compartment fan room, I taped two pieces of photo paper together because it needed a longer format for the two pages (see line in the middle). To get the proper enlargement, I set the enlarger on the big vent duct about four feet up and taped the paper on the floor. It took two exposures while in the dark . The girl had to be ‘dodged’ with a cutout to eliminate the background. Then the photo paper was pulled apart so I could process each half in the developer, stop, and fixer. Lights could then be put on, the paper dried and taped back together.” [Digital photographers and those using computer photo-editing applications miss out on such work. :)]
“I [Franke] took a lot of the photos in that book. The best idea I had was hanging the photos in the mess line passageway with a sign asking sailors to put their best caption under each photo. They came up with some good ones. I remember one of the best photos we had was of about 10 sailors in a Subic Bay bar with about 10 girls in their arms and on their laps. We had to take it down real fast and leave it out of the book . It seems that some of the shipmates did not want to have to explain their close proximity to the ‘hostesses.'”
Ensign Roberts, the cruise book editor, and I, innocent ensigns that we were, may not have been aware of the rather prominent phallic symbol dominating the montage. Pretty hard to miss, though.
Thanks for everything you did to make the cruise book so memorable, Rich!
Inside front cover
The inside front cover of the cruise book was far less titillating. It was an attempt to show where the Biddle sailed during the deployment. It was a noble effort, but lacked some detail. Then again, depicting the numerous Subic Bay-Tonkin Gulf transits would have made for a messy map. Note, too, the map included Australia, New Zealand, and Tahiti, places we were supposed to visit on the way home.