Blue and Gold 1968-71

On this date 50 years ago, Biddle tied up alongside Pier 23 at Naval Base, Norfolk, returning to the same pier from which it had left 210 days earlier. Most of us weren’t actually home for Christmas, but Biddle was in her home port.

Based on pictures in the cruise book, not my memory, there was a somewhat official greeting party for us that included several attractive young women (Miss Something-or-Others, I guess) as well as Old Saint Nick.

Lots of family members of the crew were in attendance and our arrival was a special Christmas/holiday present for them.

Considering the presence of heavy coats, including CAPT Olsen in his bridge coat, it must have been cold that day. It might well have been the first cold day we had experienced since we left in May.

Personally, I had no family members greeting me that day. Two good friends, one of whom had been a college roommate and was serving in the Navy, the other his wife, were there to welcome me back.

Being single, I’m pretty sure I stood duty that first day. I think those of us who were single stood duty a little more than normal during that Christmas week. If we did, I didn’t really mind. Married guys deserved that time at home, and I was likely glad just to be staying in one place.

Leaving San Francisco on 8 December, we spent 16/17 December in the Panama Canal, anchored for a time in Gatun Lake. There was an attempted coup in Panama at the time, and perhaps because of that some canal locks were inoperable. Biddle got through the canal around 2100 the night of 17 December. Because of the delay, we expected to go about 25 knots the rest of the way home.

I reported in my journal for 18 December that we were pitching and rolling in somewhat rough seas. “Some people have been sick already.”

During our last night at sea, we were to round Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. I knew that the area was known as the “Graveyard of the Atlantic,” because of the number of shipwrecks occurring there. I remember feeling a bit uneasy about the prospect.

Here are statistics of our deployment, as reported in the cruise book:

• Miles steamed — 55,000
• Gallons of fuel oil consumed — 4,625,540
• Gallons of fresh water made — 3,987,260
• Tons of laundry washed — 504
• Number of individual meals served — 206,400
• Total value of meals served — $116,350 (that comes out to $.56 per meal)
• Total sales in ship’s store — $49,163
• Number of soft drinks sold — 140,432; drinks per man — 351
• Number of candy bars sold — 18,615; candy bars per man — 46
• Gallons of paint used — 961
• Square feet of deck chipped by deck force — 25,000
• Number of babies born — boys, 4; girls, 8
• Number of helicopter landings — 439
• Number of replenishments at sea — 37
• Number of messages handled — 28,110
• Number of sheets of paper used — 885,000
• Number of days in port — 42
• Number of days at sea — 167

We didn’t keep any stats about things like “number of beers consumed on liberty,” etc. Too bad.

So, we’re back. Deployment’s over, and soon 1969 would be. I’m going to post a lot more pictures from the cruise book and perhaps the entire cruise book as well. But I’m going to take a little holiday break.

Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah to all my shipmates and to Biddlemen all!

A couple of days before Biddle had reached San Francisco, we had begun to pick up local radio stations. There was a lot of talk on the radio about a free concert in the Bay Area that weekend that was to feature the Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, and many more bands.

The specific location of the concert kept changing, but as things ended up it was to take place Saturday, 6 December 1969, at somewhere called the Altamont Speedway in Tracy, Calif., about 60 miles east of San Francisco.

We were halfway around the world when Woodstock happened in August, so I was really psyched about the possibility of going to what was being called Woodstock West. Of course, on the day of the concert, I had duty. Considering what happened at Altamont that day, I’m glad I wasn’t there.

You can get an extensive report on the concert in the January 1970 issue of Rolling Stone. The article was entitled “The Rolling Stones Disaster at Altamont: Let It Bleed.” (The Stones’ album — “Let It Bleed” — had come out the day before the concert.) Here’s the link to the Rolling Stone (newsmagazine) article. I also recommend the documentary, Gimme Shelter, as a great look at the event that marked the end of the brief era of “peace and love.”

I had a pretty quiet day. Stood morning quarterdeck watch, then watched some college football.

ENS Curran and I had been classmates at Boston College, though we did not know each other then. We had a mutual acquaintance, however, who lived in San Francisco. Maury Wolohan was a native of San Francisco and I was surprised to find someone from so far away as my roommate at BC during our freshman and sophomore years. In those years, he and Steve had both been members of the University Chorale. Maury had transferred to UC Berkeley to get his degree in architecture. He offered to drive Steve and me around on Sunday, 7 December.

Maury had just gotten off active duty in the Army Reserve at Fort Leonard Wood and, being back in San Francisco, had returned, as my journal noted, to being “a head — smokes, etc.” He drove us around the city and over to Sausalito. 

Arrangements he made for us that night, however, were special. We went to the concert at Fillmore West. The lineup for December 4-7 featured The Flock and Humble Pie and was headlined by the Grateful Dead. I was then and am now a fan of the Dead, and that was the only time I saw them live.

Humble Pie, an English band, featured a young guitarist named Peter Frampton. He became pretty well-known a few years later. 🙂 Here’s a video from another 1969 performance.

I tracked down a replica poster for the show and found a recording of the Grateful Dead performance that night. The Dead were, at best, mediocre. Some attributed it to them being bummed by what had occurred the night before at Altamont. Seems understandable. In my journal, I wrote about the evening, “Fantastic. Smell of grass was constant.” Indeed, I remember being offered a toke of a joint that was being passed around. Being a good Navy ensign, I declined.

Of all the performances that night, however, it was that of The Flock, the least heralded of the three, that I remember most. The Flock was a jazzy group and featured an electric violin. The sound that guy pulled out of that violin was at times painful. Not the most pleasant memory, just the strongest. This is a long (7:16) clip of the introduction to their shows in 1969. It does not include painful violin.

It was a classic Sixties night for me. Maybe I didn’t get to Woodstock, but I saw the Grateful Dead at Fillmore West in San Francisco in December 1969, the weekend of Altamont. It’s historic, man!

Biddle pulled into San Francisco Bay early on the morning of 5 December 1969. We passed under the Golden Gate Bridge at about 0600, in the dark. I remember watching on the radar screen. It had been 193 days since we had been in the continental United States.

After a couple of hours sleep that morning, according to my journal, I joined ENS Curran for several hours wandering around The City and even East Bay. We went to the top of the Fairmont Hotel’s Tower Building, rode a cablecar to Fisherman’s Wharf, and then went across the Bay to visit the campus of UC Berkeley. (I, of course, had no idea that 15 years later I would begin 12 years work on the Berkeley campus.)

I don’t remember it particularly, but at some point Biddle was open for public tours. Here’s a shot from the cruise book of missiles on the rail and the Port Authority building in the background.

Here’s a gallery of other photos from the cruise book section on San Francisco.

UPDATE: I found photos I took of San Francisco and Berkeley. Click on the image and you’ll see larger photos and captions.

Enough of the tourist thing, I was a sailor on liberty! That same evening, I joined LT Morris and LTJG Fauth on a reconnaissance mission to North Beach, the raunchy section of San Francisco then famous for topless performers such as Carol Doda and Yvonne D’Angers. But there was a new addition . . . or, should I say, subtraction. “Bottomless is craze now,” I wrote in my journal. “We went into just about every place on Broadway, until 0230.”

Ah, the good ol’ USA!

After the 30 November 1969 storm passed, Biddle spent a couple of days riding the swells produced in its aftermath. These were big waves, but without the degree of wind and rain we experienced during the morning of 30 November.

The experience still revealed, to me and I’m sure others, the awesomeness of the open sea and the relative tiny scale of our 547-foot-long vessel.

The photo that is at the top of this blog was taken, I believe, during this time. It had to be cropped to fulfill its purpose here and that reduction may have lessened its impact somewhat. Below is the full frame.

There were dozens of times when the ship would be lifted by the following sea and, as the wave crested under the ship, it would lift the stern out of the water. With the screws no longer underwater, their rotation, instead of propelling the ship, made the ship shimmy, shiver, and shake. It was an unnerving experience.

Then, with the ship at the top of a massive wave, gravity, rather than propulsion, would pull the ship down the face of the wave. My sense was that the ship was then “surfing” down the wave without the bridge watch having a lot of control of the situation.

I found the situation exciting, whereas the nighttime storm had been frightening.

Here’s ENS Graham with some memories, including some where the Biddle slid back down the wave, stern first: “I remember blue water over the bullnose (I think for several days we “buried the bullnose” at least once a watch), and all hands were confined to their bunks unless on watch. 

“We altered course to the north to put the seas on our quarter (I think it was the port quarter) and the seas were moving faster than we were.  The swells would come up from astern and Biddle would ride up, stern first (that’s where the screws probably came out of the water when we went over the top of the wave) and then slide down the back side to the trough between two towering waves.”

Graham added something I was glad to see. I had the same recollection, but wasn’t absolutely confident of its veracity, because it seemed so far-fetched.

“I also remember,” Graham said, “the owl who flew in and perched on the foredeck during the worst of the storm (we must have been a thousand miles from land) and stayed with us like the Ancient Mariner’s albatross until disappearing when we were about two days from port (San Francisco).”

We were far from land, but I think less than 1,000 miles away. 🙂 It was still more than amazing that a small owl would be able to live through such a storm, be fortunate enough to land on a speck of solidity in the vast ocean, and then take off to uncertain future. I remember taking a picture of the owl, but that slide was among those stolen from my car during a stopover in New York City the next summer. Anybody else remember the owl?

UPDATE: I found pictures I had taken of the owl. Here’s a gallery.

Here’s video (2:45) from the films shot by GMG2 Boyles and GMG2 Kuczmarski. Great shots of bullnose action and waves alongside.

Closer each minute to San Francisco.

Early in the morning of 30 November 1969, cruising many miles north of Hawaii, heading east, Biddle received an unpleasant surprise.

The cruise across the North Pacific had been generally uneventful. We had experienced two 28 Novembers, as we crossed the International Dateline in the direction opposite to that in June. Four+ days to go before we reached San Francisco.

I had the midwatch, 0000-0400, as CIC Watch Officer on the morning of 30 November. At some point, as part of ongoing efforts to stay awake, I started experimenting with the NTDS display. I changed the distance of the display, extending out to maybe 60 miles. Hunh? What’s that? On the left of the display, there appeared a very solid large return . . . of a weather front.

I didn’t remember having seen any warning of potential bad weather. Oh. Maybe it’s not going to have an effect on us. I put the ball tab on the return, which would indicate whether the speed of the front toward us was below our speed. After several sweeps, I realized the front was indeed moving faster than we were and sufficiently fast to catch up to us very quickly.

Walking out to the bridge, I asked the Officer of the Deck if we had received any messages about approaching bad weather. He said we had not. I went to the radar repeater on the bridge and motioned to the OOD to look. I extended the range so the front would be visible and I noted that the weather was approaching fast.

The OOD directed that the captain, asleep in his sea cabin near the bridge, be notified. I believe CAPT Olsen requested updates on the storm.

Within maybe an hour, it started raining and we began to take heavy rolls. The captain had come out to the bridge. From my journal: “Looked just like the movies out there. Huge waves (25+ feet), 30-knot winds spraying water all over the place. The ship took a couple of 45-degree rolls.” Than in a little bit of understatement: “I was a little bit scared.”

Right after I got off watch, Biddle had its biggest roll up until that point, “must’ve been 50 degrees plus.” I was back on the bridge at the time and saw the then-OOD, LT Cashman, lose his balance in that roll. He slid into the base of the captain’s chair. According to the account in my journal: “Captain looked down. ‘Who’s that?’ ‘Dave, sir.’ ‘Well, come a little left.'” (Or would he have said “port”?) 🙂

I remember walking back to my stateroom, alternating walking on the deck and the bulkhead. I doubt I was in my rack for more than a minute or two when I fell out due to another extreme roll. I, and just about everyone else on board, realized there was no way anyone was going to sleep. I remember the mess deck being full of sailors.

Again, I went up to CIC, just to have a better sense of what was going on. I remember someone had written on the status board “All the life jackets are stored below.” When we had been on the line, life jackets were in a more accessible location. Now that we were “safe,” they were inaccessible.

ENS Roberts recalls the events as well: “I remember the storm! Gale force winds, if my memory is right, about 60 knots with a following sea. I remember going into the radio room and into the secure room with the CRT 47 and seeing a typewriter that had fallen upside down off the shelf.

“I went up to the bridge and as I stepped through the door we took a big roll and the five or six men on the bridge went sliding to my left onto the deck. The captain was in his chair and so wasn’t knocked down. I knew we were going to roll the other way, so I grabbed the overhead cable and watched the gauge (don’t remember what it’s called) and the bubble went to 30 or 40 (don’t remember now). I had a memory that a warship could take a 60 degree roll so I figured we wouldn’t capsize, but it was unnerving. Then I watched the bow dip below the blue water and the spray go over the bridge – impressive, but it seemed we were safe enough.” 

And ENS Graham sent in his recollections: “For some reason (maybe exaggeration) I recall 80-foot seas and 100 knots of wind across the deck.  I also recall, more vividly, the 47-degree roll and the ship shuttering at the bottom before the righting arm took hold.  I remember blue water over the bullnose (I think for several days we “buried the bullnose” at least once a watch), and all hands were confined to their bunks unless on watch.”

I didn’t personally view this, but I remember overhearing conversation among shipmates that fish had been found, captured by gear, on the 05 level, six levels above the main deck.

CAPT Olsen was more experienced at sea than all of us on board except for a few and I was struck by his relative calm. I expect it is also what a captain is supposed to show whether he is calm or not. He certainly made no big deal of the storm in his report to Biddle families in BIDDLEGRAM #6 dated 20 December. Two days after leaving Guam, he wrote, “we rolled a bit, but never plowed into the sea. We crossed ahead of the high winds that hit Hawaii in early December . . . .” That was not how I remembered it.

The storm that had caught up to us easily moved past us in a similar manner. I reported in my journal that I had gotten to sleep around 0600.

Surfer Magazine in 2006 reported that the storm had been generated by a “massive 960-millibar low pressure system whose cyclonic winds cover almost a third of the entire North Pacific. [A system with 960-millibars of barometric pressure would classify as a Category 3 hurricane, marked by winds of 120+ miles an hour.] Storm surf described in the 30- to 40-f00t range (60 to 80 feet by today’s standards) batters the coast between Kaena Point and Kahuku.”

A note in the Journal of Geophysical Research reported that a buoy about 350 nautical miles north of Oahu recorded a wave height of 14.9 meters (48.9 feet) on 1 December 1969.

If the storm had lessened a bit for us, it had not for the island of Oahu. According to media reports at the time, 60 homes on the North Shore were destroyed or badly damaged in the three days following the storm’s outbreak. Two people were reported swept from shore and drowned.

In the surfing world, the early days of December 1969 on the North Shore are days of legend. According to a 2009 article in Hawaii News Now, marking the 40th anniversary of the swell, “Many surfers consider it to be the biggest swell in recorded history to ever hit Oahu’s North Shore.

“The four-day swell peaked at midnight on December 2, 1969. State senator Fred Hemmings, who surfed with Eddie Aikau, remembers:

“‘We got to Makaha and obviously the North Shore was closed out. Everything was breaking out on the horizon. You couldn’t even paddle out to a location on the North Shore, it was so wild,’ said Hemmings.

According to another account: “’The swell had peaked overnight on the North Shore, but it wasn’t getting into Makaha in the morning,’ Albie [surfing filmmaker Albert Falzon] recalls. ‘We drove to the North Shore, but there were roadblocks and police turning people around. It was mayhem, shit everywhere. The North Shore was completely wiped out. We drove past all the cars to the front of the roadblock and told the police we were an Australian news crew. They let us past and we drove down and saw the destruction and we saw Waimea Bay – a total washing machine.’”

While the focus of the video below is on a reported legendary surfing ride at the time, it shows scenes of the wave action and damage of early December 1969 on the North Shore.
 

The next couple of days for Biddle was its own distinctive experience, on which I will report in a December 2 post . . . with video!

(As promised, here is Riding the Swells.)

Best wishes to my OCS classmates, shipmates, and all Biddlemen for a safe and happy Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving in 1969 was on November 27. Holiday routine, of course, and a special dinner. My journal noted, most specially, however, that I slept until 0930, and then 1100 to 1430, 1730 to 1930, and 2330 to 0330.

Sometime in there, according to my journal, I watched “The World of Suzie Wong,” the 1960 film starring William Holden and Nancy Kwan. My October 30 post mentioned my visit to an establishment of the same name in Kowloon and included a picture of me and “Bunny.”

Watching the movie, according to my journal, I “felt homesick. I’d like to go back there, as a civilian.” Guess it had made an impression on me. 🙂

It was the second of what was to be three Thanksgivings in a row I would miss at home, i.e., my home in the States, not Kowloon.

Biddle was west of Hawaii, heading north of the islands. On the previous Sunday, I had been standing midwatch in CIC.  Noted in my journal that we had had an “interesting” event during the watch.

“We were on collision course with this freighter . . . for an hour.” We had been trying to reach it frequently via radio, but had received no response. “At two minutes before collision, we turned . . . toward him. That woke him up and he turned hard to starboard, going astern of us by about 1700 yards.”

Many middle-digit signals were hoisted.

Tuesday before Thanksgiving, the ship held commendatory mast. CAPT Olsen handed out 200 citations to crew members.

On the day before Thanksgiving, according to my journal, “Picked up a small contact 4 miles ahead of us. Turned out to be a quart bottle.”

Excitement reigned on the cruise east.

On this date in 1969, Biddle stopped in Guam. It was, at most, a pit stop for fuel . . . and movies. By late afternoon same day, we were on our way.

I worked with ENS Roberts on the cruise book until about noon. Liberty originally was to expire at 1300, but, due to a delay in refueling, it was extended to 1430. Hey! Time for a few beers!

We joined others at the Officers Club. Enjoyed a few glasses of a beer I had never had before — “Three Horses.” I was specially struck by the words “Brewed and bottled in Holland specially for the tropics.”

Wow. A Dutch beer got all the way out to Guam. Certainly the tropics.

I was also surprised to see an advance in technology I would not have expected to see for the first time in Guam. The jukebox played not only music, but also showed a brief movie. “With each song,” I reported in my journal, “you also got a little film showing girls in various stages of undress.” The films had nothing to do with the songs per se, but the film content was enjoyable nonetheless. Though a far cry from MTV, it was the first time I saw anything like it.

We picked up what I described as “some great movies” — Barbarella, Long Hot Summer, Play Dirty, Dr. Zhivago.

Most of the crew had used the few hours ashore to consume amounts of alcohol that were perhaps excessive. On the bridge, as we left the harbor and began rolling significantly, the helmsman demonstrated the effect of such behavior. He barfed. He was relieved, from both his post and his discomfort.

Next stop San Francisco! Only 5,800 miles of the Pacific to go.