Motorcycling and An Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD)

“Hey soldier come over here and listen to this – the Japs have just bombed Pearl Harbour….”

My Dad was pulling guard duty in Riverside, California just outside Los Angeles when the taxi driver called him over. He joined the National Guard in Reno, Nevada in 1939 and by May 1942 he was camped with the first wave of US Army forces in parkland adjoining Melbourne Zoo. He recalls one of the first nights returning to camp from downtown Melbourne, it was dark as, but the sound of lions and elephants….well go figure, they didn’t know a zoo was nearby.

Dad was born in New Jersey in 1919. His father was a navy man. I have grandfather’s Navy discharge certificate from 1917.

Dad was the older of two children, his sister being three years younger. His mother died of cancer when he was four years old and his father placed his sister and him in a ‘home’. My grandfather was a fisherman on the east coast and many years later in 1996, when I visited my aunt in Indiana I was able to join some of the dots and fill in a few gaps.

Grandfather remarried, a woman that came with the full package – her own daughter and son. So the scene was set, Dad and his sister were brought into the new family and home. Together they were on a different rung on the ladder, and this gave added meaning to the term ‘hand me downs’.

I returned from visiting my aunt with numerous momento photographs and one of the dots joined for me:

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was a public work relief program for unemployed men, focused on natural resource conservation from 1933 to 1942. As part of the New Deal legislation proposed by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), the CCC was designed firstly, to aid relief of high unemployment stemming from the Great Depression and secondly, carry out a broad natural resource conservation program on national, state and municipal lands.

General Douglas MacArthur had George C. Marshall organize the Corps. Later, during World War II, General Marshall became the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army.

For more detail go to - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilia...ervation_Corps

Dad joined the 1212th company of the CCC in Morristown, New Jersey when he was seventeen. The CCC was very much a military disciplined culture. The CCC’s took him to Nevada where he was a young ‘powder monkey’ drilling down into rock and setting explosives to construct road ways over the mountains. I recall Dad telling me of the time that after blasting away the side of a rock face they discovered several rattle snake nests. And the humorous stories of pack rats coming into the tents at night stealing socks from boots but always replacing the ‘stolen object’ with something else – Dad was lucky enough to score a half eaten potato in his boot the next morning.

By the time war broke out Dad had several years under his belt, was a corporal and at 22 one of the older men.

From Melbourne in 1942 he then arrived in Sydney where he and his gun crew were assigned to Dutch merchant ships. The crews provided two twin fifty caliber anti-aircraft mounts on these vessels. Within a month of arriving in Australia Dad was in Sydney when the Japanese attempted to torpedo the USS Chicago in the harbour, the torpedo exploding underneath the Kuttabul an Australian Navy requisitioned vessel. The USS Chicago was torpedoed and sunk off Guadalcanal in the Battle of Rennell Island seven months later.

As part of the Army Transport Service, Dad’s cargo was most commonly 44 gallon drums of gasoline bound for the islands and aircraft, from Guadalcanal northwards through numerous island hopping campaigns to finally the Battle of Leyte Gulf and arriving in Tocloban in the Philippines in 1945. There were several instances when Dad and his gun crew would rotate off one ship to another only to discover that the former ship never returned. At one time Dad was advised that his gun crew was going to be split to man another vessel. Dad pleaded with his senior officers to keep the crew together as they had been a unit since the earlier years in Nevada. The crew remained together and the vessel astern of them off Gladstone Queensland, that some of the crew would have been on, was sunk. The fatalities of war were very close, Dad lost half his gun crew when the port side gun crew mount was taken out by Japanese aircraft toward the end of the war.

Dad married in 1944 and his first wife was an Aussie war bride shipped to the States. Fifty two years later I discovered that I had a half sister. Dad was taken with prostate cancer in 1990.