BILL'S NAVY PAGE

This page is becoming an exercise in "how to feel old." I was an Operations Specialist (Radarman for you older salts,) while I was in the Navy; and was in the Pacific Fleet, homeported in San Diego as well as Sasebo and Yokosuka, Japan. I was on four ships, and I've discovered that all of them have been de-comissioned since I got out of the Navy in 1979. Therefore, the Navy Public Affairs Archives doesn't have pictures for me, (well, there was one of the Bainbridge, and I torqued it around a bit in PSP, and it is now the background image for this page,) and there are no homepages to link to, but I did find a few news releases. The ship's in question are:

• USS Samuel Gompers (AD-37)
• USS Towers (DDG-9)
• USS Bainbridge (CGN-25)
• USS White Plains (AFS-4) which has it's own page and some photoscans and a bunch of rambling prose on various naval topics.

One of my non-OS jobs was "Duty Signalman Inport" when I was on the Gompers. We had a few extra OS's and were short SM's in the E-4 and below range for four section inport duty, so by qualifying as an inport signalman I helped out both OI and OC divisions, plus I got to spend my duty days kicked back on the signalbridge rather than comm watch in CIC or quarterdeck watches. It's hard to beat the view from the signalbridge. Once I was on the White Plains I found that knowing semaphore was a real asset, since I could shoot the breeze with guys on other ships during unreps.