| The Palmyra Gazette |
| Welcome to: PalmyraGazette.org Created by: Michael E. Murray January 2008 Enjoy your visit! |
One night a week each island would have the use of the circuit
for the personal business of the workmen. OpCom offered to
transport any wife or sweetheart or friend who wanted to go to
the little shack on the barge, and there she could sit and talk
to her man nine hundred miles way. (124)
Conversations would run something like this:
SHE: Al, are you changing your shirt every week like I told
you?
HE: Are you staying home nights the way I want you to?
SHE: Yes, of course I am. Tell me, what do you want me to
send you down there?
HE: Honey, what I want most you couldn’t send.
Not only did this radio link blow off steam and keep up the
men’s faith in their homes; it was tremendously useful to the
Contractors as well. Previously, the island superintendents
had been mailing in requests for spare parts, supplies, food,
using Navy radio only for emergencies. Now, they would pick
up the instrument every night of the week and talk over
progress in the islands from day to day.
“Good evening,” OB Pearl would say. “This is Joe speaking.
Can you get me O.K.?”
“We can hear you, Joe. Johnston talking. Let’s have it, Joe.”
“As I understand it, you have on order here an S-5 compressor
and an S-5 unit, less motor. I would like to know what they
are going to be used for.” And so on, till every wrinkle and
knotty question had been solved for that day. Ingenious
brains developed a system by which the map of every island
was laid out in squares, with men’s names for the vertical rows
and girls’ for the horizontal. Standard practice every night
was to report on progress of dredging or construction so that
the OpCom could keep exact tabs on the project’s advance.
“Today,” Palmyra would say, “we took four thousand yards
out of Sam Lilly and got the ramp started in John Maryann.”
Endless ingenuity, endless work, endless loneliness, and
clever little ways of breaking it like this. (125)
Commander “Swede” Momsen, inventor of the famous
submarine lung and escape tank, was then in command of the
Sirius. And presently made a call to Palmyra with a load of
supplies. When he got back to Honolulu, he told George Ferris
that he had a plan. Palmyra’s palms and grim, sweating men
had made a deep impression.
“After the war,” Swede proposed, “You and I and a few of us,
George, will find a South Sea island and go and live on it for
the rest of our lives. I’ll be King and nobody will have
anything to do. But I tell you what. We’ll take along a few
people that we don’t like so there’ll be somebody to hate. That
will stop us from hating ourselves.”
Alone on the empty ocean, tiny Palmyra managed to pull
through. There was one carpenter there that nobody liked –
But there were walruses, too, and oysters, and ports. Some
how, they all got along. [126]
for the personal business of the workmen. OpCom offered to
transport any wife or sweetheart or friend who wanted to go to
the little shack on the barge, and there she could sit and talk
to her man nine hundred miles way. (124)
Conversations would run something like this:
SHE: Al, are you changing your shirt every week like I told
you?
HE: Are you staying home nights the way I want you to?
SHE: Yes, of course I am. Tell me, what do you want me to
send you down there?
HE: Honey, what I want most you couldn’t send.
Not only did this radio link blow off steam and keep up the
men’s faith in their homes; it was tremendously useful to the
Contractors as well. Previously, the island superintendents
had been mailing in requests for spare parts, supplies, food,
using Navy radio only for emergencies. Now, they would pick
up the instrument every night of the week and talk over
progress in the islands from day to day.
“Good evening,” OB Pearl would say. “This is Joe speaking.
Can you get me O.K.?”
“We can hear you, Joe. Johnston talking. Let’s have it, Joe.”
“As I understand it, you have on order here an S-5 compressor
and an S-5 unit, less motor. I would like to know what they
are going to be used for.” And so on, till every wrinkle and
knotty question had been solved for that day. Ingenious
brains developed a system by which the map of every island
was laid out in squares, with men’s names for the vertical rows
and girls’ for the horizontal. Standard practice every night
was to report on progress of dredging or construction so that
the OpCom could keep exact tabs on the project’s advance.
“Today,” Palmyra would say, “we took four thousand yards
out of Sam Lilly and got the ramp started in John Maryann.”
Endless ingenuity, endless work, endless loneliness, and
clever little ways of breaking it like this. (125)
Commander “Swede” Momsen, inventor of the famous
submarine lung and escape tank, was then in command of the
Sirius. And presently made a call to Palmyra with a load of
supplies. When he got back to Honolulu, he told George Ferris
that he had a plan. Palmyra’s palms and grim, sweating men
had made a deep impression.
“After the war,” Swede proposed, “You and I and a few of us,
George, will find a South Sea island and go and live on it for
the rest of our lives. I’ll be King and nobody will have
anything to do. But I tell you what. We’ll take along a few
people that we don’t like so there’ll be somebody to hate. That
will stop us from hating ourselves.”
Alone on the empty ocean, tiny Palmyra managed to pull
through. There was one carpenter there that nobody liked –
But there were walruses, too, and oysters, and ports. Some
how, they all got along. [126]
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Paradise Island
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