The good ship Merapi
The USS MERAPI AF 38 was a three hold cargo ship. The forward hold was a dry hold, the middle hold was refrigerated for vegetables, the third hold was a frozen hold for frozen foods. Our crew of about 40 lived together, worked together and played together. Home ported in Hawaii in the late 1950's things were a little bit different than in the states.
For instance, television was always shown a day late. There were no satellites so television shows were flown to Hawaii the day after they were shown in America. Everything was a day late.
The most popular television show on the Merapi was the Mickey Mouse Club. The guys would gather to watch Annette and Bobby do their thing. It got so popular that our firstclass engine-man, a guy from New York City named Brentari, ordered 20 pairs of Mickey Mouse ears for us to wear. We were a goofy looking lot, a bunch of sailors watching TV with Mickey Mouse ears on their head.
We made bi-monthly trips to the Marshall Islands to supply the scien- tists and military personnel conducting atom bomb tests. In the forward dry hold we carried canned goods, cigarettes, bottled drinks, sundries, and plenty of booze for the troops. The whiskeys, gins, vodkas, and other strong liquors were kept in secure lockers.
Beer was kept in two large secure lockers. We knew better than to break into the whiskey lockers but it was open season on the beer lockers. Some of our more nimble fingered shipmates would break the seal on a beer locker and each department on the ship would take as much beer as they wanted.
I was in engineering and we would usually take about 15 cases of beer. We would split our beer with the cooks who let us store the beer in the ships coolers. We would hide it under the vegetables in the cooler, and we would only drink the beer at night when we were going on watch. No one ever got drunk because we had a limit of one beer per day.
On one trip there was a surprise captains inspection. Some officer had discovered the broken seal on one of the beer lockers. The inspection started in the forward hold and they found the beer hidden by the deck crew. Word quickly spread throughout the ship. The cooks panicked, they wanted that beer out of the coolers. We knew we couldn't hide the beer in the bilges because that's the first place the captain would look. Engineman Brentari said where is the last place the captain would look? He said lets hide it in the captain's gig (personal boat). He didn't look in his gig and that night we returned our beer to the coolers.