Working on Mare’s Island during WWII as a 14-year-old
Editor’s Note: Dick Marquette, Sutter, from time to time regales us of Yuba-sutter area history from WWII forward. Here is his latest piece.
Well, as I have said, there was a war on and we repaired our fleet as well as those of other nations. Dad was a “burner” and worked on the submarine “Wahoo,” which was much endeared for its battle record in the South Pacific.
We received our work order as posted on our machine. I was to work on foreign ships and it was all done in millimeters. When I machined the gun mount chocks, there were four corners on each one and each corner was of a different thickness.
One time I was machining a propeller shaft for a destroyer and they are quite large and I was doing a final cut on it when there was a giant explosion in shop 31.
It is quite a story and it involved two men working on a prop and they bolted them down to a huge cast iron slab while they bore the propeller. What happened was that someone went underneath the slab and lit a match when the gas had been left on by mistake. I had a brand new ... tool box that was blown to hell by the blast.
Luckily, the lathe had reached the end of its run on the shaft or I would have seen a mark where the tool had jiggled upon the explosion. It would have cost the USN plenty and they had come over to check the shaft after the accident.
The other big explosion was when ammo ships blew up while loading over at Port Chicago. It blew many glass windows out of our shop and caused concern when the waves started rocking our subs at Mare Island.
People thought it was a Japanese two-man submarine like the one at Pearl.
The island was guarded overhead by big barrage balloons that were cabled to the ground and searchlights were probing the sky constantly. There were around 35,000 working there.
When I came to work I saw so many things. I saw a war, and I wondered… wondered about everything. We had concrete air raid shelters and on your time card it told where you were to go in case of attacks and the shelters were stacked with food and water.
At noon there was a band concert by the Navy and
Marine bands. There was a new boxing ring set up near the shop and I boxed one noon and I had always enjoyed that. Navy boxing was always held on Friday nights. The Navy produced a world’s champion Gene Tunney in the 1930s.
The Navy operated over 300 big gray buses to bring workers from Sacramento and many distant cities. The busses crossed the bridge and entered the north gate where a super sharp United States Marine would board from his booth. He walked the entire aisle, eye-balling all the passengers. If one did not look right he was put through the “electric eye.” People did wrap copper around their body and the Marine took them off the bus and to jail, I guess.
I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why anyone would want to steal from the company they work for and during a war when our boys overseas needed all that equipment to help us overcome the enemy.
Sometimes another kid and I would take the Navy bus to Frisco and they stopped at the Greyhound Depot at 7th and Mission and we took the Judah Street car to the beach and found some girls to go to the caves under the great highway and we built fires and had weenie roasts and listened to the latest music.
Sometimes some of the other guys and I would talk about our futures … we had constantly talked about packing in the Yukon and there we would live off the land. One kid wanted plenty of weapons including grenades, rockets, bazookas and all manner of explosives.
I always had questions like, “What are we gonna do with all that stuff… that gold and the furs? He said we should buy more of the weapons. An old Canadian once told me, “I’ve seen ‘em come but then you never see ‘em come out. Sonny, the North woods does not give up its dead … you never see ‘em again. They are greenhorns.”
Mare Island was a very exciting place to work -- 35,000 workers all shifts, 300 big busses, spotlights piercing the sky, hundreds of barrage balloons overhead, dances after work with big band music, USO dances everywhere -- the old song goes, “Those were the days my friend, we thought they’d never end, we danced the whole night through ...”