Coast Guard veteran to speak at event

The Lehigh Valley Veterans History Project Roundtable will meet at 7 p.m. Nov. 30 at Lehigh Active Life, 1633 Elm St., Allentown. The speaker will be Dale L. Sommons, a retired Coast Guard petty officer second class.

Sommons is the first Coast Guard veteran to speak at the Roundtable Program. He will share many of his experiences and extensive travel throughout the world as a Coast Guard veteran. Sommons enlisted in the Coast Guard in May 1966 and went to Cape May, New Jersey, the home of the Coast Guard boot camp. Sommons graduated three months later and reported to the Coast Guard’s 3rd District in New York. He received orders to report to the Coast Guard cutter Rockaway. The ship was stationed in Staten Island, and Sommons was on the Rockaway for 21 months. He will share his experience of crossing the equator and becoming a shellback. At one time his ship became an oceanographic vessel with scientists coming on board.

Sommons traveled through the Panama Canal and crossed the equator a second time. He completed a month of naval training at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Sommons went to Seattle and was stationed on the Coast Guard cutter Point Knoll. From Seattle he was moved to the Coast Guard base in New London, Connecticut. Sommons was put in charge of his own 40-foot search-and-rescue boat until he was discharged on May 25, 1969.