220709 Galley Slave

I spent some time working in galleys during my early years in the navy and before becoming a 3rd class petty officer.
In my ninth week of boot camp, called service week, we were all assigned to tasks in support of those ahead and behind us. My assignment was working in the galley at Great Lakes naval training center.

I spent 12 hours a day working in the scullery cleaning off steel trays, ensuring there were no utensils that went into the garbage and then running the trays through a huge steaming line that washed and rinsed them, then taking them out and stacking them for the next meal. That was followed by hauling 55 gallon garbage cans and dumping them into other cans that the local pig farmers used to feed their pigs. Now before you swear off ever eating ham again, these days pigs are raised in air conditioned sanitary buildings and they are not fed old slop from institutions nearby. It was a very hot, sweaty job for a long week in my early naval service.

The next time I was trapped and sent to a galley was in Pearl Harbor. We had spent several weeks training at Barbers Point, Hawaii. Wonderful weekends of taking a bus to Honolulu and swimming at Waikiki beach and we even had a day of sailing off the beach, hosted by a life insurance salesman, who hoped to sell us a policy. The day came when we were to leave beautiful Hawaii, for what was then a primitive place called Guam. Our group was sent to Hickam air force base for our flight to Guam where my uncle Kenny USMC landed in WW-2 to liberate the island from the Japanese. The departure time was delayed for 4 hours due to an aircraft malfunction, so with hours to kill, 4 of us decided to go to the enlisted men's club for a couple of beers. We went back to the aircraft terminal after an hour and a half, only to be told the plane had taken off shortly after we went to the club. We asked to be taken back to Barbers Point, but were told we were stuck in Pearl until there was another flight. Shore Patrol came to the terminal to get us and move us to the naval transient barracks at Pearl. We arrived there and were given a choice, either face a court martial for missing movement or stay in the transient barracks and take whatever job they assigned until we could catch another flight. The transient barracks was a horror show, filled with derelects and sailors waiting to finish their enlistment and they didn’t give a hoot about anything, they were getting out of the navy. I was assigned to the naval station galley, but this time I was assisting the cooks in the galley, stirring and fetching or whatever they needed. My days were okay in the galley, the nights were terrible in the barracks. We caught another plane after a week and were headed to Guam.

We arrived at Anderson air force base at the north end of the island. That was a very nice place and I thought life would not be bad on Guam. We were picked up by a navy truck that took us to NAS Agana near the center of the island. It was nothing like the luxurious Anderson base.
This picture was taken at the flight line, note we were working out of Quonson Huts there, unlike the nice buildings at Anderson.

I was at Agana for several days working wherever I was sent. One afternoon I had worked late on an assignment and went to the galley for supper. I was walking to the galley at just after 4:30 when a bosun’s mate stopped me and wrote me up for being in dungarees. After 4:30 I should have been in white uniform. I had not been told that. I went to see a chief petty officer in the master at arms building. He gave me a choice of going to Captain’s Mast for punishment or I could do 4 hours of extra duty for a week. I ended up at the line shack at the airfield for a week. That meant if I wanted supper I had to go back to the barracks area and the galley where I would be let out in front of the galley and be in dungarees at about 8 pm in between supper and midrations, and then have to go past the master at arms building to likely get caught again. So I went a week without supper. My extra duty was over and 2 days later I was assigned to the NAS galley for 94 days of 12 hours each. To my (not) delight I was put in the scullery again. After a month or so, I was assigned to night shift in the galley. That was the best job in the galley. Me and Harley D. Orem were to work with a second class petty officer by the name of Cruze Benevente. We started by scrubbing hugs pans from the supper hours and then moved on to preparing box lunches for planes departing from Guam the next day. We had to first coat the bread with butter (a crime in my opinion) and then fill the bread with different kinds of lunch meat. Of course I helped myself to anything I wanted to eat. At 5 am we had to go over to the barracks where the galley slaves slept and wake them up for duty. I remember some of them were obviously having great dreams for a guy a long way from home, so I would pass them by until the last minute so the dreams could finish. Once we awakened all of them, we went back to the galley where I was the breakfast cook for eggs and bacon. I got pretty good at cracking an egg with both hands at the same time and placing each on the grill without breaking the yoke on either one. Our eggs came from farms in the U.S. to San Francisco to cargo ships traveling at 12 miles an hour to Hawaii, then on to Guam, then to the NAS Agana galley. After that long journey some of those eggs were green when cracked and they would skitter across the grill like fireworks. I would scrape them into a tray at the back of the grill and then continue on. No one seemed to mind as long as they didn’t get one of the green eggs. Alas my time in the galley finally ended and I finally got to the squadron and was assigned to crew #4 and from then on life was much better.
I am the second from the left of the back row in my flight suit. We had a great crew and a lot of adventures in the Philippines and flying overnight above the aircraft carriers in the gulf of Tonkin off Vietnam.