240614 Larry P-- A Great Man

This picture was taken in 1944 after Larry was transferred back to the USA on survivor's leave.

Larry P was the greatest man I never really had the chance to get to know as well as I wanted to. I met him in the summer of 1963 and married his oldest daughter Joyce in January of 1964. Larry never spoke much and since I was in the navy I wasn’t around enough to get to know him. Larry was born in 1921 and left this earth in 1967 while I was at sea. The only way I know about him was through our brief conversations, along with family stories and mainly naval records I obtained.

Larry was born in Indiana and his mother died not long after his birth. His father could not care for him and his older sister so they were placed in an orphan’s home that was also a working farm. Larry started to work as soon as he was old enough to walk and help with chores. The children in the home grew their own food, lived on a rigid schedule and ate their meals in absolute silence. The home was not an easy place to live. The furniture in the home was made by convicts in the Indiana state prison system. I suppose there weren’t enough cars to keep the convicts busy making license plates back then.

Larry grew tall and slender, head and shoulders above his peers. He was a quiet man and even more so as a child and teenager. One of his peers in the home mistook his quiet, calm demeanor for cowardice and began taunting him. This went on for weeks until Larry exploded into fighting mode. That bully was a quivering, bloody, pulp by the time an ambulance arrived to take him to the hospital. He was never seen again and Larry often wondered if he killed the young man.

Larry only had one year of high school, which was not uncommon in those days during the great depression. He left the home at 14 and went to work on a farm nearby. This sums up his early life and stories I heard from family members.

Here begins the story gleaned from naval records. In June of 1942, Larry received a nice letter from his uncle Sam, inviting him to join the navy and fight the good fight. He went to Great Lakes recruit training center, the same place I went 21 years later. In October of 1942 he went to Diesel Mechanic school in Little Creek, Virginia. It was an amphibious training camp, but for some reason the navy had a diesel school there too. Larry told me Little Creek was such a horrible place that even the chaplain went AWOL.

Larry was assigned to the USS Brownson, which was just commissioned in early 1943. This picture was Larry's ship the USS Brownson.

The ship was in New York harbor when Larry arrived. The ship went on its shakedown cruise off Guantanamo Bay, before heading to Casablanca in May. Upon return the ship was ordered to the Pacific, crossing through the Panama Canal enroute to San Francisco. In July the ship departed Frisco for Adak Alaska, in the Aleutian Islands where they assisted in the retaking of those islands from the Japanese. After spending three months bobbing like a cork in those frigid waters, they departed that area on November 29, 1943, headed for Pearl Harbor where they re-provisioned and then received orders to the south Pacific. (It should be noted here that many sailors never cross over into the south Pacific. I was sailing all over the Pacific for 10.8 years and only came close to crossing one time when we pulled into Singapore, just 80 miles north of the equator.

On December 14, 1943 the USS Brownson entered the south Pacific at 00 degrees latitude and 175 degrees west longitude. In the navy it is a big thing crossing the equator and ceremony must be done. Here below is Larry’s personal orders upon crossing the equator:

USS Brownson DD-518 on entering the domain of Neptune Rex notice and listen ye landlubber

I order you and command you to appear before me in court on the morrow to be initiated in the mysteries of my empire. If not you shall be given as food for sharks, who will devour you for entering my domain without warrant.

You are charged with the following offense:

Claiming to be a diesel man on a destroyer and that he was shanghaied to sea.

Therefore, appear and obey or suffer the penalty.

This picture is the last ever taken of the USS Brownson as it sunk below the waves off the coast of New Brittan. It was Larry's ship. how it happened is in the story below.

On December 26, 1943 (Christmas Day in the U.S.) the USS Brownson in company of three other destroyers escorted the USS Sonoma and seven LSTs (LST denotes Landing ship tank. Sailors called them Large Slow Targets. There were so many of them made during the war that the navy didn’t name them; they were only given numbers. )  They were invading the Cape Gloucester area on the island of New Britain. The Japanese had just finished an air strip on the island and the First Marine division was given the task of taking it away from them. Brownson’s job was shore bombardment prior to the landing. The Japanese launched an air attack which began right after the Marine landings. The Brownson and the Daly and the Laffey were diverted to screen for the air attack. The U.S. had P-38s in the air dogfighting with the Japanese Val dive bombers so the destroyers had to hold their fire so as not to hit the U.S. planes during the melee. The air forces were evenly matched with about 60 planes each. Two of the Vals slipped down and began a run on the Brownson from the aft quarter.The Brownson’s 20mm and 40mm guns fired away on the two bombers. One Val was diverted after dropping one bomb which barely missed. The second Val dropped one 500 pound bomb and two 100 pounders from just 500 feet above the Brownson. The 500 pound bomb landed just aft of the #2 exhaust stack, went through the 1/2 inch steel deck and exploded in the after engine room, which exploded the boilers and killed all but one sailor there. Larry would normally have been there as he served as a water tender and a fireman, but with his diesel training I think he must have been in the auxiliary diesel steering room during battle stations. Otherwise he would have been killed in the blast. The only two things Larry told me about the sinking were that he had just won $800 in a poker game and he didn’t have time to get it from his locker below decks and that he was stuck below deck when an unknown sailor managed to open the hatch and reached in to give him a hand getting out. The official record shows the Brownson snapped into two pieces amidship and sank 8 minutes after being hit. Larry was in the ocean and I cannot imagine what he may have been thinking. 109 Brownson crewmen died that day. Larry was rescued by the USS Daly.

Larry was soon on his way home for 30 days survivors leave and then re-assignment. He was sent to a naval facility on the Ohio river where the LSTs were manufactured. Once an LST was completed Larry and a crew had 2 weeks to go down river and basically do a shakedown cruise, down the Mississippi to New Orleans where other crews sailed them to the Pacific.

The crews stopped overnight in Saint Louis and that was where Larry met his wife to be. On Christmas of 1943 his ship was sunk, on Christmas of 1944 he was married. Shortly after getting married LP was transferred to Chicago pier where he was a crewman on one of the two aircraft carriers that sailed lake Michigan training navy pilots for takeoff and landings onboard ships. The invasion of Japan was on the horizon and the navy knew they would need a lot more pilots. The war ended in August of 1945 and Larry was discharged on October 12, 1945. He and his wife moved in with her parents in Saint Louis because the city was still short of rentals because the excess of factory war workers had yet to filter out of town. His first daughter arrived in November of 1945.

In July of 1946 Larry and his bride secured a VA loan to buy a new house in a subdivision north of Saint Louis. Her father called it a cracker box that would not last a year. His bride sold it in 1974 and it was still there in 2016. Larry worked at a liquor store owned by his brother-in-law for a while and in May of 1950 he took a class in aircraft layout and manufacturing in Saint Louis and got a job at a place in Saint Charles Missouri called Leonard's’ metal works I believe. Larry designed and built a postage stamp vending machine like the ones in post offices today. The company went to patent the machine, but arrived at the patent office 2 weeks too late. The one Larry designed and built ended up on display in Lenard’s president’s office as a display of what the company could do. The ones seen in post offices today are by the company that beat them to the patent office.

Larry’s later assignment was making parts for the Apollo space capsules. He developed a pain in his side during that time and thought it was damage from working in cramped spaces on the space capsules. When the pain lingered on he went to a doctor who could not figure it out. He went to a chiropractor who put lifts in his shoes. Neither one did a simple chest x ray. Had either done that they would have found cancer. The doctor just kept prescribing more and more pain pills. The downward spiral led to an afternoon when he picked up his bride from her workplace and headed home. His pain was so horrible he had forgotten how many pills he had taken and on the way home he sideswiped a car on the street and didn’t even realize what happened. His bride screamed at him to stop and he did. Police showed up and wanted to arrest him for driving intoxicated. His bride convinced them he needed a hospital instead. The emergency room xrayed him and found his lung cancer had spread to his brain. He never left the hospital.

In late October of 1967 I was stationed in San Diego and getting ready to go on cruise in early November. My mother called long distance and said Larry was dying. I, my bride and daughter flew back to Saint Louis to see Larry in the hospital. We headed home a week later and left our daughter with my mother so we could get my bride ready to head back to Saint Louis to be with her mother during her mother’s upcoming tribulation. One of the last things Larry got to do was hold his 5 month-old granddaughter before he passed away the day of his oldest daughter’s birthday. That is why my Joyce never wanted to celebrate her birthday.

The END