The Shell Oil Company had a large plant there (San Francisco) and we enjoyed watching the large tankers from overseas coming into the Sacramento River and discharging their huge cargoes. Much oil was handled by tank cars that distributed their cargo throughout a wide area by train. There was a tank yard a short distance from the depot.
One day after getting off work at 2.20 pm, I walked down into the freight yard, only to find the entire yard covered with about three inches of slimey oil. A large tanker had sprung a leak or some culprit had turned on a faucet that had entirely inundated the yard. It was an awesome sight.
The only dry place in the yard was the freight car bumper which sat on high ground. On top of this great mass of oil sat the most beautiful girl I had ever met. She was completely surrounded by oil, and I have no idea how she ever got there without coming in contact with the oil.
As I approached, she smiled very sweetly and spoke. I was petrified. I later wrote a poem that I thought described the incident very well:
POEM
Kay was a private duty nurse, and was sitting with an invalid in a nearby home. She was either assigned early day hours the same as I was, or through some special arrangement, she got off at the same hours I did. I never asked her - she was always available when I had time off, and that was good enough for me. We spent many long, happy hours together.
Kay was a horse lover and an all-around outdoors girl. She loved the outside and there was endless scenery for us to explore. I don't think we missed but very little, if any, of the beautiful sights in our neighborhood.
We were both in paradise and I was sure this time that she was the one girl that I had been waiting for all of my life.
After a couple of months of this idyllic love, the bubble burst. Kay had finished her assignment with her patient there and was up for a new assignment. I never dreamed it would end, but one day Kay came to me with the news that her next assignment was in Honolulu, and she would be leaving in two days. I must have known all the time that it would some day come to an end. She couldn't stay on forever with one patient, but I had never allowed myself to think about it.
The day she sailed for Honolulu was the darkest day of my life. There just had to be an answer that would permit us to be together again.
After her sailing, I tried to pull myself together and come up with some solution that would allow our romance to again blossom.
I had developed into a fairly adept Morse operator, and was improving my speed daily. There were no Morse code wires between San Francisco and Honolulu, but there were ships sailing between the two ports daily. I decided to learn Continental Morse and get a job on one of the many boats that plowed the water daily between the two ports.
One of the few sailing vessels still plowing the Pacific had just landed in San Francisco after being at sea for more than six months on a trip from Hawaii. It seemed the sailing ship had gotten off the course somewhat and had become becalmed and unable to make any headway for many weeks. I was in the navigation office talking to them about a job when this ship landed and I was invited to go down to the dock to accompany the purser, who was meeting them to supply the first food and money they had seen in weeks.
It was a motley crew that greeted us. Nearly all were skin and bones from near starvation and lack of salt-free water. They had been several weeks without any food and very little water.
This was a good time to get a job as an operator, for they were fully convinced that every ship should have an operator aboard, and I was hired immediately. I told the company I wanted to give the railroad thirty days' notice and I would join them then. I didn't tell them that another reason for the thirty days' time was that I had to learn something about radio mechanics and also the International Code. It never occurred to me that it would be any problem.
I found a school in San Francisco that taught both radio mechanics and code, and immediately registered for their course. They said it would take six months but when I told them I knew the American Morse Code, they said the time could be reduced substantially.
The students attending these classes were having very little trouble learning the mechanics of radio. We had a sample set there that we could look over, and pictures of different types of sets were available.
After three weeks of schooling, attending classes two nights a week, I satisfied the school that I was ready for the government examination, and received a first class radio operator's license. One of the students had a list of the sets we would be required to draw for our license exam, and while we were quite adept at drawing pictures of the different types of sets, we were somewhat short on actual ability to understand just what made the sets work.
Reporting for work at the expiration of my thirty day notice, we were sent to the Bay Point shipyard to pick up a brand new freight ship named the Mohinkus I. (Could find no pictures on the internet in 2021.)
The Mohinkus was equipped with an old style spark gap radio with a crystal receiver. I was to be the only operator on the ship during its maiden run to Hawaii. The sending part of the set seemed to work perfectly, but the crystal receiver refused to deliver any incoming sound whatsoever.
The chief engineer said he knew a lot about radio receivers, but we heard nothing after going through the Golden Gate, although we tore the set down completely. Perhaps I should have gone to school another few weeks!
I was unable to contact Kay to advise her when I would arrive because of the breakdown of the radio, and I was very disappointed that she was not there to meet me when we arrived.
A radio man came out in a boat to meet us as we were coming into the harbor. He said he could hear our signals and messages, but they were unable to make us understand them. I bought a little tube appliance from him that he said would work anywhere. He was right, and I never had any further trouble sending or receiving messages clear across the ocean in broad daylight. The signals coming from Annapolis, Maryland and Nagasaki, Japan were fine. He was my friend after that!
I had many experiences in the Islands. Many of them rather pleasant, but others I would just as soon forget about. While I had been swimming every day in California and thought I was just about as brown as anyone could get, I managed to get one of the worst sunburns in Hawaii. After lying in the sun for three hours one day, I had blisters on top of blisters, many of them as large as my hand. I could get a tablespoon of liquid out of just one blister. I couldn't even lie down because my shoulders and back were so sore. I spent my nights for the next two weeks sitting up.
One day after I recovered from the sunburn, a friend and I were back on the beaches showing off. When the waves recede from the beach there is a wide expanse of sand without any water covering it. We were taking long runs on the sand trying to meet the first big incoming wave and then diving into it. It was great fun showing off for the onlookers. I took one exceptionally long run into a wave, and instead of diving into the middle of it, went completely through it and landed on my head in water that wasn't more than six inches deep. That concluded my diving experiences. For six months I couldn't turn my head in any direction.
On my arrival to the Islands, there were only two hotels on the island of Oahu - the Alexander Young downtown and Moana on the beach. The Moana had just been built and was considered the ultimate in fine hotels. Neither had air conditioning or fans, and it was necessary to keep the windows up for circulation of air. There were no screens on the windows, either. A big piece of net was hung from its middle over each bed and it flared out at the bottom to cover the entire bed. Mosquitoes found a way to circumvent it, however, or hid out on the inside of the net, and their bites were quite common.
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| Moana Hotel Note: The Moana Hotel is a historic hotel building in Honolulu, Hawaii, located at 2365 Kalākaua Avenue in the Waikiki neighborhood. Built in the late 19th century as the first hotel in Waikiki, the Moana opened in 1901. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The building is currently part of the resort complex known as Moana Surfrider, A Westin Resort & Spa and is a franchise of Westin Hotels & Resorts. |
While I was overjoyed at meeting with Kay and reminiscing for so long, when I left her that first evening at the hotel, I realized that something was missing. The joy of being with her, with the prospects of many more enjoyable weeks to come didn't thrill me like I thought it should. It seemed as though the Islands had cast a spell upon her, and she was not the same girl that I had been so enamored with for so long in anticipation.
We were engaged to be married one year from the coming September. While it seemed eons away at the time we became engaged, it now seemed much closer. I was still very much in love with her, but had a deep down feeling that seemed to say she belonged to the Islands and not to me anymore.
Perhaps I was jealous of the Islands. I wanted to go back to the States and take her with me, but she wouldn't budge. It was that we be married in the Islands, or not at all. I was thoroughly intrigued with the Islands and enjoyed every minute I was there, but the thoughts of spending the rest of my days there seemed too confining. I was afraid they would close in on me and I couldn't think of spending the rest of my life on a small patch of ground in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
One night between trips, I talked to her sister in California about it. She and I both agreed that Kay was too young to be over there all alone. I wrote a message that she was to wait and have delivered once I got back to the Islands. One night while sitting with Kay in the Alexander Young Hotel lobby, a delivery boy brought her the message from her sister. The cable stated, "need you badly - come home at once". She was heartbroken and started to cry. She told me that she must get home to her sister.
I was scheduled to sail the next day on the Matsonia and tried my best to get her a reservation, but one couldn't be arranged. We arranged her passage on the Tenyo Maru, a Japanese ship leaving the next day. We were both on the same ocean at the same time with the same destination, but we were 600 miles apart. I became acquainted with the Japanese operator on the Maru and we passed messages back and forth between Kay and me.
The closer I got to San Francisco the more I worried about what Kay would say if she found out her sister didn't need her as badly as she had claimed. The more I thought about it, the more I began to think that her sister was really concerned about Kay. We both wanted her home again.
I began worrying that Kay would blame me for the entire episode and I couldn't stand the thought of it. When we docked in San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day, I was experiencing a recurrence of the results of my diving accident in the Islands. I was homesick, worried, and scared to face up to Kay. The next day when she arrived, I went to the railroad depot and secured myself a reservation home to Missouri. I was at the end of my rope, and at the time, it made sense to me. Never seeing her again seemed better than seeing her blame me for bringing her home. Later I found it difficult to rationalize.
I was recently able to identify Kay as Kathleen Parmeter. I went to look in Family Search to see if maybe I'd written a memory about her. I had written about his relationship to her, but not her name. Next to that, on the screen, was a "People you may know" and showed Kathlene Parmeter. She was born in California about 1900. She was a nurse, and she was stationed in Hawaii. In 1923, she married a doctor. They had one daughter but later divorced. She lived until about 1999, so it's sad that she and Grandpa never reconnected all those years later. Or did they?
Fascination with railroads
https://americanhistory.si.edu/america-on-the-move/lives-railroad
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