The Last of the Doughboys

by RICHARD RUBIN

  Unfortunately, he didn’t remember much more about his service, at least not that he could convey to me; he was 107 when we met, and his memory seemed to have mostly slipped away by then. Lloyd Brown, though, was a different story.

  Maybe it was because he was a mere 103 years old when we met, a couple of months after I’d visited William Cotton, but talking to Lloyd Brown was pretty much like talking to anyone else. He was a bit confused about his precise age, but that could have been because, when he enlisted in the Navy in 1917, he gave them 1899 as his birth year, when it seems much more likely that he was actually born in 1901, and had tacked on a couple of years at the time so as not to be turned away. Whatever the year, he was born on October 7, in Ozark County, Missouri, near the town of Lutie, which is no longer a town. He was the fourth of nine children, seven boys and two girls; the next in line was his brother Floyd. Lloyd and Floyd. Their father, Claud, had a small farm. “I used to pull weeds away from the plants,” Lloyd recalled, “and take a hoe and dig around the plants, you know. Get all the weeds away from the plants, whatever we were growing, whether it’s cabbage, corn, carrots, beans, whatever . . . I didn’t mind. It was my duties as a kid. All the kids in the neighborhood did the same thing.”

  We sat in his living room in Charlotte Hall, Maryland, about an hour southeast of Washington; it was a mild, sunny autumn afternoon. His daughter Nancy was there, and some other family, too, and they chimed in liberally, sometimes disputing minor details, often sharing a hearty laugh. They were a loud, lively bunch. The patriarch spoke loudest of all; hesitated from time to time, but never for long. He had an accent that, like Laurence Moffitt’s, seemed archaic, though his was harder to place. I’d say southern Missouri, but that would be cheating.

  Around 1913, his father changed professions, “went to Chadwick [Missouri], and he went in business. Bought out a business, buying eggs and turkeys and processing them and plucking all the feathers off of them and putting them in barrels and shipping them to the Slipton Company, in St. Louis.” Chadwick was a railroad town, bigger and busier than Lutie, and the business did well. Claud Brown needed help; good thing he had those nine kids. His son Lloyd left school after the eighth grade and never returned.

  A year or two later, America entered the war, and Lloyd decided he wanted a part of it. “I don’t know why I chose the Navy,” he said, “but I guess because it travels around different parts of the country.” Like William Cotton, he was completely landlocked.

  “He wanted to see things,” Nancy added.

  “Different parts of the world,” he asserted. “That sounded good to me.”

  “How did your parents feel about it?” I asked.

  “Oh, they weren’t concerned very much,” he said. “I was sixteen or seventeen years old.” His oldest brother, Homer, went into the Army and off to France. Lloyd signed up in St. Louis; from there, “they sent me to Great Lakes, Illinois, for about a week or ten days,” he recalled, “to learn to do a little marching, and row a boat. And then they put me on the New Hampshire.”

  Like the Oklahoma, the New Hampshire was a battleship, but though it was only eight years older than the Oklahoma, there was one significant difference between the two: The New Hampshire was powered by coal. When fuel ran low, Lloyd Brown recalled, “they had a big barge pull up, and it had a big”—he closed his hand to simulate a steel claw—“grab up coal, and drop it on our deck. And then our crew would shovel it down manholes. Had a manhole on the deck, take the cover off and shovel the coal down there, and it goes down in the engine room.”

  “Would that make a mess on deck?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, shaking his head. “It’d mess the ship up and the crew and everything. Had to wash everything, the walls, the ceiling, with soap and water.” Then, he said, “you sprinkle sand on the wooden deck. And they had a brick, what they called a ‘holey stone,’ and they put that brick down there, and it had a hole in the middle of it, and you had something like a broom handle to push it back and forth. With the grain of the wood, of course.”

  “Was that very hard work?”

  “You didn’t have to press too hard. The weight of the brick would do the job. You would just have to push it back and forth.”

  “How long did it take you to clean up after you got a load of coal?”

  “Oh, I’d say a couple of days, that’s all.” You can see why the new class of battleships were so popular with seamen. It wasn’t so easy for the crew to get clean, either; on a ship that was at sea for weeks, even months, at a time, fresh water was a precious commodity. Lloyd Brown said that he and the other seamen were issued only about a quart of it every day at the canteen. In the shower, he explained, “usually you had enough fresh water to kind of get yourself soapy, and then you take a shower with seawater.” And, he added, “you had to shave and brush your teeth”—also with fresh water. There wasn’t much left over to actually drink. Fortunately, there was one fountain, located in the center of the ship, where anyone could go at any time and line up to drink their fill; it was known as the scuttlebutt. “You go to the scuttlebutt to get your drinking water. And gossip. Used to call it ‘scuttlebutt news.’”

  Hence the expression.

  When he wasn’t shoveling coal or scrubbing away coal dust, Seaman Second Class Brown was assigned to a gun crew. He was a loader. “You put the shell in, and then a bag of powder, and then close the breech and be ready to pull the trigger.”

  “How big was the shell?”

  “It was about the size of a champagne bottle. Three inches in diameter.”

  “Did you ever actually have to fire the gun at sea?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, “we fired the gun.” And then, he added, almost casually: “We shot a hole through another ship, one of our own ships, by accident.”

  “Was that the gun you loaded?” I asked him.

  “I believe it was,” he replied.

  “Where did that happen?”

  “In the ocean there.”

  The rest of the family laughed. Lloyd didn’t seem to mind.

  “What were you supposed to be shooting at?” I asked.

  “Germans,” Nancy declared.

  “Well,” Lloyd answered, “we were supposed to be shooting at a submarine.”

  “Was there actually a submarine there?” I asked.

  “There must have been not,” Nancy offered.

  “No,” Lloyd said, “it turned out to be it was not a submarine, no.” He said it was “a floating piece of framework, a discarded carton or something.” U-boats were known to camouflage their periscopes by covering them with wooden crates, in the hopes that sailors would think they were just jetsam.

  “Do you remember which ship it was that got hit?”

  “No, I don’t remember.”

  “Did it do a lot of damage?”

  He considered for a moment. “No,” he said.

  “I guess they didn’t shoot back at you, huh?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, and laughed. Most days, he explained, he did a four-hour tour on lookout up in the crow’s nest. He described the system they had for splitting up the horizon into sectors; I asked him what he would do if he spotted something suspicious. “Well,” he said, “I’d call my officer over the tube, call my boss, whoever he was—the watchtower, I guess it was—tell him what I saw, and let him issue out the orders that would be suitable for it.” On that particular day, he recalled, “I spotted what I thought was a submarine. It turned out to be a floating carton or something.”

  Wait a minute. “And then you called that down?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “And that’s when they fired and hit the other ship?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh!” I said. “So you were the beginning of that?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and everyone laughed, including him.

  “Did you get in any trouble for that?” I asked him.

  “No,” he told me. “I gave them my—I described what
I saw and left them to follow their own judgment.”

  And that was about as much excitement as he saw during the war, at least at sea. Ashore, especially in New York, he remembered, “we’d go chase girls together, things like that.”

  “Did you have any luck?” I asked him.

  “Yeah,” he said, his smile giving way to a laugh.

  “Did they like the uniform?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “That’s why he joined,” Nancy said.

  “Yeah,” her father added, “during the war we were very popular.”

  After the war he returned to Missouri, but soon found it bored him; a couple of years later, he enlisted in the Navy again. This time, he let them send him to music school—“It was better than scrubbing decks,” he explained. He learned the cello, and was assigned to the Seattle, Admiral Robert Coontz’s flagship, where he played in the admiral’s orchestra. “We played for his parties,” he recalled, “during his dinner hour.” One of the perks, he said, was that “they serve you the same food they’d serve the admiral.”

  He also got to travel wherever the admiral went—Hawaii, Panama, Australia, New Zealand. It was a nice assignment. In 1925, after four years on the Seattle, he decided to leave the Navy for good; “my time was up, I guess,” he explained. He moved to Washington, D.C., and got work as a fireman at Engine Company 16, a job that saw him through the Depression. After sixteen years there, he moved on to serve as a fireman at the city’s National Airport, retiring in 1952.

  He said he enjoyed all of the phases of his life a great deal, but I have reason to believe that his time on the New Hampshire was special to him. I know for a fact that it left a mark on him—literally. At one point, he rolled up his right sleeve and showed me, on the inside of his forearm, a large tattoo; it was faded and had blurred quite a bit, but still clear enough to read: USS NEW HAMPSHIRE.

  It was eighty-six years old.

  And that leaves Ernest Pusey. I first learned about him from an article in a Florida newspaper that didn’t even mention his service. It was, rather, about how he was General Motors’ oldest living pensioner. He was 109, and had been retired for forty-six years at that point. He had only worked at GM for thirty-two years. It pays to live a very long life.

  He was living alone in a nice double-wide mobile home in Bradenton, Florida, when I met him; on the day I visited—June 15, 2004—it was so steamy outside that when I walked into his air-conditioned home, the lens on my video camera fogged up.

  As much as any veteran I met—maybe as much as any person I’ve met—Ernie Pusey just looked like a nice guy. He wore big glasses, had a big nose and big ears and big sprouts of pure white hair atop his big, oval head, but mostly his face was defined by a big, open-mouthed smile, which never really left it during the two hours I interviewed him, nor during the lunch he and his caregiver, Rose, insisted on treating me to after we had finished. His happiness would seem to favor the nature side of the old nature versus nurture debate, because his early life hadn’t been an easy one. He’d been born in Washington, D.C., on May 5, 1895; his father, already sick with tuberculosis, died just five years later. Ernie and his sister, Helen, were sent to live with their grandfather on N Street in Georgetown, but at some point his mother, who went to work for the telephone company, became afraid that her son would develop the consumption that had killed his father, so she sent him to live with two ladies—an elderly dowager and her unmarried middle-aged daughter—in Virginia. The mother, he remembered, “was bedridden, and they had to get her up and put her in a wheelchair every day. And her daughter taught school, and I went to the little school down the road.” He spent years there—eight or nine, or maybe twelve, depending upon when you asked him about it—traveling back and forth to Washington on a side-wheeler steamboat.

  The Washington of Ernie Pusey’s childhood, at least the way he recalled it, sounded downright pastoral. The streets, he said, were still lit by gas lamps, “and they’d go around and light them every night.” His grandfather Samuel Pusey had been a bookkeeper at a flour mill on the Potomac; Ernie would often visit, sometimes playing in a nearby swimming hole—really—and sometimes making the rounds with his grandfather. “He’d go around to the different companies and see what they needed of any kind of cookies, or what kind of flour they’d want. And he had a horse and buggy, and he’d take a nap every afternoon when he was on the route—he’d tie the horse and buggy across the street and take a nap.”

  They shared their backyard with a goat. Ernie also lived, some of the time, with his other grandparents, the Koeths, on A Street in Capitol Hill. He remembered that grandfather, Theodore Koeth, as being retired; in the 1900 census, Theodore Koeth is listed as a painter. “Their house there was a row house,” he told me, “and all the sheds in the back were together. And they didn’t want to let me out on the street because I’d run away a lot of times, so they’d put me in the backyard, and I’d get up there on the roof of those row houses, and I’d go down the street and see what everybody was doing. Sometimes they’d be having ice cream or something, I might get some.” He laughed. “And then when I got home, I’d get a spanking, every time.” It was worth it, he said.

  Washington offered interesting employment opportunities for a boy. “I was delivering telegrams when I was big enough, on a bike, to the embassies,” he told me. “I must have been eight or nine years old.” He also worked at Union Station. “I had a job of putting the tags for where each [bag] was going. Put [passengers] on the cars, so they know what car to get on. And they had steam engines then. Sometimes they’d have a hard time getting out of there; they’d put sand on the track.” He said he saw the president—the first President Roosevelt—at the station many times. “They’d be on a special train,” he explained. “He’d leave out of Washington and go to some other city.” Later, he got a job as an oiler on a side-wheeler. The skipper often let him pilot it, he said.

  And then, when he was twenty-one, he enlisted in the Navy. Or maybe he was twenty-two; America entered the war a month before his twenty-second birthday. “Why did you join the Navy?” I asked him.

  “I had an uncle,” he replied, “and he said, ‘Join the Navy and you won’t be in the trenches.’” That was an honest answer.

  They assigned him to the USS Wyoming, where he served as a fireman, firing the ship’s engines. “Two engines were fired with coal, and one engine was fired with oil,” he explained. He worked shoveling coal into one of the engines—four hours on, four off, alongside eight or ten other men. It was very hot work. He wanted to put in for another job—“either oiler or water tender, something like that”—but never did.

  The Wyoming was the lead ship in something called Battleship Division 9, a cluster of five Dreadnought-class battleships under the command of Admiral Hugh Rodman that the United States Navy essentially loaned to the British Grand Fleet for the duration of the war. They almost didn’t make it; the weather was so bad during the transatlantic crossing that winds ripped the topmasts off all the ships, and one, the New York, nearly foundered. “All the way over, it was so rough, nobody was allowed topside,” Ernie Pusey recalled eighty-seven years later. “And the destroyers were going along . . . as rough as it was, I think they only saw one German submarine.” When that happened, he said, the destroyers “all rushed over there to drop the depth charges.”

  “Did they get it?” I asked.

  “Who knows?” he said.

  They finally made it to Scapa Flow, a stretch of water amid the Orkney Islands, off the northern tip of Scotland, where they performed a series of maneuvers and exercises in relative safety. “It was fixed so the submarines couldn’t come up in there,” Ernie explained. “A couple of times we saw a submarine and the small ships would go right after them and drop depth charges.”

  “Did you yourself ever see one?” I asked him.

  “Yeah,” he said, “we saw one or two.”

  “What did they look like?”

  “Well, they were just, had the s
norkel out of the water, and of course, they weren’t going to be up above, with the ships coming along, because they had six-inch guns they could fire out both sides.”

  “The battleship had six-inch guns?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did they ever fire them?”

  “No, they’d only fire them in practice. And one time,” he said, “they had twelve-inch guns, and they fired them in practice, and I remember we were looking out of the porthole, and thought they were going to fire the one up on the bow, and they fired the one right where we were looking out the porthole. My cap flew off the porthole. It deafened me.” Things were pretty tense onboard the Wyoming. “Some of the men on there were so afraid of the submarines that they had to discharge them. . . . They just went all to pieces.”

  Since the Wyoming was frequently confined to port during its time at Scapa Flow, its seamen enjoyed a good bit of leave—“maybe four or five hours” at a time. “One time I went out,” Mr. Pusey told me, “and a fellow says, ‘Oh, I’m going so and so further,’ so he went to Glasgow, and I went along. We met a couple of girls there, and I should’ve taken the train back that evening and I missed the train, and when I got back on ship, I didn’t get any leave for six months.”

  The battleships of Division 9 left Scapa Flow on several occasions to escort critical supply convoys to and from Norway. It was hoped, by the fleet’s high command, that the German fleet might attempt to intercept the convoy, thus giving the Allies an opportunity to destroy it once and for all; but that never happened. Instead, the ships sailed for the North Sea, where they performed still more exercises and maneuvers. According to its last surviving crew member, the men of the Wyoming spent most of their time there “waiting for the Germans to come out.” He added, a bit ruefully: “They never came out.”

  Not until after the armistice was signed, anyway. On November 21, 1918, the British Grand Fleet, including US Battleship Division 9, collected in the North Sea, where they—370 ships carrying ninety thousand seamen—formed two columns, through which passed the entire German fleet, en route to surrender. Admiral David Beatty, commander of the Grand Fleet, likened the procession to “sheep being herded by dogs to their folds.” Admiral Rodman later wrote: “It was hard to realize that the ships which we had expected and hoped to engage, would all be given up without a struggle or fleet action, and surrender without a fight.” In the end, the German fleet was sunk—by the Germans themselves. “They opened up valves down below,” Mr. Pusey explained. “They sunk every one of them right there, in Scapa Flow. They’re still there now.”