Playing Fair and Being Kind

Once in a great while I will reflect on people from my past. Some I have written about. This is one of those stories that happened in a few hours and ended there. Unless you want to talk about life-long happy memories of one person. This brief encounter lasted me a lifetime. Here it is.

I MADE A FRIEND FIFTY YEARS AGO

and I miss him

Tailing in on the last post about shipyards and shipyard complexities and shipyard workers, specifically shipfitters. All the trades in a shipyard have a two-digit shop number designation. That number is printed large on each side of their hard hat. Each shop’s hard hats are painted unique colors so that a mechanic of that specific shop can be seen at a distance, to wit, if I am looking for an outside machinist on a dock or ship I will keep my eye peeled for a blue helmet with the number 38 in black on the sides. Navy officers like me wore white hard hats with the Navy emblem and “Ship Superintendent” stencilled across the front. We also wore khaki work uniforms. We were easy to spot.

In the case of waterfront workers in the welding group I recall there are three trades, each with different colored hard hats and numbers. The shipfitters wore pale yellow helmets with the number 11, pipefitters wore brown helmets with 51, and the welders wore pale blue/green with the number 26. My job included looking for specific shop tradesmen to throw into a delayed or late job to facilitate the shipyard schedule of work completion. It was a constant. The scientific approach used by the schedulers in the Planning Department left much to be desired. It was burdened with poor planning and scheduling regardless of the simplicity of the task.

I don’t want to get into any technical areas of planning, etc. Simply, I was at work and cruising the waterfront on a sort of informal inspection walk. That was part of my job as well. By the way, I was a ship superintendent. I was a Navy officer and those of us working in the Production Department were tasked with being the go-between for the U.S. Navy ship’s crews and Charleston Naval Ship Yard. I was assigned to oversee the overhaul/repairs of one or two of the ships that were in the yard for work. My specialty was non-nuclear submarines.

This particular evening it was my turn in the barrel to be the Industrial Watch Officer which came up about twice a month. As IWO I made several tours of the waterfront checking on barges and ships that were tied up alongside the piers. Lines checked, waterlines checked, safety items checked. It was an involved tour that didn’t leave a lot of time to play. We had to also go to the south end of the shipyard to the galvanizing shop to make sure the heaters in the huge vat of melted zinc were energized and that the zinc was in a liquid state. That was a creepy place. We all were nervous in that shop. Imaginations run amok when one stands alongside a vat of hot zinc. The total tour took an hour to complete.

I was just south of dry dock number 2 when I noticed a yard worker standing next to a dumpster, the type of dumpster that was tall with doors on the sides. He was standing next to an open door with a large hardcover book in his hands. He held the book open and was reading. I saw he was a welder by the hardhat. Even without the hat I could tell by his clothing and tool bag. He wore leather sleeves and his hat was on backwards. As I got closer, I saw he was engrossed in the book and he didn’t see me until I was just about on top of him. His glance was friendly and confident and I felt a fondness immediately.

He was a black man probably five or six years older than I. In 1969 Charleston, South Carolina, http://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/charleston-hospital-workers-strike/,where some towns still held separate washrooms and laundromats for white and black people this encounter was special. My approach didn’t seem to give him any concern and my demeanor indicated that I was relaxed and open. We met like this close to midnight in the middle of the shipyard. Two men interrupted at work about to share an encounter.

“Whatcha got?”, I asked.

His voice was gentle, deep, musical.

“Look at this…”, he said holding the open book toward me. “Look at all this.” He gestured with his head toward the open dumpster door.

I stepped closer and looked past him into the door. There were dozens of books strewn inside the dumpster. I turned to him and saw he was holding a volume of an encyclopedia set. He continued to hold the book with care and we both gazed inside the dumpster each of us commenting on the incongruous picture before us. Pristine books chucked inside a dumpster! I reached for a book and saw it was nearly new, hardly used. It was a rare find and right away I figured how the books got here. A submarine crew had taken the opportunity to order a new set of encyclopedias and simply discarded the old set into a convenient dumpster. The cold-war nuclear submarine Navy was flush with Congressional funding; priorities had been established. Anything goes. No questions asked. This set of books was hardly a few years old and was being swapped for an up-to-date set. Money be damned.

I formed a simple plan. Being a Navy officer afforded me privilege to drive my personal vehicle in and out of the security gate with barely a notice by the guards on duty. My car had a special windshield sticker indicating I was a Ship Superintendent. I was never delayed at the gate.

“Would you like to have this set of books?”, I asked. The question was unnecessary but needed to be voiced.

His look was precious. We exchanged a lifetime of knowledge in that brief, quiet space.

“Oh, yes…I would!”, he crooned deeply. I told him I would go get my car and drive back so we could put all of the books in the trunk. We agreed I would take them to his house the next day. He wrote his address on a page of my wheel-book. He lived withing a few miles of my house in Ladson. He lived in Lincolnville.

We both went to work retrieving the books and checking them over. We stacked them in order to make sure the set was complete. Satisfied, he and I stood awkwardly for a moment.

“I’ll tell you what”, I said. “You wait right here. If anyone asks you what is up you tell them that the Industrial Watch Officer told you to stay here with these books and that I’ll be right back.”

He caught on and nodded in agreement. We’d play our roles to pull off this caper. I liked this guy. This evening had become exciting. I was back in under fifteen minutes. We loaded the books carefully into the trunk of my old ’61 Ford., made sure of our plan for the next day and I drove off. He went along to his job.

Everything went without a hitch. I delivered the books to the man’s house in Lincolnville before noon the next day. Lincolnville is a community of black people; the town had been established by seven black men in the middle of the nineteenth century. The population at the time of this account was barely more than five hundred people. It was the first time I’d driven that road. I was a little cautious. These years in South Carolina and perhaps all of the South were tense. Nearly all of my co-workers in the shipyard were white and the racism was overt. Jim Crow was very much in force.

http://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/charleston-hospital-workers-strike/

I drove to the man’s house. It was easy to find. Lincolnville was only a few streets then and the address was only one block off the main street. The man met me at the door and we shared the task of unloading the old Ford. Within a few minutes all of the books were stacked on the floor of his front room. We exchanged a few polite words and then it was time to go. The encounter seemed a little awkward and with a sense of relief I exited and drove back home.

We never met again. Never saw each other at the yard nor did we seek each other out. I returned to my life of overwork and underappreciated struggle with ship overhauls and poorly planned work lists and under scheduled time frames. Within a year I was gone to a sea-going ship far from the dust and grit of the shipyard.

Over these past nearly fifty years I’ve thought about the man and that evening caper. It was a fond memory and I began to seek similar friendships. I never came as close to that feeling though of when he and I exchanged glances in the few minutes we had by a dumpster containing an encyclopedia. I never did remember his name nor did I ever try to find him again. Until yesterday. I found the Lincolnville town hall telephone number online. I was nervous. Disappointment. A phone call and quick conversation with a file clerk didn’t accomplish what I’d hoped it would. The town is much larger and it’s been half a century. I am almost eighty years old, not thirty.

The file clerk became more helpful the more I tried to give her information about the man. She began to sense my fear of failure in keeping him close. She could hear my cry of desperation to once more hear his musical voice. I knew she felt the tears in my heart and the ache in my throat. She came up with a name of a man who had died just last fall. His name was Fred Noble. It seemed to fit. Right? He was the only man in town who would have fit my description. I hope his name was Fred Noble. It fits.

G. M. Goodwin
29 March 2018

Gentle George
4 August 2020