In today’s slang, he lived large. He was called Sid by his family and Slew by his fellow officers, for reasons I never learned. He liked to take his shoes off when he worked and walk around the office in his stocking feet. He smoked, swore, drank, and gambled at every opportunity he had. His profile in the 1943 Current Biography described him as “one of the Navy’s best plain and fancy cussers.”
Rear Admiral Howard Kuehl served on my grandfather’s staff as a young lieutenant during the campaign for the Solomon Islands, when my grandfather commanded all land-based aircraft in the South Pacific. In an article he wrote about his wartime experiences, he affectionately recounted an example of his boss’s colorful idiosyncrasies.
In addition to his other duties, Kuehl served as the wine mess treasurer, an assignment that obliged him to maintain a meager inventory of liquor for the officers’ recreational use and to obtain from my grandfather and his staff officers adequate funds for that purpose. When an officer received transfer orders, he was entitled to a refund of his wine mess share. In September 1942, after my grandfather had received orders reassigning him to Washington, Kuehl visited him on the afternoon before his scheduled departure. Dutifully attempting to return my grandfather’s share of the kitty, he was momentarily taken aback when my grandfather ordered that it be returned “in kind.” Summoning considerable courage, Kuehl informed his boss that because liquid spirits were a precious commodity aboard ship it was an unofficial but scrupulously observed custom that an officer returning to the States would not take any with him. Assuming no further admonishment was necessary, Kuehl then handed over to my disgruntled grandfather the money owed to him.
The next morning, my grandfather’s staff lined up at the gangway to shake his hand and bid him an affectionate farewell. When he reached his intrepid wine mess treasurer, he shot him a look of affected displeasure and said, “Kuehl, goddammit, you’re a crook.”
My mother often recounts the occasions when her father-in-law would order her to accompany him on a long night of carousing in his favorite gambling den of the moment. He seemed to have one in every place he was stationed. He also managed to spend considerable time at horse tracks, where his enthusiasm for the sport was evident in the sums of money he spent to make it interesting. As commanding officer of the aircraft carrier USS Ranger, he would order his yeoman into the first boat headed ashore whenever the Ranger came into home port, tasking him with the urgent business of placing his bets with the local bookie.
A young ensign, William Smedberg, fresh from the Naval Academy, reported for duty to the USS New Mexico, where my grandfather was serving as executive officer. An hour after he arrived he was summoned to my grandfather’s cabin. Apparently, the ship’s home port hosted a rowing regatta among the officers and enlisted men of the various ships stationed there, and my grandfather, being a sporting man who enjoyed a good wager, had taken a keen interest in the event. He had examined Ensign Smedberg’s record at the Academy and discovered he had been coxswain on an Academy crew. Smedberg recounted their exchange:
“Young man, I understand that you were a coxswain at the Naval Academy?”
“Yes, sir, I was coxswain of the hundred-and-fifty-pound crew.”
“Well, that’s good, because you’re going to be coxswain now of the officers’ crew and the enlisted crew. You’re to take them both out every morning we’re in port at five o’clock. And you’re to win both those races.”
They won both races, making my grandfather a happy and somewhat more prosperous man. (Ensign Smedberg would eventually reach flag rank, serve as Superintendent of the Naval Academy when I was a midshipman there, and retire a vice admiral.)
My grandmother once informed my grandfather of a new treatment for ulcers she had just read about in a magazine. Pounding his fist on a table, he shouted, “Not one penny of my money for doctors. I’m spending it all on riotous living.” My grandmother was reported to have given him an adequate allowance for that purpose while retaining unchallenged control over the rest of the family’s finances.
While serving as a pallbearer for one of his Naval Academy classmates on a cold, rainy day at Arlington National Cemetery, my grandfather listened to a young officer suggest that he button up his raincoat to protect himself from the elements. The old man, raincoat flapping in the wind, looked at his solicitous subordinate and said, “You don’t think I got where I am by taking care of my health, do you?”
My mother, who was enchanted by him, keeps in her living room a large oil portrait of the admiral, distinguished and starched in his navy whites. In reality he was a disheveled-looking man with a set of false teeth so ill-fitting that they made a constant clicking noise when he moved his jaw and caused him to whistle when he spoke.
Admiral Halsey and he were such good friends that even in the strain of war, when my grandfather was Halsey’s subordinate, theirs was a relaxed and open relationship marked by mutual respect and candor. They delighted in ribbing each other mercilessly and playing practical jokes on each other. On the evening before a trip to Guadalcanal together, my grandfather had spent the night in Halsey’s quarters. He had absentmindedly left his teeth sitting on a bureau in Halsey’s bathroom. Halsey saw the teeth sitting there and, delighted by an opportunity to discomfit his old friend, slipped them into his shirt pocket. One of my grandfather’s aides recalled the scene that followed as the party was departing for Guadalcanal, my grandfather frantically searching for his missing teeth while Halsey badgered him to hurry up.
“Can’t go, I can’t go. I’ve lost my teeth,” he implored. To which the much-amused Halsey responded, “How do you expect to run naval aviation if you can’t take care of your own teeth?”
After another fruitless search, and a few more minutes of Halsey poking fun at him, and my grandfather hurling insults right back, my grandfather resigned himself to going to Guadalcanal toothless. At the plane, a grinning Halsey handed the teeth back to him, and caught, I am sure, a torrent of abuse from my grandfather.
When in combat, he dispensed with all Navy regulations governing the attire of a flag officer. Disheveled, stooped, weighing only 140 pounds, and looking many years older than his age, he was, nevertheless, unmistakably Navy. Sailors who served under him called him, behind his back but affectionately, “Popeye the sailor man.” He wore a ratty, crushed green cap with its frame removed from the crown and an officer’s insignia sewn onto the visor. Halsey once described it as “unique in naval costume.” Like most sailors, my grandfather was a superstitious man, and he treasured his “combat cap” as a good luck talisman. So did everyone else on his flagship, fearing that any misfortune that befell the old man’s hat was a sign of approaching calamity. Whenever the wind blew the hat from its perch, men would dive to the deck and frantically scramble for it lest it be blown overboard. My grandfather, who was aware of the crew’s shared regard for the supernatural powers of his unorthodox headgear, watched in amused silence and grinned broadly when a relieved sailor handed it back to him.
The cap was a gift from the wife of a naval aviator. My grandfather was much admired by the aviators under his command and by their families, who knew how deeply he grieved over the loss of his pilots. I have heard from colleagues of my grandfather that he would cry routinely when he received casualty reports. “Whenever a pilot was lost,” John Thach said of him, “it was not just a sad thing, but it seemed like a personal loss to him and it took a lot out of him.” He loved life, and lived his as fully as anyone could. It is easy to understand how greatly it must have pained him to see any man, especially someone under his command, lose his life prematurely.