Given the challenge that our colorless circumstances posed to our imaginations, however, my fellow officers and I expended considerable energy devising entertainments to make time pass quickly and pleasantly. We organized a number of legendary bacchanals that abide, fondly, in the memory of many middle-aged, retired, and nearly retired Navy and Marine officers under the name of the legendary Key Fess Yacht Club.
Early in my time at McCain Field, a base beautification project had been launched by our well-intentioned commanding officer, at the behest of his wife and the wives of other senior officers. The plan to improve our plain surroundings included the construction of several man-made lakes. Bulldozers dug large holes in the base’s clay soil, which stood empty until enough rainfall filled them with water to give them, it was hoped, a natural appearance. Sadly, they looked more like swamps than lakes, and they stank like a swamp as well.
One particularly unattractive and malodorous lagoon, called Lake Helen in honor of the CO’s wife, lay just off the back of the BOQ, a prospect most of us regarded with bemusement as we walked along the outdoor corridors along which the doors to our rooms were located. Living among us at the time was a Marine captain who worked in an administrative capacity at the base. He was a man with a great thirst, which he attempted to slake virtually around the clock. He set up a bar on a card table in his room, and day and night we would hear him beckon any passerby, from young ensigns to room stewards, into his quarters for “a drink before din-din.”
Late in the evening, we would often find him outside his room, leaning precariously on the balcony railing, cursing the eyesore that was Lake Helen. He had taken an intense dislike to the offending lagoon and would rage at it profanely for hours. Refusing to acknowledge its given name, he called it Lake Fester. Planted in the middle of the lake was a small island, nothing more than a little mound of dirt with a few spindly trees perched there pathetically. Our hard-drinking Marine neighbor called it Key Fess. And soon most of the residents of the BOQ referred derisively to the lake and its ridiculous island by those names.
One evening, several of us were bemoaning the sorry condition of our social life when someone came up with the brilliant idea of forming the Key Fess Yacht Club. The next weekend, attired in yachting dress of blue jackets and white trousers, we commissioned the club. We had strung lights on the trees of Key Fess and draped banners and flags over the BOQ’s railings. We elected the club’s officers, choosing Lake Fester’s chief critic, the Marine captain, as the club’s first commodore. I was elected vice commodore. We christened an old aluminum dinghy the Fighting Lady, and as “Victory at Sea” blasted over loudspeakers, we launched her ceremoniously on her maiden voyage to Key Fess, with the new commodore standing comically amidships, hand tucked inside his jacket like Washington crossing the Delaware.
Over the next several months, the weekend revels of the Key Fess Yacht Club became famous in Meridian and throughout the world of naval aviation. Huge throngs of people could now be found every Saturday night on the shores of Lake Fester, throwing themselves wholeheartedly into the evening’s festivities. We held a toga party in the officers’ club one night, replacing all its furniture with the mattresses from our rooms, which I still remember as one of the most exhausting experiences of my life. We often paid bands to come in from Memphis and entertain us.
Some of the club’s members dated local girls, who spread the word in sleepy Meridian about our riotous activities, and soon a fair share of the town’s single women were regular guests at our parties. One Sunday morning, BOQ residents were awakened by cries of help coming from Key Fess. Someone had rowed a few young ladies out to Key Fess the night before and stranded them there. We rowed the Fighting Lady out to rescue them. Despite their weariness, they still managed to give full vent to their anger, complaining bitterly about the mosquito bites that covered them.
Aviators from both east and west coasts began showing up for the fun. An admiral even flew in from Pensacola one Saturday to see for himself what all the fuss was about. Eventually, our commodore received orders to transfer to another base. I was elected the new commodore. Aviators flew in from everywhere to attend the huge party celebrating the change of command. We had put Naval Air Station, Meridian, on the Navy’s map.
Despite the demands of my office as commodore of the Key Fess Yacht Club, I managed to devote at least as much energy to my job as I did to my extracurricular activities. Correspondingly, my reputation in the Navy improved. Anticipating my forthcoming tour in Vietnam, and confident that I could perform credibly in combat, I had begun to believe that I would someday have command of a carrier or squadron. I finally felt that I had settled into the family business and was on my way to a successful career as a naval officer.
I was also in the middle of a serious romance with Carol Shepp of Philadelphia, a relationship that added to my creeping sense that I might have been put on earth for some other purpose than my own constant amusement.
I had known and admired Carol since Academy days, when she was engaged to one of my classmates. She was a divorced mother of two young sons when we renewed our acquaintance shortly before I left for Meridian. She was attractive, clever, and kind, and I was instantly attracted to her, and delighted to discover that she was attracted to me.
Carol would occasionally visit me at Meridian and good-naturedly join in the weekend’s festivities. But most weekends during our brief courtship, I abjured the social activities at Meridian, preferring Carol’s company to the usual revelry at the Key Fess Yacht Club. On Friday afternoons, I would take a student pilot on a four-hour training flight to Philadelphia, refueling at Norfolk on the way. I would arrive at seven or eight o’clock in the evening. Carol would be waiting at the airfield to pick me up, and we would go out to dinner.
Connie Bookbinder, whose family owned Bookbinder’s Restaurant, had been Carol’s college roommate, so every evening we dined there on lobster and drank with friends. On Saturdays we would go to a football game at Memorial Stadium or a college basketball game at the Pallestra. We would enjoy some other entertainment on Sunday before I flew back to Meridian on Sunday night.
We had been dating for less than a year when I realized I wanted to marry Carol. The carefree life of an unattached naval aviator no longer held the allure for me that it once had. Nor had I ever been as happy in a relationship as I was now. I was elated when Carol instantly consented to my proposal.
We married on July 3, 1965. My marriage required that I relinquish my office as commodore of the yacht club, which I did without regret. The party held to celebrate my retirement was a memorable one.
Carol’s two sons, Doug and Andy, were great kids, and I quickly formed a strong affection for them. I adopted them a year after our marriage, and I have been a proud father ever since. A few months later, Carol gave birth to our beautiful daughter, Sidney.
That December, I flew to Philadelphia to join my parents at the Army-Navy football game. My mother had brought Christmas presents for Carol and the kids, and I stowed them in the baggage compartment of my airplane on the return flight to Meridian. Somewhere between the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Norfolk, Virginia, as I was preparing to come in to refuel, my engine flamed out, and I had to eject at a thousand feet. The Christmas gifts were lost with my airplane.
This latest unexpected glimpse of mortality added even greater urgency to my recent existential inquiries and made me all the more anxious to get to Vietnam before some new unforeseen accident prevented me from ever taking my turn in war.