Alex Haley was a shoe-shine boy in the U. S. Coast Guard until it was discovered that he could write. Haley was born 11 August 1921 in Ithaca, New York, but he grew up in Tennessee. He always spoke proudly of his father and the incredible obstacles of racism he had overcome. On May 24, 1939 Haley began his 20-year service with the Coast Guard. He enlisted as a Seaman and then became a third class Petty Officer in the rate of Mess Attendant, one of the few enlisted designators open to African Americans and Philipinos at that time. It was during his service in the Pacific theater of operations that Haley taught himself the craft of writing stories. He talked of how the greatest enemy he and his crew faced during their long sea voyages wasn't the Japanese but boredom. He collected many rejection slips over an eight-year period before his first story was bought.
After World War II, Haley was able to petition the Coast Guard to allow him to transfer into the field of journalism, and by 1949 he had become a First Class Petty Officer in the rate of Journalist. He later advanced to the rank of Chief Petty Officer and held this grade until his retirement from the Coast Guard in 1959 when he became a Senior Editor for Reader's Digest. He is best known for The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which he ghostwrote, and his book Roots: The Saga of an American Family. He died 10 February 1992.
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The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Met
(The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Met by Alex Haley was originally published in the March 1961 issue of Reader’s Digest.)
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The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Met (March 1961)
Alex Haley is widely known as the author of Roots: The Saga of an American Family,
the 1976 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that traced his family’s roots
back to his African ancestors. Before this novel and its television
miniseries made him famous, Haley was best known for The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which had originated with an interview Haley conducted while he was writing for Playboy. Prior to that, Haley had been a writer for Reader’s Digest.
This was Haley’s second career, however. In 1959 he had retired as a
chief petty officer after twenty years of service in the U.S. Coast
Guard.
Haley had enlisted in
1939, after a couple of years of college. He went through World War II
on Coast Guard cutters and other ships as a steward’s mate. But Haley
also attempted to write for publication in slack hours. After years of
effort, he began to have some success. One day, while stationed in the
Third Coast Guard District in New York long after the war, Haley was
serving coffee to Admiral, "Iceberg" Smith, an officer exceedingly proud
of his literary taste. Smith pointed out an article lying open before
him as a captivating piece, one that had been written by "some colored
fellow." Haley hesitated, then replied, "Yes, sir, I wrote it." At a
conference of admirals in Washington a few months later, the Coast Guard
established a rating of journalist, and Haley became a journalist first
class.
In this 1961 article,
Haley recounts the origin of his writing career—his penning love letters
for his shipmates while serving on the USS Murzim, a Navy ship
manned by Coast Guard personnel. Haley pays special tribute in this
piece to an illiterate first class steward’s mate under whom he had
served, a man who always attempted to do his best for his fellow black
servicemen (including Haley) in whatever way he could.
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Haley’s recollection
not only vividly portrays the "Unforgettable Character" who is its main
subject, but it also glances at the unfortunate situation of black
sailors of the era. On the other hand, one notices here the informal
power that a leading petty officer often wielded—especially a leading
petty officer like this one, who had the ear of the ship’s captain.
The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Met By Alex Haley
In our quarters on the USS Murzim,
I glimpsed on the steward’s bunk an incomplete letter to his wife, and
saw my name: “Haley he the steward second-class, suposed to be my
asistant. Ben to colege and can tiperite but schur is stoopid. Can’t
boil water.”
This was World War II, and the Murzim
was a Coast Guard cargo-ammunition ship newly arrived in the South
Pacific. Scotty, with twenty-five years’ service, had been a hostile old
sea dog from the day I entered his galley. A huge, jowled Negro, his
sail-like apron bulging over his washtub belly, he would glare down at
me sourly: “Us bein’ the same race ain’t gon’ get you by. Damn civilians
done ruint the service!”
Scotty was the darling
of the captain, who loved old-timers. He lumbered about the ship,
poking into everyone’s business, and the young boots trailed in his wake
with open-mouthed awe and admiration. The Seafarer, the ship’s
mimeographed newspaper, ran such Scotty quotes as, “I wrung more
seawater out of my socks than you ever sailed over.”
My ambition was to be a
writer. Nights, off duty, I typed stories in the officers’ wardroom
pantry. Scotty, after haranguing me all day, was irresistibly lured to
watch me “tiperite.” I’d make the portable rattle, certain it angered
him that a subordinate had a skill he hadn’t. I didn’t know Scotty.
One night his deep
voice interrupted me. “Looker here, boy, you ever seen the Cap’n talk
letters to his yeoman?” I replied that the yeoman took shorthand. “Don’t
need all that chicken-scratchin’!” Scotty exclaimed. “Fast as you run
that thing, you might make a yeoman. I’ll help you practice, I’ll talk
you some letters.” The idea of this ungrammatical clown hijacking my
off-time to dictate to me was hilarious, and I laughed in his face. “You
real wise, ain’t you?” he rasped. “Opportunity ain’t every night!”
The next morning a messboy shook me awake. “Man, Scotty wants you on the double!” I hurried to the galley. “I meant on the double!” Scotty roared. “This ain’t no cruise ship!” He lobbed a big steel pot into midair. “Scour that!”
He flung a sweat-popping succession of more pots and abusive orders. I
shined steam kettles, scrubbed garbage cans and bulkheads. Finally I
realized that I could revolt—and land in the brig—or I could type
Scotty’s letters. “You got the message?” he asked. Choked with rage, I
could only nod. “You a smart boy.” Derisive laughter was in his eyes.
“Take off—see you tonight!”
After 8 p.m.
muster, Scotty, scowling around a new cigar, followed me to the pantry.
Angrily I zipped paper into the typewriter as he overflowed an armchair
he had swiped from the wardroom.
“This here letter’s to Pop Robinson. He’s a first-class cook on the Pamlico.”
I smacked out the heading, and Scotty smiled approvingly. “Hello—it is a
long time since we was in touch. . . .” I typed that. I typed one
garbled, ungrammatical cliché after another for half a page. Abruptly
Scotty ended: “Forever always your ex-shipmate.” I added, in caps,
“PERCIVAL L. SCOTT, STEWARD FIRST-CLASS, USCG,” and thrust the page and
my fountain pen at Scotty. He signed as though it were the Emancipation
Proclamation.
In the galley next morning, Scotty assembled the five messboys. “You better wish you
had some brains! Don’t never forget, Haley give orders, it’s the same
as me!” All morning he excluded me from any real work. After dinner he
growled, “Chow’s in the stove. See you tonight.” Again, I got the
message. That night I typed half-pages to three former shipmates of his.
After a week of
fifteen stilted letters, Scotty began to relax. Fat elbows on aproned
knees, jowled chin in hands, he paced his sentences to the moving
typewriter at about thirty words a minute, and his letters lengthened
with “good old days” reminiscings: “Never will forget the time I hired
that civilian to come busting in that woman’s place and scared you half
to death.” “Remember when I raffled champagne and let you win and we
drunk it?” The stories portrayed a hard-drinking, hard-loving Scotty,
always exploiting the gullible.
As the Murzim
shuttled between islands, Scotty happily showed me replies to his
letters. The laborious scrawlings expressed joy at hearing from him and
incredulity that he had learned to type. Meanwhile, U.S. magazine
editors rejected my love stories. “You help me with my mail,” Scotty
gruffed, “maybe I can help you with them stories.”
The stories obviously
impressed him. Nightly, after dictating, Scotty would leaf through my
dictionary. Soon new words cropped up in his talk. “Can’t tribulate no ninety-day ensigns,” I heard him tell a chief. “They ain’t got no significance.”
Scotty demonstrated my
significance by letting me spend whole afternoons with the friendly
signalmen on the bridge, who were teaching me to read flags and blinker
lights. “Signalin’ takes brains,” Scotty approved. When I could read
blinker, Scotty, while dictating, kept alert to hear any clicking of the
bridge signal light. I would dash on deck, read the message, and then
Scotty would go forward and “predict” news sometimes hours before it was
broadcast on the public address system. His fo’c’sle followers soon
whispered that Scotty had second sight.
Every night, after
dictating and studying new words, Scotty left me to write stories while
he made his circuit of the ship. One night he returned towing a big,
rawboned youngster from Ohio, who was red-eyed and upset. “Go ‘head,
show him!” Scotty barked. Nervously, the seaman handed me a
pink envelope. The first few lines revealed a “Dear John” letter.
Appalled at Scotty’s indelicacy, I handed it back.
“I’m gon’ set her straight!” Scotty exploded.
“Scotty, you can’t do that!”
But wild horses
couldn’t have stopped him. Scowling over the letter, he dictated: “It’s a
cryin’ shame you think bein’ out here is some good time. Here I set on a
ship full of five-hundred-pound bombs in a ocean full of subs and
sharks. You don’t even wait to see if I get back. I bet you grabbed some
disanimated 4-F. It ought to be him out here doin’ your fightin’ and
dyin’. . . .” While the shaken seaman signed, Scotty raked me with a
black look.
When the Murzim
put into Brisbane, mail call was held. Scotty and I were shelling peas
when his “Dean John” client burst into the galley. We read an astounding
reply from the boy’s girl, begging forgiveness. “See, dammit, you
wouldn’t of wrote!” Scotty trumpeted.
This triumph made
Scotty a strutting Cupid among the admiring kids in the fo’c’sle. Back
at sea, he confronted me: “Looker here, few kids want me to cor’spond to
some Brisbane gals they just met.” His face struggled with delight, but
his voice conveyed menace if I balked.
Each night now, Scotty
brought two to four young clients into the pantry. “I’ll dictate
later—dictatin’ oughter be private,” he instructed me. “I’ll just ask
stuff I need—you keep notes.”
Seating a youngster in
his appropriated officer’s chair, he would ask, “Anything special you
want to say?” “What’s her hair and eyes like?” “How’d she act?” When a
client was reticent, Scotty blazed, “You ain’t got nothin’ to write about!”
To my astonishment, he
had marked lyric passages from my rejected love stories. “Ready-made
stuff! Take right here—‘the enchantin’ moon studdin’ the night ocean
with diamon’s as he think about her . . .’ ” We began to produce love
letters. Scotty gave me a ream of the captain’s bond and a box of carbon
paper which the captain’s yeoman had traded for a surreptitious steak.
“Make a copy of every letter,” he directed. “No reason we can’t use the
same ones over.”
Soon mail calls
brought gushing responses from Brisbane girls and Scotty’s young clients
exulted. But I began to grow concerned: clearly the girls would now
expect Scotty’s distinctive letters. “Scotty,” I said, “what happens
when some of these kids get transferred? What will they do without your
letters?”
All morning he worried. In the afternoon he asked, “Them copies you been makin’—how many you got now?”
“About three hundred.”
“Tell you what. Bind up different copies in folders. Them kids can pick stuff they like and write in they own hands.”
It worked fine.
Nightly, clients clustered about mess-hall tables, shuffling through
twelve binders. Selecting passages they liked, they wrote furiously.
Scotty steamed around inspecting them as he once had my typing. “Han’
writin’s more better!” he sang out, encouraging independence. “Stick in
some of your own words—twis’ stuff around!”
Finally orders came
for our second stop in Brisbane. In the wee hours of the first night,
one after another of Scotty’s clients wobbled back, describing fabulous
romantic triumphs. Scotty, painfully incapacitated with varicose veins,
presided in the fo’c’sle. Three cheers for the old sea dog rang out
regularly. Scotty was fit to split with bliss.
The next afternoon, a
messboy telephoned me on the bridge where I spent all my spare time with
the signalmen. “Scotty wants you in the pantry—on the double!” It was
my first “On the double!” in a year. I rushed below, wondering. Scotty
and the messboys stood around a white-frosted cake. On it,
chocolate-chip Morse code spelled “HALEY.” Scotty, shuffling his feet,
spoke gruffly. “I tol’ the Cap’n you could stand watch as signalman. He
say go ‘head.” Suddenly glowering, he whirled on the messboys. “Looker
here, don’t it rate a hand when one of our race can better hisself?”
They clapped as my
tears blurred them all. And it was in that humbling instant that the
massive old sailor spun into brilliant focus. I saw with crystal clarity
the enormous soul and heart seasoned through a quarter-century of
fo’c’sles into barnacled wisdom. He cultivated being rough to mask even
from himself his benevolent, patriarchal affection for shipmates. I had
resented his vicarious attachment to the education I had been luckier
than he to have—and now he had helped me to leave him behind.
Scotty often visited
me on the signal bridge. Once he came when we had anchored off an island
and “Mail Call!” was being piped. Naming two men, he said, “Watch ‘em
down there and see what you see.”
We looked down on the
forward main deck as yeomen barked names and passed thousands of letters
from a dozen bulging mail sacks to the jubilant sailors. But the two
men we were watching got nothing. “Poor guys don’t never get no mail,”
Scotty said. “Looker here-fix up this thing.” He gave me a Pen Pal Club
ad, torn from a magazine. I filled in the two men’s names, and in time
the two astounded men received their first letters.
The poignant “Mail-Call” scene kept bothering me. One night in the pantry, I wrote it as I felt it, and it was printed in The Seafarer,
which many men enclosed in letters home. Someone’s home-town newspaper
reprinted my story. A press wire service picked it up; [my article]
“Mail Call” was printed widely over the United States. From across
America, letters came addressed: “Lonely Sailors, c/o The Seafarer, U.S.S. Murzim.”
Before long, a message was relayed to me, too—from U.S. Coast Guard
Headquarters. Ordered back to the States, I wound up assigned in Third
(New York) District public relations. There, in 1950, I was named the
U.S. Coast Guard’s first chief journalist, and my stories, too, began to
click.
But my letters to Scotty went unanswered. Then, in 1954, some reader mail resulting from a Reader’s Digest
article included an envelope addressed in a wavering, unruly script
that I joyously recognized. Scotty told me that he had made chief
steward on the Murzim. But in 1945 his varicose veins forced
him to retire and he had settled in Norfolk, Virginia, where he was a
night watchman at the Brook Avenue Navy Men’s Y.M.C.A. “Reeding your
name folowed by story a grate thril,” Scotty ended his letter. “Knowed
you’d make good was how come I help you out.”
(The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Met by Alex Haley is presented to our audience under the Creative Commons License. It was
originally published in the March 1961 issue of Reader’s Digest. © 1961
The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
Doris Miller, known as "Dorie" to shipmates and friends, was born in Waco, Texas, on 12 October 1919. He was commended by the Secretary of the Navy, was advanced to Mess Attendant, Second Class and First Class, and subsequently was promoted to Ship's Cook, Third Class.
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, Miller had arisen at 6 a.m., and was collecting laundry when the alarm for general quarters sounded. He headed for his battle station, the antiaircraft battery magazine amidship, only to discover that torpedo damage had wrecked it, so he went on deck. Because of his physical prowess, he was assigned to carry wounded fellow Sailors to places of greater safety. Then an officer ordered him to the bridge to aid the mortally wounded Captain of the ship. He subsequently manned a 50 caliber Browning anti-aircraft machine gun until he ran out of ammunition and was ordered to abandon ship.
Miller described firing the machine gun during the battle, a weapon which he had not been trained to operate: "It wasn't hard. I just pulled the trigger and she worked fine. I had watched the others with these guns. I guess I fired her for about fifteen minutes. I think I got one of those Jap planes. They were diving pretty close to us."
Miller was commended by the Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox on 1 April 1942, and on 27 May 1942 he received the Navy Cross, which Fleet Admiral (then Admiral) Chester W. Nimitz, the Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet personally presented to Miller on board aircraft carrier USS Enterprise (CV-6) for his extraordinary courage in battle. Speaking of Miller, Nimitz remarked:
This marks the first time in this conflict that such high tribute has been made in the Pacific Fleet to a member of his race and I'm sure that the future will see others similarly honored for brave acts.
In addition to the Navy Cross, Miller was entitled to the Purple Heart Medal; the American Defense Service Medal, Fleet Clasp; the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal; and the World War II Victory Medal.
Commissioned on 30 June 1973, USS Miller (FF-1091), a Knox-class frigate, was named in honor of Doris Miller.
Labels: Black Heroes.
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On 23 May 2008 the military’s top officer told members of the Naval Academy’s Class of 2008 that they should not be afraid to question authority and that they should be prepared to leave the service if they feel they cannot carry out orders.
“Few things are more vital to an organization than someone who has the moral courage to question the direction in which the organization is headed and then the strength of character to support whatever decision is made,” Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen told 1,037 graduates Friday at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium. “That is real loyalty.
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