Robert Gallagher, Wake
Remembrance for His UncleThere are odd bits of history in the scrapbooks made by Jack Light - restaurant menus, poems, letters from politicians greeting his ship, notes from basketball coaches scrimmaging against the ship's team, cartoons, and more. For most of his career, Jack served on the First Contact radio watch.
I notice that my father decided to join a signal company in the US Army, a parallel choice that seems likely to have been influenced by his life with Jack. At the least, it's an odd coincidence that Jack knew morse code and that my father learned it, too, in order to write down the North Korean messages.
Most of Jack's sailing career took place before my father was born. In his scrapbooks, he pasted his re-certifications in the new-fangled technology of radio. Radioman certification didn't even start until 1921 but in one of his early entries, already Jack was re-certifying. In another scrapbook entry, he included U.S.S. Asheville logs from 1926 including his account of surviving a direct hit by a typhoon. Later, he added his Vibroplex Key Certification, which demonstrated that he was a Morse Code operator for his ship.
He saved a lock of hair from a woman, leave passes, and Chinese money that he could afford to paste into the book. He last visited the Chinese ports about a year before the Japanese invaded them.
Later, as he continued sailing around the world, Jack visited France. He spent time in Hamburg, Germany, a city that could only have been accessible if his ship sailed up the Elbe. Years later, my father taught at the Army base in Hamburg. I went to nursery school there. But Jack got there before us.
After all of his travels, though, Jack retired from ship life and settled down in Baltimore. He started a new life there. Then, when his sister's family turned homeless again as well as fatherless, he rented a car and drove to Elmira, New York.
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