I didn’t drink coffee at all while living at home, and I wouldn’t really count what Grandma Brinkley gave me as coffee. For the youngest grandchildren, she prepared a 50-50 mixture of milk and coffee, liberally laced with as many spoonfuls of sugar as you needed to make it taste right. Older grandchildren got to mix their own coffee with either milk, fresh from Grandma’s cow, or condensed milk, and an equal weight of sugar, for balance.

I never had any problems with sea-sickness during my enlistment in the Coast Guard. I had been a little concerned that I would suffer the same misery that some of my shipmates related to me, as I had often been car-sick during the long rides to North Carolina as a child. As I later found out, motion-sickness does not necessarily transfer from one mode of transportation to another, and is often merely out-grown. I think I out grew it when I came to be too tall to lie down length-wise in the back seat and watch the telephone lines crawling up and down the right rear-window for hours on end.
The ship I was stationed on, the USCGC Ingham, was a “High Endurance Cutter” and was one of the largest ships the Coast Guard had at the time. It was 327 feet long, about the size of a Navy destroyer, but much wider. This made it ideal for patrolling the Atlantic Ocean, as this length was nearly a perfect match for the waves common in that ocean, producing a smooth ride even during rough weather. The Ingham carried me from our home port of Norfolk, VA to Baltimore, and after refurbishing, on to Argentia, Newfoundland, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Panama Canal and across the Pacific Ocean to the Philippines and then on patrol off Viet Nam. During that entire voyage the only time I felt poorly at all was during our approach into Argentia. Going into port required threading our way up a narrow fiord, and our own wake bounced back and forth between the steep shorelines, causing a rhythmic side-to-side vibration that made nearly everyone uneasy. Of course, those that were prone to sea-sickness were completely done in by this motion. Upon reaching the Pacific Ocean, with its much greater distances from wave-crest to wave-crest compared to the Atlantic, the ride became so smooth that even our most sensitive sailors rarely had to resort to the tea and crackers diet.
It was while returning to the States that we really appreciated how well our ship handled rough weather. We ran into a typhoon with winds up to 60 miles per hour and waves over 40 feet high, and the Ingham turned this challenge into a relatively gentle, but rapid, up and down motion. It was like being on an express elevator, but the ride lasted 15 hours.
We all had our sea-legs and this continuous movement was only mildly annoying as we moved about the ship, or attempted to take a shower. More challenging was dealing cards, as the flight of the card being dealt was somewhat unpredictable.
Some of us not playing cards came up with a new game, “Jumping Ship”. We opened the largest hatch between two decks and carefully moving to the lowest deck, waited for the ship to settle into a wave trough. As the ship began her climb toward the next wave crest, we squatted down as low as possible, grasping the handrails on each side of the ladder. When she reached the crest and began her downward run into the next trough, we jumped.
Timing was everything in this game, as jumping too soon slowed your take-off with increased weight and you would land on the ladder between decks, though not at full weight. If you jumped late, you wasted your jump-time and not only ladder-landed, but with the ship under deceleration also weighted more than normal.
The game went on for a while, and as word spread, the number of players began to grow, along with the rules. We began to develop a point system, based on not only how far up the ladder you landed, but how you landed, were you using your hands to steady your flight along the way. Soon we had to open the next deck’s hatch, as we had begun to master the technique and were beginning to over shoot the ladder. We later realized that what we thought of as our increased skill was actually the increasing violence of the typhoon, totally lost on us as we began talk about trying flips and turnson our way up the two deck course.
I was attempting to make my first two-deck jump, and as I was passing the first landing I realized that one of the spectators was not wearing the same blue work clothes as everyone else, but officer’s khaki.
“Corey!”
I landed half-way up the second ladder, carefully entangling my legs in the steps, and getting zero points for my effort.
“Yes, sir?”
“You and Brooker come with me.”
I knew someone had informed on us, otherwise how would he know who started the game? Probably Johnson. I’ll bet he hadn’t forgotten that Liberty Launch trick, where we had gotten him to put on his dress blues and wait for a boat to take him ashore for a night off. It had taken some doing, what with us being at sea and hundreds of miles from land.
Brooker and I followed Mr. Emerson to the ship’s office, where we learned our sports careers were over, and we would have new ones making fresh water in the boiler room for the next 2 days.