Reunion :: 14 - 18 May 2010

Zeke Ferrel coordinated the 2010 reunion on May 2010, at the Holiday Inn Sunspree Resort, Virginia Beach, VA. A big THANKS, ZEKE for him!

3900 Atlantic Ave., Virginia Beach, VA 23451
www.vboceanfrontnorth.com

The agenda was as follows: Picture gallery!

• Friday: Check in. Evening - go downtown and board "Spirit of Norfolk" for a dinner cruise on the Elizabeth River.
• Saturday: Luncheon, speaker MCPO Jeff Garrison of COMSUBLANT will present the role of submarines in future naval ops. Bus to the Naval Base and tour an in-port submarine!
• Sunday: Bus to downtown Norfolk to tour battleship WISCONSON. Then on to the Norfolk Naval Museum/Aquarium and the Waterside Complex. The Waterside has good shops and eateries.
• Monday: Evening Farewell Banquet.
• Tuesday: Group breakfast and departure.

As was mentioned at the reunion, anyone wishing to contribute pictures to be inculuded in a memory CD of the event can send them to me (Rik Nilsson). I only ask that you please first use your camera's furnished software to reduce them to a maximum size of 1024 x 768 pixels, or keep the file sizes under 250KB if possible; I have a satellite internet service and they restrict my bandwidth. If you don't have any software or don't know how to do that, see my image etiquette article here, or just burn the images onto a CD and mail them to me. Email me for my address, I'm not going to post it here.

Here are my notes on the reunion of 2010:

I chose to drive from Oregon, rather than fly, in an effort to avoid airport, airline and TSA interferences and crowds. We also enjoy the scenery. It was a good experience, with the usual noisy hotel air conditioners, stretches of tedious highway construction slowdowns, inconsiderate truck drivers, and including one car breakdown smack in the middle of tornado alley. Robin even got to see fireflies (lightning bugs), a phenomenon she once accused me of making up.

As with most of the rest of the U.S.A., Virginia Beach was wet most of the time. Conveniently, though, we managed to stay dry during the events.

The Sunspree was under renovation again. The whole south wing, containing the resaurant, conference halls and guestrooms had the usual open ceilings, dust, floor debris and smell of wet plaster and paint. Our "hospitality" room was 82 degrees and the air conditioner was switched off when I arrived at 11:30 Friday. It wasn't cool enough to gather in until about 14:30 that day. No snacks were provided, nor a refrigerator to store any had we gone out and bought some ourselves. Al Sabatino provided a camp cooler and some beer. Clyde Beatty also brought some beer. I got some more beer across the street at the 7/11. So we had some beer. Just before time for dinner, the hotel staff managed to roust some ice, pitchers of water and glasses.

The Spirit of Norfolk dinner cruise was much more boistrous than past cruises, not to say that was bad, due to a plethora of highchool graduating students celebrating with youthful exuberance.

The EPA had found something undesirable during an inspection of the interior of the battleship Missouri, so we could only tour the three weather decks open to the public. It was still impressive to experience the size, mass and intimidating force implicit in the huge ship. All that steel ...

The highlight event of the reunion (for me, anyway) was the Navy life update by MCPO Garrison, and especially the tour of the USS BOISE (SSN 764), a Los Angeles class nuclear fast attack submarine. My impressions are: 1) Interior space for human habitation and movement is very similar to what the Balao boats had; tighter now, due to my increased girth, 2) Although there was a plethora of advanced equipment everywhere one looked, behind that new stuff there was the usual "shell" of mechanical submarine hardware just inside the pressure hull – pipes, conduits, hydraulics, valves, etc., and lastly, 3) There are only two water tight doors for compartmental integrity on the Boise. That means that the boat essentially comprises three large compartments. The crew wore the Navy version (blue scheme) of the joint force simplified "digital camo" fatigues, as opposed to the denim dungarees and chambray or wool jumpers of our day.

It was a great reunion, in spite of the hotel's inability to meet our needs. Amazingly, most of the sea stories were new ones! We had crew from basically three periods, from the mid 1950s to decomissioning in 1972. Our sad hearts went out to Carol Hadden for her loss, and we are glad she came to join us. Carol, you are hereby officially invited to any future reunions. That goes for all other wives of passed crew, too.

Here's a list of the attendees in alphabetical order:

Steve and Faye Barrett
"Clyde" Beatty
Al and Pat Burger
Zeke and Shirley Ferrell
John W. Gribble
Gordon Gullickson
Carol Hadden
Tom and Lavonia Hutto
Walt and Judy Joyce
Bob and Linda Morton, and son Joey
Merrill (Gus) Negus
Rik and Robin Nilsson
Charlie and Bev Runyan
Al Sabatino and Dian Sage
Richard Strout
Harry Warren and friend Mary
Charlie and Alice Weaver
Charles and Clara Workman
Bill (Yogi) Zawick
Douglas and Judy Zimmerman