I submitted this true story to Storyworth several years ago and forgot about it until I was sifting old email files. There is more, but it doesn't fit in the margins of this page. Maybe tomorrow.
The USS Enterprise was rebuilt after a few years of service (I think it was the time of the first reactor refueling). A couple of the additions figure in this story. The space where I worked was added onto the right side of the ship below the flight deck where before there had been nothing but a painted hull. To get into our shop, you had to go through a watertight door the wrong way, by which I mean outside the protected hull. So we were just kind of hanging out over the water about 50 feet up.
The added space was two decks high. We used all of the lower deck and half of the upper, the other half occupied by the metrology and calibration lab, where the electronic test equipment used all over the ship was repaired and calibrated. The way it had been built was that the new upper deck was bigger than the new lower deck, so there was a prismatic open space on the outboard side of our shop that didn’t show up on any ship floorplan, so there was nothing in there except some steel I-beams for strength.
Backing up a bit, some background on what were called “coke messes”. In order to reduce hoarding and loansharking practices among the sailors, any work center (we were AIMD WC 620) could set up a coke mess with membership restricted to those assigned to the WC, with initial shares of $10 or $20 and the price controlled at 20 cents a can. We could buy cases of sodas at the Navy Exchange on base for less than half that, so it was a good deal. We had about 25 sailors assigned, and they all put in $20, so the treasurer we elected was able to buy a lot of sodas starting with the 2-week training cruises off the California coast.
We estimated that in our big empty space plus stacking a few cases in the aisles, we could fit 1100 cases of sodas when we filled it up. We were the biggest competitor with the ship’s soda shop.
After the first training cruise, one of the sailors in the shop broke into the safe where the treasurer kept the money, stole it all, and then deserted the Navy. Our assets at that point were just the unsold sodas we still had on hand, but that was enough to continue, so that after a couple of short training cruises and the run to Hawaii, the first stop on our big cruise, we had enough money for the treasurer to go to a phone booth at the end of the pier and order 1100 cases of sodas from the local distributor. That much soda is delivered on shipping pallets, 100 cases per pallet, and 11 pallets fill up a flat-bed trailer.
When the truck of sodas arrived, it parked right next to the ship on the pier and then we had to face the problem of getting it on the ship. The soda mess treasurer, who was a sweet kid from Lake Placid, New York whose post-Navy ambition was to own a pancake restaurant, walked down with a few cartons of cigarettes (which we could buy real cheap on the ship) and bribed the longshoremen and crane operator to hoist the pallets onto one of the ship’s elevators. From there it was about an hour’s work for all of us in a chain to move the cases across the hangar deck and up one flight to our main shop space.
We weren’t invisible, of course, and the ship’s Supply Officer saw everything we were doing and didn’t like it. He thought that we were interfering in his effort to supply the ship for the big jump from Hawaii to the Philippines. He told us that what we did was almost correct, except that we should have placed the order through him so that he could coordinate the deliveries to fit his schedule. As a compromise, he offered that whenever the ship got a delivery of soda cases, we could get at least one pallet’s worth.
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