I had three best friends from our time together in the fifth grade through high school years. My family had just moved to Connecticut in 1948 from Nebraska. Their names were Bruce, Jerry and Billy.

The four of us went through Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, and Sea Explorer Scouts together. Bruce was the smartest of the group and ended up getting an engineering degree from Lehigh University. Bruce’s father was a shop worker at the General Electric plant in Bridgeport, CT. My dad was an executive at GE and had an office in that same plant. One time Bruce’s father was assigned some carpentry work in my father’s office. Bruce never mentioned it because I’m sure he found it awkward. My dad told me about it. The dads were both present at Scout father-and-son activities and seemed to have no trouble relating on a first name basis although there was obviously a wide difference in their work responsibilities.

Bill went to Penn State and had a ROTC scholarship. He later became an Air Force pilot and had a role in the NASA recovery of astronauts. My future as a Navy pilot led to a common bond Bill and I shared long after our boyhood years. Bill’s father was a mailman and a very skilled carpenter. He had built the home Bill lived in and it was huge compared to the modest houses the other three of us had.

Jerry lived with his mom in a very small home at the edge of town. I knew nothing about Jerry’s dad and Jerry never mentioned even having one. His mom had a drinking problem and sometimes when we were at Jerry’s, we were aware his mom was passed out on the couch.

Jerry didn’t go to college but was a skilled auto mechanic. He had a model A Ford that he had converted from mechanical to hydraulic breaks and had replaced the original four-cylinder engine with a V-8 Mercury. Jerry’s Model A could out-drag anyone else’s car in high school.

Cars were a hot topic with all four of us. Jerry was the only one with his own, but within months of each of us getting driver’s licenses, we decided we would each buy a jalopy (paying no more than $200) strip it down of glass and fenders and race them as stock cars in the empty field beside Jerry’s house.

I found a 1937 four-door Studebaker that the family used to drive their kids to the town’s swimming pool. It burned oil and had numerous mechanical problems that motivated the family to get rid of the car. The kids loved the car however and had given it the name “Heathcliff.”

(My Studebaker was black)

My $175 offer cinched the deal and I drove the car to Jerry’s lot, clipping a couple stone walls on the way over just for the fun of it. Within minutes of arriving at our “racetrack,” I attacked the windows and fenders with a sledgehammer, reducing my bomb to racing configuration.

The car was licensed to the former owners and they needed to recover the license plates and drove over to Jerry’s with their kids to pick up the plates. When the children saw what I had done to Heathcliff, they immediately began wailing in grief and horror.

I felt bad the kids had to see that.

We never had all four jalopies running at the same time. Jerry was a wizard at fixing the breakdowns, but it was a challenge. I was the only one with an actual crash helmet, the others wore football helmets. We all had seat belts. My car’s gas tank was vulnerable to rear-end impact, so I removed it and tied it down in the back seat. We had rules we agreed to, i.e, no head on collisions, and no smacking anyone’s car that had stalled. Amazingly, no one was injured. The worst crash resulted in a roll-over but the car ended up back on it’s wheels. We all thought that was hilarious but then Bill noticed the interior of the car was soaked with gasoline, so we hosed it out with a garden hose to eliminate the fire hazard.

After several weeks the cars became so beat up they were unrepairable. We called a local junk yard and had the cars hauled away selling them for scrap. We recovered just enough money to pay for a couple of six packs to celebrate our stock car racing adventures.

As mentioned, the four of us were Explorer Sea Scouts. A yachtsman in our town, Bill Workman,  volunteered to be our scout master. He learned the New London Maritime Museum in Mystic, Connecticut, offered weeklong sailing experiences for youth groups. The youngsters served as crew on a classic 65-foot sloop designed by the famous team of Sparkman & Stephens. The Brilliant was a ocean racing sloop and had set several records in ocean crossing events.

Seven of us scouts signed up for the cruise plus our leader, Mr. Workman. Mystic Museum provided the skipper, a very experienced yachtsman who had captain’s papers for anything under sail.

We sailed throughout Long Island Sound that week, never actually going out into the Atlantic but some days in the Sound were quite windy with ten-foot ground swells.

On one of those stormy days, I was assigned bow-watch duties. The bow-watchman stood at the end of the bowsprit in a railing wrapped extension six feet forward of the boat’s bow. The duties were to lookout for floating hazards and to shout warnings to the helmsman. The Brilliant was plunging into ten-foot waves. Initially, the waves were breaking over my lower legs but increasing in size such that I was getting wet above my waist.  I began holding my breath on the downward plunge. The skipper was unaware I was out there until someone brought it to his attention. Horrified, he shouted, “Get that kid off that bowsprit!”

Awe, heck. I was enjoying the excitement.

We also had a mate aboard, a sixty year-old man called Oscar, who had been a fixture at Mystic Sea Port for years. Oscar organized all our meals and kitchen duties that week.  In addition to his Mystic Museum relationship, Oscar also occasionally crewed for other Mystic Yachtsmen on their cruises.

Oscar and I became particularly close during the week. One afternoon in the galley as we were finishing up the pots and pans, Oscar said, “You really like it out here on the water, don’t ya, Jimmy?”

“Yes, sir. I love it.”

“You know, I have a number of yacht owners looking for crew when they sail out of these waters heading for southern islands. Would ye be interested in me giving your name as a possible crewmember?”

“Oh boy, would I. I could only do that in summer, of course.” And to myself I wondered what my parents would say about such an opportunity. I was the only one among my friends that Oscar mentioned that invitation to.

We went ashore a couple times during that week and my friends and I swaggered down the streets of the villages like experienced swabbies just back from sailing around the Horn.

In the evening, at anchor, we scouts sat on the deck while one of our number read aloud from a paperback book he purchased describing the sexual encounters of the  scantily clad beauty pictured on the cover. We listeners hooted and howled at the imagines described.

What a wonderful week it was. My mother picked us all up at the Bridgeport Railroad Station on our return. We all tried to outdo each other with tales of our week’s adventure. My mother was shocked, not so much by the stories but by the profane language we had all been using so freely that week.

“Sorry about that, Mom. Just a sailor boy, home from the sea.”