School was never an easy thing for my father, who much preferred tinkering and sailing to book work. The expectation was that he would be an engineer like his father--which commonly attracts tinkerers, but requires oodles of math classes and the like.
He managed to barely graduate from Lowell High School in San Francisco, and decided that sailing the seas was for him. He saw the writing on the wall in Korea, and not wanting to be drafted as an army private ("cannon fodder" he called them), he enrolled in the California Maritime Academy to become an officer.
He had academic problems because of his poor math background and had to drop out just before graduation. He recounted how astral navigation just about broke him, but after about six weeks of concentrated self-study he was able to earn his Third Mate’s License and the school subsequently gave him his degree.
He spent a couple of years as working as an able seaman on the Matson Line's Matsonia between California and Hawaii, until it was decommissioned, and then on a Standard Oil tanker, the H. D. Collier, where he was in line for a third mate’s job when the local draft board intervened and he had to apply for active duty in Korea with the Navy to avoid being drafted into the Army..
From 1950 to 1952 he served on the USS Catamount (a landing ship dock) in Japan and Korea, mostly in the engine room. This was his first introduction to a steam power plant and he found it interesting. He was less enamored of the battles, and the damage it wrought on the bodies and souls of young men.
After being discharged he took advantage of the GI Bill to graduate from the University of California in June 1957 with a BS degree in Mechanical Engineering. The wide smile on his face on graduation day tells it all.
Robert Doherty and Ted Wise
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