Celebrating 50 years

I chose this picture of my old ship since it looks like a part of a dream sequence...and that is all I have left after almost 50 years; a dream.

I have linked up with several hundred other crew members (via Facebook) who served on board from 1958-1977; 1977 being the year that Roosevelt was scrapped....yep, broken up into pieces and melted in to plow-shares, supposedly. The gentlemen whom I reference are for the most part younger than I....I was on board from 1963-1965; most of them were on board in the 1970s...and many of them are from the squadrons we had on board (I was ship's company), but regardless, we have much in common.

We can speak of spaces on the ship or even ports we visited and we can visualize in our mind's eye what they mean. Everybody has pictures of airplanes landing and taking off...I have pictures of airplanes on the flight deck doing their thing. Sometimes someone miss-names something or miss identifies another ship and we gently correct them. One of the oldest guys...a 1958-1960 shipmate runs the site. He is 76 and he tries to keep us on track.  He is also the secretary of the Reunion Association and so he tries to get us to travel to the reunion site each year. It is not like you would know anybody since we are all from different times and different departments on a big ship, but having the kinship is is the attraction. My former department head...now well into his 80s is the Reunion President. I would know him, of course.

The Roosevelt's sister ship, the USS Midway is a museum in San Diego which Aleene and I visited about 8 years ago. The Roosevelt (CV-42) is basically a copy of Midway (CV-41), so when you get on board you think that you are on "Rosie" as we refer to her. I need to go back there since they have now opened the engineering spaces which is where I worked. They weren't open in 2005.

So the nostalgia  binge continues in 2013 for me since 50 years ago, 1963, I graduated from Penn State and two months later went on active duty and four months after that got orders to Rosie. Life is but a dream and the picture of my old ship captures that dream for me.

Smooth sailing, mates.