Red Headed Stepchild
(The Barrett family memoir of Navy Life)
by Sophie Ruth Meranski with photos

 

1014.
Native village Tutuila Samoa 1925 }M{

 

 p 48-#1014 View collected by Jack Barrett during l925 MARBLEHEAD cruise with forty thousand man fleet to Austalia-New Zealand after war games in Hawaii April and crossing of Equator July 6. MARBLEHEAD stopped both ways at Samoa, an American posssession. Jack's shipmate Phil Dahlquist became acquainted with local chief of police, whose son he had met previously at a Navy school in Virginia.Samoa became an important Allied outpost in World War 2, in the front lines of the Naval War, but it never was captured by Japan. Jack Barrett's friend Captain Samuel Wilder King, native of Hawaaii and graduate of Annapolis Naval Academy was governor of American Samoa l942, and Jack Barrett as Overseas Transportation Officer at Pearl Harbor and Assistant Personnel Officer of Fourteenth Naval District arranged Am King's transportation to Pago Pago, and also the transportation of a French governor to Noumea, New Caledonia. American Samoa M-A-R-B-L-E-H-E-A-D }M{


 

1015.
Half Dome, Yosemite Valley June 1947 & Barrett Lincoln Zephyr 1937 #1015 O-V-E-R T-H-E M-O-U-N-T-A-I-N

 

 Jack Barrett photo. The l937 Lincoln Zephyr had an elusive hole in the radiator that mechanics could not find until after the family arrived in Boston August 12. Mechanics worked on it for a week at Brainerd Minnesota in record 104 degree F. heat. The car made it to Yosemite, Crater Lake and over the continental divide at Glacier and Yellowstone Parks, and over Beartooth pass outside northeast entrance of Yellowstone Park, 10,942 feet, but the rear axle broke at the central intersection of Mandan, North Dakota, and telegrams to Minneapolis cost more than the replacement axle. Frost layering of parallel fractures helped produce the remarkable sheer shape of Yosemite's Half Dome. p 48 (Y)


 

1016.
p 48 Melbourne Botanic Gardens 1016 M-A-R-B-L-E-H-E-A-D }M{

 

 postcard Jack sent to his sister Katie as MARBLEHEAD was leaving Tasmania July 1925


 

1017.
May 1936 p 48 Sophie Norfolk Virginia 7100 Hampton Boulevard photo no.1017

 

 C-L-A-X-T-O-N 1936 -"twelve weeks" would mean July 1936,but photo is with May group from Grandfather Barrett's visit.{S} {C}


 

1018.

 

 p 48-1018 Sophie 7100 Hampton Boulevard Norfolk Virginia CLAXTON guns four four-inch 50 caliber one three-inch 23 caliber AA. Four twenty-one-inch triple torpedo tubes. Navy Yard, Mare Island. Authorized Nov 4, 1917. Commissioned September 13, 1919. Out of commission June 1922. 314 feet 4.5 inches. 30 feet 11.25 inch width. draft nine feet zero inches. Displacement 1154 tons. Tons per inch immersion 15.4 Speed 35.45 knots Two masts. Eight wardroom officers ten petty officers 104 enlisted. Parsons geared turbine engines. Four normal boilers. 26,675 horsepower main engines.Westinghouse turbo gen. Named for midshipman Claxton, 1812.


 

1019.
p 48 Nov 1936 Sophie Jack John Cynwyd #1019

 

 P-H-I-L-A-D-E-L-P-H-I-A soon after arrival November 1936


 

1020.
Mollie Sophie Nov 1936 p 48 #1020

 

 P-H-I-L-A-D-E-L-P-H-I-A


 

1021.
p 48 Jack Sophie Cynwyd N l936

 

 1021 P-H-I-L-A-D-E-L-P-H-I-A


 

 

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