[Milsurplus] buncha RBOs on board USS Tenessee 1943

[Hubert Miller]

I received a few agreements with my comments on the shipboard radio operator role.
Of course, I am referring to commercial merchant marine. 
I have read a half dozen books now, memoirs of former merchant marine radio operators, and those 
will definitely give you mixed feelings about that job. Along with the romance of visiting exotic places
there were a lot of crew members who were kind of "off", unstable, and maybe alcoholic. It seems to
me the job was a "sufficient" but not necessary element for becoming an alki. I have also known three
former ship radio ops. One went from this to becoming a college physics professor, one finished a 
career and seemed to have turned out well, and one was a downhill alcoholic. So my observations are
no kind of reliable measure. 

One account, from the 1930s, described crossing the Pacific with the only radio equipment being the
MF type, I mean 600 meters band. They would go a week or more with absolutely no contact with 
the outside world. That, and little reading matter, and fellow crew members whose every story you
have already heard, means: b o r I n g. 

I finished up technical school in 1976. There was one fellow in the class who had read that ship radio
operators were earning $40K/ year and up. So he totally focused on that and that was going to be 
his career. BTW, he had no ham radio background, or actually any interest in radio, that I could see,
but was totally focused on that way "in" to earning the big bucks. Most of the other students had no 
idea about "ship radio operator", no clue that position had ever existed, but somehow somewhere he
had read about the earnings potential.  Back then, the $40K did sound good. I really wonder now
how his story turned out. That was getting real near the end of the radio operator role, and particularly 
so for the job on U.S. ships.

One ship we crossed on, the General Patch, had warmed seawater showers. You used special saltwater
soap. I don't remember anything odd about that now, but I'm sure now the sticky feeling afterward
would obsess me. Those "General" class transport ships in those days of the 1950s were frequently 
hauling refugees, DPs from Europe to the U.S. 
-Hue Miller