“I was born on Cape Cod in New England. My dad served in the Navy during World War II. My mother left us after the war. I was eleven years old with four younger siblings. My dad had no one who could care for us, so we were placed in a state-operated children’s home. My brother and I lived there during our early teen years. Our three younger sisters were later placed in a foster home.

I enlisted in the Navy after high school and enrolled in Submarine School. During sub school, I visited with my mother at her hotel, sometimes volunteering as a short-order cook in the hotel restaurant. Two ladies came in one evening; one showed me a picture of her daughter. I had seen her daughter earlier that week and told my mom I would like to meet her. I was serving breakfast the next morning when that girl sat down at the counter, introducing herself as Jean. We went for ice cream on our first date on June 1, 1953. Jean and her mother drove me to the navy pier the next day, where I reported for my first submarine duty assignment, the USS Lionfish.

I met with Jean on weekends when I wasn’t on duty. We were both from ‘broken’ families, an experience neither of us wanted for our children. We got engaged four months after our first date and married less than a year later.

I reported to my next submarine assignment, the USS Albacore. Its hull was designed for higher underwater speed efficiency and looked like a large whale tied to the pier. The Albacore left homeport on a shake-down and speed trial voyage to the Caribbean Sea. Our shake-down turned into a break-down with engine failures on the way to the destination and back to our shipyard. Despite the failures, our test to outrun the fastest anti-submarine warfare destroyer was successful. Collier’s magazine described it as “The World’s Fastest Submarine.”

After that assignment, Jean and I settled into base housing and started our family with a son and a daughter two and a half years later.

My next assignment was the USS Triton, one of the first submarines operating on nuclear power. It also became the first sub to go submerged around the world in a single voyage. We followed the route of sixteenth-century explorer Ferdinand Magellan for eighty-three days from February through May 1960, viewing some of the shoreline features through the periscope. There were no repair facilities, so we figured out problems. We briefly lost use of our depth finder, using a sledgehammer to pound on the hull. A stopwatch timed the return echo to calculate depth to the ocean floor. This voyage tested nuclear plant reliability and showed the scientific information that could be gathered from unbroken underwater circumnavigation.

President Eisenhower awarded a Presidential Unit Citation to our Triton crew, and National Geographic and Life magazine documented the voyage. The Life article includes a picture of the babies born during the voyage with their parents. Jean held our third child who was born while Triton passed near Easter Island in the Pacific.

My original plan was to support my family with a military career, but I read through the entire Bible and books about the Christian experience during the Triton voyage–that changed my plans. I left the military to attend college training for a military chaplain assignment. We moved to Greenville, South Carolina where I was accepted for admission to Bob Jones University. It was a radical change, but we were less vulnerable to being a ‘broken family.’ Jean and I soon had eight children. Six survived. We also took in my three younger sisters as foster children, plus a teenage daughter from another family who lived with us until she finished high school.

We moved to Mississippi for a job at Ingalls Shipbuilding; Jean and I began working with other ministries. We established a hospital visitation ministry, started a mission church, and ministered in alcohol and drug recovery. Then, I received a call to pastor a church in George County, Mississippi. We ministered with families who once lived on productive family farms with row crops or cattle. They now go off to construction and industrial site locations, often working twelve-hour shifts seven days a week for adequate income. We never knew who would be in town for church, but we were blessed to work in this community for nearly forty years. I served other churches and conducted revival meetings for both white and Black churches.

I had a damaging heart attack at fifty-two that limited my activity. I retired on disability. Nine years later, I became the on-call chaplain for the Lucedale Police Department. I served there for twenty-five years, helping others deal with PTSD, anxiety, family issues, and addiction. Alcoholism broke up my early home, so I understand some of the problems it causes for families. I was also interested in working with the youth court to help young people. Caring about people is my gift. People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care. I tried to make myself available to my Lord.

I turn ninety on August 10. Participating in five different Bible studies each week gives me reasons to get out of bed, keeps me busy. Jean and I were married for sixty-seven years; she died two years ago. Being without her has been a difficult adjustment for me and our large family. Now it’s ‘Well Lord, if you will send Jean back, we will do it all over again’.”

Richard

(Happy Birthday Richard!!)