A few days after he had reported to Goat Island, McKenna found a store on Mission Street in San Francisco specializing in secondhand magazines. The establishment stood on the fringes of skid row, and down-and-out men were always bringing in magazines to sell. They obtained the periodicals from trash cans or vacant lots, or they begged for them. Richard spent at least an hour browsing the offerings, selected ten magazines for a quarter, and returned to Goat Island. After reading the magazines, he returned to the store, resold them for a dime, and made another selection. He considered the store a library for skid row men and people, like himself, with little money. He even viewed the owner of the “library” as its librarian, although he never learned the man’s name and recalled him as an “unshaven, taciturn, pipe-smoking old man, [who] between transactions . . . was always reading himself.” The “librarian” seemed to resent the interruptions made by sales. The skid row establishment began McKenna’s lifelong prowling of used-book stores. A publicity photograph for a 1972 book shows Richard behind his typewriter with a large bookcase crammed with volumes, most of which appear to be used books.21
McKenna had heard that all Navy ships had libraries—he would soon learn this information was false—but thought because he was in a transit status in Chaumont he would not be able to use its library. Before sailing across the Pacific, Richard went to his “library” on Mission Street and, with some money he had managed to scrape together, purchased a dollar’s worth of old magazines. Storage space for personal possessions being limited on a troop transport, McKenna spread his magazines beneath the thin mattress of his bunk. Other people in the compartment either read or pilfered the volumes, but most returned them when finished. When he arrived in Guam, McKenna still had some magazines he had not yet read.22
Fireman 3rd Class McKenna eventually boarded Chaumont for the long voyage to Guam. Ask any veteran about sailing in a troop transport and he or she will invariably paint a picture of overcrowding and boredom. In the pictorial center of the Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC) in Washington, D.C., is a sailor’s cartoon that captures what many felt. Vertically along the side of a drawing of a transport ship are letters spelling out USS Chaumont, which the wag has translated as meaning “U Shall Suffer. Christ Help All Us Monkeys on Navy Transports.” Ironically, McKenna’s World War II career would center on troop transports.23
Upon boarding Chaumont, the new fireman received a sheet of paper printed on both sides, titled “Instructions for Troop Class Passengers,” which outlined what was expected of him while he was in the troopship. McKenna found himself—not too surprisingly—assigned to E Division (Engineering); he would sleep in compartment L-7 and eat “in cafeteria style in Compartment No. 5-B.” In addition to outlining where the troops could or could not smoke, the instructions informed him he was to check the ship’s orders, which were “conspicuously posted about the ship.” Further, McKenna was required to “be habitually in a clean and neat uniform of the day.” His hair had to be cut in a regulation manner, which meant “that hair on top must be no longer than two inches and neatly tapered at the sides and back. The back of the neck must not be shaved.” Furthermore, “no eccentricities” in beards or haircuts were allowed, and McKenna was required to “shave daily.”24
Richard spoke badly about the slow-moving Chaumont throughout his life. In a letter to an old shipmate two months after his retirement in 1953, Richard let loose a stream of vitriol toward all masters at arms (MAAs)—that is, the police force on a ship or shore, known then in the Navy as “Jimmy Legs”—and specifically those in Chaumont. “All MAA’s were bastards and the ones on the Chaumont were the biggest bastards of all,” McKenna wrote. “They would grab a towel or anything else you left on a bunk for a few minutes and put you on report for having clothing adrift [not in the proper place]. If they had to, they would take something out of your seabag. Then you would have to do extra duty or buy off. They wanted you to buy off. If you only had a quarter and two packs of cigarettes, they would take that.” Warming up to his subject, McKenna revealed, “The chief Jimmylegs . . . made more money by shaking down the passengers than the skipper drew in salary. Maybe the skipper was cut in on it. I will always hate that ship.”25
A decade after his 1953 letter, his ire had not diminished. “I hated the Chaumont more than I ever did any enemy ship. I rode her both ways, out in ’32 and back in ’41, and she had not changed a bit,” he wrote. “One ship, one passageway. Eat slop standing up. Standing room only on the well decks and God help any sailor who leaned against an officer’s automobile. The married men could stand down there evenings and watch their wives on the boat deck dancing with the officers. She looked like a shoebox with a bow on each end. I still hate that ship.”26
Even later he wrote, “That wash room, all around a trunked cargo hatch in the tween decks. Half of it always roped off for the crap games the MAA force ran. One fresh water tap that ran a trickle half the size of your little finger. Twenty guys lined up waiting for water, even at two o’clock in the morning. They said the Chaumont had her bow built just like her stern so the German subs wouldn’t know what direction she was going. Nobody aboard ever did, either. I hate that ship.”27
In McKenna’s last letter on the subject of Chaumont, written on 28 December 1963, the years still had not softened his rage. He wrote of his current writing project, “I am going to work in a few pokes at the Chaumont for the sake of all of us who were prisoners of war aboard that floating madhouse. . . . I am still waiting for Congress to vote me a medal for suffering hardship and insult above and beyond the call of duty.”28
Eventually, on 6 August 1933, Fireman 3rd Class McKenna left the “madhouse” Chaumont and reported to duty in his first permanently assigned Navy ship, USS Gold Star, station ship for the island of Guam. McKenna quickly realized the ship and location were all a young man from an isolated town in the high desert of Idaho who liked to meet unusual people and go to unusual places could have ever hoped to encounter. The ship also began his lifelong love of machinery.
On Sunday, 6 August 1933, with the temperature near eighty degrees Fahrenheit, a twenty-year-old McKenna departed Chaumont, carrying an envelope with his orders and his service and pay records in his left hand and his sea bag, with a hammock wrapped around it, on his right shoulder. He made his way on board Gold Star, reporting for his first permanent duty in a ship.1
The Navy had taken over and commissioned the ship—originally built for the Shipping Board by the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation of Wilmington, Delaware—on 1 February 1922 at the Philadelphia Navy Yard as Arcturus (AK 12), a cargo ship. Five days later, the service renamed the new ship Gold Star and classified it as an AG, a general auxiliary ship. The ship measured 392 feet in length and had a beam of 52 feet. Gold Star had a “snail-like cruising speed of about 9 knots (10 mph).” A former commanding officer, Capt. Joseph Unrig Lademan Jr., USN, described his ship as “elderly, plain, broad in beam, straight-lined from stem to stern with not a trace of graceful sheer.” The new ship sailed to the West Coast and there moved cargo along the coast, including three voyages to Alaska for naval radio stations. On 9 October 1924 Gold Star arrived at Guam, the U.S. possession in the far-off and little-known Mariana Islands. The two original 4-inch guns on the ship were removed by the time McKenna reported on board.2
Little did McKenna realize he now served in a ship with unique duties and living conditions. From 1924 to the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, Gold Star was used like a civilian tramp freighter, shuttling slowly between Guam, the Philippines, China, and Japan, with an occasional foray to Hawaii, carrying mail, passengers, and products such as copra from the island. To work cargo, Gold Star had two masts, five cargo holds, well decks fore and aft, and a three-level superstructure. Because it carried all types of cargo, it had a refrigeration compartment. Other cargo, including large amounts of coal, was transported to the island. Gold Star