Different Drummer

COLUMNIST’S NOTE: I wrote this column, poking fun at my dad and myself, in November, 2012, as it turned out some three months before he was to die. I did so then (successfully) to cheer him up. Changing only verb tenses, I resubmit it now, to remember and honor him.

Sunday, Nov. 11, was Veterans Day (originally Armistice Day), the annual time we set aside to recognize those who have served our country in its military. And so, I feel it high time that yet another member of the Greatest Generation receive due recognition for the significant role he played in helping keep our country safe.

We can, of course, never repay, as a nation, the debt we owe him, as generally unknown as it might be.

I speak of one Harold Ray Mosby, my father. As this epic tale unwinds, some of you who know me well might be able to intuit some inherited traits.

As Admiral Halsey’s task force was island hopping across the Pacific, like scores of his fellow Americans, fresh out of high school, my father pledged his “life, liberty and sacred honor” to the defense of this great land and enlisted in the Navy. In retrospect, something a little more land-oriented might have been a better option.

Having been sternly advised by her sister to keep a stiff upper lip and be strong, my grandmother put Dad on a bus, amid the Clarksdale bus stationfilled tears and wailings of her sister, bound for naval basic training at the Great Lakes.

Now at this point it is important for you, the reader, to understand two things: Dad had never been much farther away from his home hamlet of Coahoma than Memphis, Tenn., and this was March at the Great Lakes, or in other words, cold as the hair on a polar bear’s fanny.

So, as happens on every recruit’s first day, Dad was taken to get his military clothing. Unfortunately, in his case, that involved being taken from one quonset hut to the next, because they couldn’t find any pants small enough to fit him. And, after being shuttled from one spot to the next, Dad, not the most patient of all God’s creatures, felt it had gone on long enough, and said the equivalent of “say, partner, it looks to me like you don’t quite know what you are doing.”

This he said to a person who turned out to be the wrong person to hear such.

Consequently, my father regrettably found that his first military duty assignment was to then strip to his skivvies and stand behind a table in one of those quonset huts, handing out clothing to other would be seafarers—at the Great Lakes, in March.

He would later allow as how he had never quite been able to get really warm thereafter, and that it was truly a medical miracle that he would go on to father three children.

Undaunted, however, Dad managed to make it through naval basic training without drowning and took to sea about a communications ship, the U.S.S. Rocky Mount, captained by a generally unpleasant chap named Katz, from New York.

As best I understand it, think James Cagney in the movie “Mister Roberts.”

Largely because he could type (the only class he ever insisted that I take at any level of school), Dad found himself assigned to the ship’s office, which would have been relatively cushy duty, considering that a world war was being waged by land, sea and air, except for one character trait which is apparently common to all males of a particular Mosby clan — something the comic Ron White frequently describes as having the right to remain silent, but not the ability.

The more perceptive of you may sense a trend emerging.

It seems that Capt. Katz insisted that he have 12 brand new, freshly sharpened pencils delivered to his desk every day, a perceived luxury my father found both unnecessary and extravagant, considering all the rationing going on back stateside. And so swashbuckler that he was, after about two weeks of it, Pop said he told the captain of his ship the equivalent of “say, partner, I just don’t see what you need all these pencils for.”

Feisty little fellow, he was.

So in what was certainly the greatest military-related injustice since the Treaty of Versailles, my father found himself promptly assigned to the salt mines of the ship’s engine room — a fate from which he was saved only by the facts that his office buddies (a) really liked Dad and (b) really disliked Capt. Katz.

And so it was that the senior Harold Ray Mosby, an unrecognized naval giant if ever t’were such, with the help of his pals spent the remainder of WWII dodging the captain of his ship, thereby limiting what surely would have been his latent heroic deeds in ridding the South Pacific of the then Japanese peril.

And accordingly, this Veterans Day, I think it only fair that my Dad’s military daring-do be shared with the world, rather than just being confined to laughter-filled family gatherings. Hey, Pop, thank you for your service.

Ray Mosby is editor and publisher of the Deer Creek Pilot in Rolling Fork.