Keith Tillotson
Portland Oregon (1943)
After I graduated, I came back down to Burbank and told Ida she could have that car. She was still livin' in the house. I gave her the car I had. I had a '37 – oh, by the way, the '39 I bought, I had to turn that in because I just couldn't handle the money, you know. Thirty dollars a month.
First job I got, I think it was a little over 200 dollars a month or something like that. I can't remember exactly. I got the job in Long Beach. I got a job on a ship – second engineer.
I was making under a dollar and hour at Lockheed. In the Navy I was making 900 for the year. 'Course in the Merchant Marine you got overtime, and you got double pay if you got in the war zone. They doubled your pay. My pay corresponded with the Navy officers. Close to that, except you didn't get all the extra things like some assistance for your wife and your kids and all that kind of stuff. It was pretty good pay.
I got a job with a company that had an office in Long Beach. I can't remember the name of the company – could have been Weyerhaeuser or something. And they wanted to know how I wanted to go. There was a ship up in Portland Oregon being built. So I said, "I want to fly. I don't want to ride in one of those trains – it's too long." So they flew me up there.
They put us up in a hotel – all the Merchant Marines. Paid you a per diem, and give you a regular salary. Paid your hotel bill and all that.
And they had just laid the keel, so now I got about two months for this ship to be built or less. They build 'em pretty fast, the Liberty ships. I can't remember now whether it was even a Liberty ship. No, it was a tanker is what it was – a turbo-electric tanker. That's what it was.
The day it was ready, they already had the shakedown crews and they were ready to commission it, and I got the measles. I had to go to the hospital, so I missed that ship. But, it went out to sea and broke in two. I don't know, it just broke in two – two pieces. They towed the engine part of it into one of the islands in Hawaii. And the rear-end – the aft-end where all the boilers were – they towed into Hawaii to use as a power plant. So I was kinda' lucky I didn't get on that one. I don't know if people got killed, but probably some of 'em did. Probably was a big storm, most likely. They build 'em so fast, you know.
Keith's Continuous Discharge Book