Keith Tillotson

The J D Ross (January 1944)

I waited for another ship to be built, so I spent about three months there in this hotel. The next one built was a Liberty ship. They built those in about a month. That's a reciprocating engine, and I'd never been aboard one of those.

The captain assigned to the ship, and the whole crew, was somewhere in Portland Oregon havin' fun while the ship's being built. You had to go through the union hall to get a job, and sometimes you'd run out of money and have to find where the captain was – what nightclub was he in, so you could get some money off of him.

So actually what you did was just spend all the money you earned while you were livin' in this hotel. Never saved any money, just spent it all. They paid you in cash – even the Navy did that. They didn't give you any checks. All you had to worry about when you were sailing was, you get paid cash aboard ship, you'd better have two or three people go to town in a group. Or you just might not get there. Everybody knows that a sailor gets paid off that way.

They usually pay you big bills. One time I got paid off after a long trip, and it was four or five thousand dollars. I just called a cab to go to the bank. The trip was about 10 months almost. What you did was you'd get a draw. You'd get a draw on it, and spend that money. So you didn't spend it all.

This particular ship was a Liberty ship. JD Ross, it was called. I'd never been aboard one of these up and down jobs, reciprocating engine like in a car. The large cylinder was 48 inches in diameter. You could stand inside of that thing and put the rings in it.

First trip we went to Guadalcanal. Some island – Russell Island – I remember the name of the one particular island. Unloaded there, and headed for Chile. That was a long trip. From Guadalcanal, that's just north of Australia, we went to Chile. I forgot the name of the town – one of the main ports in Chile.

We were hauling cargo, just all the supplies they needed for the war. A lot of it I suppose was food that wouldn't spoil. I didn't pay too much attention to the cargo, just general stuff. What we picked up in Chile I'll never know. I didn't pay any attention to that. My job was just the engine room, you know.

We had three officers, and I was the second engineer on most of them. Three that stand watch – first engineer, second engineer, and third engineer. Then the chief don't have to stand watch. He's like the captain, but he's still under the captain. I remember one chief complained, said, "The only thing about being chief, you can't be in charge of the whole ship." The captain's in charge.

Anyway, we had a nice captain. I forgot his name. That's where I learned how to gamble a little bit. We had the first engineer and the purser, and we had a couple of cadets out of King's Point. They had to stand watches, too – one in the engineering department, one in the deck department.

The German U-boats were all over. One time we thought we were bein' chased, and that's when we burnt out a bearing on that Liberty ship. I don't know, they just thought they spotted a sub, or got word that there was one. So, we threw the juice to it. Could only make about twenty knots on those Liberty ships. Twenty-five. Heading for Chile, we burnt out a bearing. The connecting rod was kind of pounding. We went a-thumpin' on in. We had to fix that while we were in Chile.

Come up the coast from there, and went through the canal, and stopped I think somewhere in Jacksonville Florida. Stopped in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and went through the C&D canal. I was on watch, so I didn't see goin' through this canal. Went through there and went into New York, and I paid off. Got off the ship.

Like half the crew, usually they quit. If they had a long enough time at sea they'd want to get off and go on a vacation, you know. You get one long trip, you get tired of it. The chief engineer got off, the first engineer and I got off. The third engineer – practically all of us got off. They just hired a new crew right through the union. Most all of us went right back to Portland Oregon to start all over again.

Next: Jack Dempsey's (1944)