In the nearly ten years I’ve been researching the many aspects of the USS Zircon (PY-16)—from its days as a millionaire’s luxury yacht to its days as a, uh… millionaire’s luxury yacht—my main source of direct knowledge of the ship and the YF-415 disaster, which prompted my research, has been Isidore “Teddy” Bertone. I’ve also talked with my mom’s brother, Skip, who had conversations with my dad about his service in general, and the YF-415 incident specifically. Beyond that, most of what I know has come from newspaper articles and documents I’ve obtained either from the National Archives or via Ancestry/Fold3.
In 2015, when I was back in the Midwest to work at the now-defunct Great Lakes Folk Festival, as well as to attend a reunion of people who had attended Good Shepherd School on the East Side of Toledo (just prior to the diocese shutting down the parish), I visited my dad’s sister Gertrude, who as I write this is his last surviving sibling (and, I hate to say, not doing well). Gert was born almost seven years after my dad, so when he was in the Navy (age 24 to 27), she was but 17 to 20, so still pretty young. When I asked her about his history in the service, she couldn’t tell me much except for a time that she visited him and my mom in New York not long after they’d gotten married, which actually would have been after he left the Navy.
But one thing she did recall was that their mom had been in touch with a local Toledo newspaper with regard to Dad’s having been awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for his role in the rescue of the YF-415 sailors. She couldn’t give me any specifics about when or where the article would have appeared, however, so I didn’t have a clue as to how to find it. There were at least two daily newspapers in Toledo in 1944, The Blade and the Toledo Times, as well as (I think) The East Side Sun, which was dedicated to East Toledo. I figured that I’d have to spend hour upon hour in the main library’s microfiche/microfilm room searching through several years’ worth of newspapers, and even then, the chances of not finding it were high. Also… I live in San Francisco!
A couple of weeks ago, however, I figured out how to search Google’s newspaper archives, something which—for reasons I can’t explain because I’m generally pretty web savvy—had eluded me for all the time I’d known about the archives. Lo and behold, when I did a search for Dad’s name, an article from The Blade came up from Tuesday, 26 December 1944.
Google’s scan of the article, however, wasn’t all that great, as you can see, so I contacted a librarian at the Toledo-Lucas County Library from whom I’d received some other information recently about obituaries for high school classmates of mine. I asked her if there were a chance that the library would be able to pull a better copy of the story from their microfiche. In her reply, she said that yes, a better copy probably could be pulled, but that the library maintained a clippings file of World War II articles which had local interest, and attached to the email was this…
Librarians are the best!
My Father Served On The USS Zircon (PY-16) 