Ensign John Gay

When I began to write this post, I thought there was no one in John Gay’s family with whom I would be able to get in touch. That was because for the longest time, I had believed his name had a middle initial—G. I’m not sure where I had come up with the initial because Gay’s name does not appear on any of the muster rolls or deck logs that I had at the time I added him to my spreadsheet. I only discovered that he was an officer aboard the Zircon after receiving a bunch of photographs from the son of Arthur Fleming Drant (F2c), who’d served on the Zircon from the day it was commissioned on 25 March 1941 until 23 February 1942. Gay’s name was written on the back of a few of the photographs.

John G. Gay, Lieutenant Charles Frederick Havemeyer

I think that the G came from a news clipping I’d found in a Pennsylvania newspaper which announced on its society page that a John G. Gay had been accepted by the Naval Academy in Annapolis. It was the only such news item I had found for John Gay at that time. Simply put, I conflated one John Gay with the other because… the Naval Academy. With few exceptions, very little information about a ship’s officers is available via muster rolls, so it wasn’t until I obtained a tranche of deck logs that I found his name listed as the Zircon’s Communications Officer.

28 February 1942 deck log’s List of Officers

This process of trying to locate over four hundred Zircon families requires a little persistence. Failure is almost the norm. When I feel I’ve gone as far as I can go with someone, I move on to the next person on the spreadsheet. Eventually, I work my way back around to those that I had reached dead ends with earlier (I can’t count how many times I’ve been through the spreadsheet).

Gay (left) with Ensign Julius Peter Wilkowski*

I can only hope that in repeating the process, sources such as Newspapers.com or GenealogyBank,com might have “new” information for me. Also, as more and more people create family trees at Ancestry, additional and (often) more reliable information becomes available, and in some cases, there are photographs, as I recently discovered while looking for Sylvester Craven, who was a Chief Commissary Steward in 1941 and 1942.

With Gay, however, I was stymied… for a long time. A week or so ago, though, I came across a Draft Registration card of one John G. Gay, who was an immigrant from Czechoslovakia, and I thought I’d at last hit paydirt. I wondered, though, if an immigrant would have so quickly risen through the ranks to Ensign, especially as there was virtually zero military documentation besides the Draft Registration card. As I looked into his family history, I found no survivors. He had one son who’d died young, and another who died but had no children. I started writing, however, thinking that he was the guy, despite my gut feelings.

Wilkowski (knee), Ensign Ed Thorne, Ensign William Dommerich, and Gay behind Lieutenant Commander Cornelius Martin Sullivan

But then, I discovered a Findagrave memorial for John Gay—with no initial—that had an obituary included in the description. Everything in the obituary seemed to line up with the guy I was looking for. There was no middle initial on the memorial, but that’s pretty common as people create pages based only on what’s on the gravestone, and sometimes, gravestones don’t include initials. And then, I found a duplicate memorial that had identical birth and death information, no obituary, but with links to other family members. I got a little giddy thinking that my mystery had been solved.

Using the birth and death dates, I was able to find a tree at Ancestry which included an image of his obituary, which I probably would have found had I not been searching for John G. Gay. With the information about his surviving family members, I was able to find an email address that worked for his daughter Phyllis, and she confirmed I’d found the right John Gay. But, she informed me, “(h)e was always known to us children as John Gay, there wasn’t a G for a middle name.”

Gay (left) again with Wilkowski

A case in point regarding new information becoming available throughout the course of this project, I’m 99.999999% certain that when I began to look for Gay in Ancestry’s military documents a few years ago, I didn’t come across his Draft Registration card. Discovering it now, I see that he registered in New York, which I believe only recently made these documents available.

Gay’s Draft Registration card

The obituary I found at Ancestry (and then Newspapers.com) was published in the Boston Globe, and it differs from what I found on Findagrave in that it’s pretty bare bones. The latter was published in the Southampton Press (which I obtained thanks to a librarian at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton) and provided a brief but good sketch of Gay’s life:

The Boston Globe version indicated that he’d died after a long illness, but did not mention that he’d been hit by a car.

Boston Globe, 18 July 1996

Gay was born in Boston 10 April 1915 to William Otis Gay and Annie Margaretta Dumaresq, and as noted in the obituary, he had six siblings: Sophie Margaretta, William Otis, Dorothea Ellen, Philip Dumaresq, Anne, and Colette.

His family is delineated in Colonial Families of the United States, which was published before Colette was born in 1921.

Colonial Families of the United States

Getting back to his service… he was Communications Officer on the Zircon from 30 August 1941 until sometime in 1942 (since I don’t yet have all the ship’s deck logs, I currently don’t know his detachment date), after which he was promoted to Lieutenant (j.g.) and assigned Commanding Officer of the Sub Chaser, CS-682, at the Submarine Chaser Training Center (SCTC) in Miami, Florida.

The above Report of Changes from 31 December 1942 seems to indicate that the SC-682 was commissioned on 9 January 1942, but I found no muster rolls from before the December date.

Later that year, he reported on the destroyer USS Sturtevant (DE-239) as its Executive Officer, and served for about seven months. Interestingly, the History of the Sturtevant gives him a middle initial… G.

History of the USS Sturtevant (DE-239)

Phyllis said that her father never spoke of his time in the Navy, that “he was badly affected by the war” and likely suffered from PTSD. But… once the family got a television, “he was crazy about watching Victory at Sea.“

Post-war, Gay went back to working on Wall Street, an occupation which appears to have run in the family, as both his father and oldest brother worked in world of banking and finance.

*Wilkowski would later legally change his name to Peter J. Wills.

Frank Paul Bielskis

Because I haven’t updated this site in some time, I thought I would start posting individually about some of the men who served aboard the USS Zircon (PY-16).

When I began my search for the Zircon sailors (and/or their families), I created an Excel spreadsheet of all the names that appeared on muster rolls I’d obtained via Fold3.com. One of the first things I did was to determine which of the sailors were on board the day of the YF-415 disaster (11 May 1944), as looking for witnesses to that event was a priority of mine at the time. So, taking the March (quarterly) 1944 Muster Roll and then adding and subtracting the sailors whose names appeared on the subsequent Reports of Changes, I was able to determine that there were a hundred and twenty enlisted men aboard the ship on 11 May 1944. Once I acquired the ship’s deck logs for 1944, I found that there were eight officers.

Once the spreadsheet was completed, I began searching for information about each sailor in alphabetical order, and amongst the first handful on the list was Frank Paul Bielskis. Unlike many (probably most) of the people I’ve searched for, I found a fair number of newspaper articles which mentioned Bielskis’ name. Sadly, they all were news articles about the boarding house fire in Brockton, Massachusetts in which he died.

Page 1 of the 30 April 1966 edition of the Boston Traveler

Bielskis had been married, with two children, but he appears to have been either separated or divorced from his wife at the time the fire occurred. For a time, he and his wife, Frances (“Fannie”) had lived with his parents, Casimir (Charles) and Eva, in Brockton. He worked as an automobile mechanic.

His wife apparently did not marry again, or so her obituary suggests. Bielskis was not mentioned.

His children have not responded to my postcards, letters, and phone calls, so either they were too young to know much about him when he died, or their relationships with him were such that they have no interest in speaking about him.

The below photo of him (at top right) is the only one I have of him in which he has been identified. I received it from Thomas Shubert, whose father is at the very top of the photo.

Top: Thomas Charles Shubert, Jr; Middle: Elster Johannessen Tufte, William Albert Greffin, Ned Landis Lamprecht, Frank Paul Bielskis; Bottom: William Richard Salomons, Jr., Paul Magera, Buford Aubry Griggs (Photo courtesy of Thomas Shubert)

I am generally pretty outgoing, but calling strangers out of the blue remains somewhat uncomfortable for me, especially since we live in the age of scam. TA few months ago, however, I gathered up enough moxy to call Theresa Loef, sister of Frank Paul Bielskis. I sent her a postcard in November of 2020 but hadn’t heard from her, so I thought a call was in order.

I’m glad that I called. We had a perfectly lovely conversation, and she wasn’t the least bit concerned that I was trying to defraud her in any way (she didn’t seem to be anyway).

Theresa is almost twenty years younger than her brother, so she barely knew him. She was unaware of the YF-415 disaster, but she did recall the fire in which he was killed, and told me that Bielskis originally roomed on the ground floor of the hotel, but another boarder had physical issues which made it difficult to get to the third floor, so Bielskis traded rooms with him, thus saving his life and sealing Bielskis’ fate. Of course, this could be a myth. This could be the story that her parents told her, as I don’t know how such a thing could be known unless there were interviews of the survivors that made it to print. Myth or not, it is what she holds onto as a proud memory of her brother.

Not long after speaking with Theresa, I sent her a copy of the photo.

In Memoriam: Richard Hamilton Garrison

RIchard Hamilton Garrison

In May 2014, I had no idea what a simple web search would wrought. As explained in the pinned post (and again in my post from last month), I was curious to see if any newspapers ran articles about the USS YF-415 disaster, and the subsequent rescue of about half of its crew by my dad’s ship, the USS Zircon (PY-16). Because of life (read: mostly work) and my hesitancy to make cold calls to people I don’t know, I didn’t get in contact with Isadore “Teddy” Bertone for almost two years after I’d read about him on the Northern Atlantic Dive Expeditions (NADE) website. My biggest regret in this process so far is that I didn’t contact Tony Susinno when I had the chance. Tony was Teddy’s lifelong friend and fellow Zircon sailor with whom Heather Knowles at NADE also had spoken about the YF-415 disaster.

It wasn’t until after I met Teddy in October of 2017, that it occurred to me that more Zircon sailors who were aboard the ship on 11 May 1944 might be alive. So I went through the ship’s muster rolls I’d downloaded from Fold3.com and identified the approximately one hundred enlisted men and officers, and I began searching various newspaper archives sites, FindAGrave.com, Ancestry.com, etc. to see if I could find living Zircon sailors.

The first one for whom I couldn’t locate an obituary, either in archived newspapers, public records, or more recent newspapers via Google searches, was Richard Hamilton Garrison, who when he left the Zircon had the rating of Storekeeper, Third Class (SK3c). Not wanting to repeat my previous mistake of failing to speak with a Zircon sailor when I had the chance, I found Richard’s phone number online and gave him a call early in February of 2018. I announced who I was and explained why I was calling, and he lit up. He recounted his experience on the Zircon that day in 1944. While he couldn’t recall what he was doing at the time the Zircon came upon the YF-415, nor the names of the three men who had gone out searching for YF-415 survivors (my father, Paul Magera, Henry John O’Toole), he described the gruesome details of body parts in the water and the smell of burning flesh.

He also talked of being a musician, and how when he enlisted, he’d hoped to play in a Navy band. That wouldn’t come to pass. He told me of his wife, who had died of cancer, and that he also had cancer. It was clear in his voice that he missed his wife, but his own sickness didn’t seem to affect his attitude. At 92, he was sharp and cogent. He told me his son lived in the San Francisco area, and that his daughter had been a nurse in Oregon or Washington… that she looked after him. I later found he had another daughter.

We spoke for probably forty-five minutes, and towards the end, the names one of his fellow sailors came to mind… Joseph Henry Hoser, Jr., who also worked in the ship’s store. At the end of the call, Richard told me that he was really pleased that I’d called and suggested that if ever I were in the San Diego area to get in touch so that we could meet. I told him I would do just that, and as it happened, a client contacted me the next day or so to confirm photographing his association’s annual meeting in Los Angeles in the coming week. I called Richard and told him that I’d be in Los Angeles in just a few days, and that I could rent a car to make the two-hour drive to see him. He seemed excited at the prospect. I certainly was.

A day or two later, however, he called and left a message on my voicemail. It was rather somber in nature, and he said that he had to cancel my visit; that it was “weird,” but would I please call him back. When I did, he told me that a neighbour of his, a local sheriff, had come by to check in on him, as he regularly did, to see how he was doing. He asked him if anything was new, and Richard told him about me, my phone call, and my plans to visit him. The neighbour told him not to see me, that I was probably a con artist attempting to scam him. Richard told me that he didn’t give the guy my name, address or phone number. I told him that if he had, he would have been able to find me all over the internet. You know… because I’m not a con artist. Richard then told me that he would treat this all as if it had never happened. We said our good-byes.

In the months that followed, more Zircon photographs came into my possession, and I sent copies of a number of them to Richard, hoping that 1. I could convince him I was on the up and up; and 2. see if he could recall names of unidentified sailors in the photos. I also sent copies of news articles and the NADE newsletter. He didn’t respond. I sent a letter to his daughter who cared for him. She didn’t respond.

At some point, I shared Richard’s phone number with Teddy Bertone so that the two former ship mates could talk. Teddy has been my driving force in this project, and as he has opened up about it in the last few years with his family, he has also come to miss those with whom he served. Teddy is as proud a person that has ever worn a military uniform, and he continues to hold dear those days he was in the Navy. I knew how important it would be for him to talk with Richard, so I helped to make it happen. Neither knew each other way back then (or recalled having known each other), but Teddy had remembered that Richard played a trumpet on board and that he had blonde hair.

I’m a little more than half-convinced that the sailor on the right is Richard at RIddell’s Bay

A month or so later, I asked Teddy’s daughter how it went and she said it had gone great. I asked, too, if I came up in the conversation, hoping that Teddy had vouched for me and my integrity. She said that he had. So, I made another call to Richard, shortly after sending him an enlargement of the group photo which graces the top of this blog. I was really hoping he could identify himself in the photo and perhaps others. But he was curt with me when I asked about the photo, and then he hung up. I was really hopeful that I could have gotten him on video talking about the day of the YF-415 disaster, as well as about his everyday life aboard the ship. But since it was clear that he no longer wanted to talk to me, I decided not to press him and stopped communicating with him altogether, with the exception of a postcard for his birthday. As the 75th anniversary of the disaster approached, I sent a note to a San Diego area television station hoping that someone would interview him about the incident. I never heard from anyone. I suspect that no one contacted him. I shared his phone number with Boston-area writer-historian Jim Rose, who interviewed him for his article on the 75th anniversary of the disaster.

A couple of months ago, since I had stopped trying to contact Richard, and since I couldn’t have expected his family to get in touch with me, I did a web search, essentially look for—and hoping I wouldn’t find—an obituary for him. Alas, I did. I felt a bit crestfallen. He had died about ten months earlier. I began writing this up with the intention of posting it today, the first anniversary of his death.

I sent notes of condolence to two of his children, neither of which has responded, and I let Teddy’s daughters know. While I suppose I understand Richard’s kids’ unwillingness to contact me, I also sort of can’t. Selfishly, I’m sad that I wasn’t able to develop my relationship with Richard beyond that first phone call. I really would have loved to sit face to face with him and have a discussion about his time on the Zircon, and his life before and after the war… something I never did with my own father.