“Chick!”

John Gigarjian (left) and my dad, 20 January 1945

For the longest time, I had no idea who the fellow on the left side of this photo was. This is one of five photographs in which he appears amongst the twenty-three photos taken at my parents’ wedding, on 20 January 1945. I knew him only as my dad’s best man.

No names appear on the back of the photos. No names were written on the pages of the album that the photos once occupied. I recall that the album had a deep wine-coloured covered and was bound with rivet-like posts—two or maybe three of them—and I seem to recall a decorative cord. The pages were black (like construction paper) and the photos were held to them with photo mounting corners.

On my parents’ Certificate of Marriage, the Witnesses’ names identified Dad’s Best Man as John Gigarten.

Mom and Dad’s Certificate of Marriage

For as long as I’ve had the Certificate of Marriage, I had never paid much attention to the writing on it. I had always assumed that the Witnesses’ names were signatures. Therefore, why would someone not spell his name correctly. Of course, had I taken the time to scrutinize the document just a wee bit, I would have noticed that the handwriting was identical. It’s possible that Gladys, mom’s best friend and Maid of Honour, had written the names in. Maybe Mom did, although the handwriting doesn’t quite look like hers. The priest perhaps? Someone in the church’s office?

I’ll never know, of course.

Years ago, when the internet was still rather in its infancy, I had a trial account at Ancestry, and I searched for John Gigarten in Ancestry’s database. Nothing. Not one single result came up. I probably even used my pre-Google search engine of the day, AltaVista. Nada. It seemed that there was not a human being on the planet with the name Gigarten. It never occurred to me at the time that the name was misspelled because again, I had assumed—without close scrutiny—that he signed the document and how is it possible that he would have written the wrong name? It was nothing short of baffling.

Fast forward to October of 2017…

I had work in Boston photographing a conference, so while I was there, I visited the YF-415 memorial for the Black sailors who were killed in that disaster, which is on the site of the former Hingham Naval Ammunition Depot (now Bare Cove Park), and later that day met the divers who discovered the wreckage of the YF-415 in 2002. (It was a weird coincidence that one of the divers, Bob Foster, attended Bowling Green State University at the same time I had, and that we had a mutual friend.) When the conference was over, I took a train to New York so that I could meet one of my dad’s ship mates, Isidore “Teddy” Bertone, who has been a driving force for this research project of mine. We met while a videographer recorded our meeting. While Teddy and I talked, I showed him my parents’ wedding pictures and when the above picture of my dad and his best man came up, Teddy excitedly exclaimed, “Chick!”

He explained that “Chick” was a cook on the Zircon, and then showed me a picture from shipmate Frank DeRupo’s wedding—”Chick” was the same guy in my parents wedding pictures! He was DeRupo’s best man, too. In all likelihood, “Chick” was probably a really great guy, but I’ve also wondered if maybe he was so popular because he was the ship’s cook (SC1c) and no one wanted to get on his bad side. I also wonder how many times he served as someone’s best man.

Sailors (from left): unknown, Teddy Bertone, Frank DeRupo, Gigarjian, Anthony Susinno, Mario Saponaro

When I returned from the trip, I began in earnest seeking out more living Zircon sailors. Because the YF-415 disaster was forefront in my mind with regard to the information I was seeking, I downloaded all of the Zircon’s Muster Rolls and Reports of Changes and set about trying to figure out who was aboard the Zircon on 11 May 1944. As I created my spreadsheet, I came across the name Gigarjian on one of the muster rolls, and a light went on.

So “Gigarten” was probably due to someone having misheard a name. Or perhaps my mom and dad weren’t familiar enough with John to know how he actually spelled his name, despite that Dad had spent two years with him aboard the Zircon, so took a guess without asking him. Maybe my dad always thought his name was Gigarten.

My older brother Mike, who has been working on our family’s genealogical history for probably twenty years created a “family tree” of Zircon and YF-415 crew members using his Ancestry account. He made a profile for Gigarjian within the tree, and I uploaded the wedding photographs I have of him to the profile. Not long after that, we received a note from one of Gigarjian’s daughter’s with regard to the photographs as she had never seen them before. It occurred to me then to create a Facebook group where we could come together to share photos, stories, documents… anything related to our fathers’ service on the Zircon. As of today, the group has about 170 members representing about a quarter or so of the 400-plus sailors that served on the ship at one point during its five-year commission.

Living in these times with the internet, it’s easy to forget the days when getting in touch with someone who lived a thousand miles away was either a chore (writing letters) or a major expense (long-distance telephone calls). I recall well my mom’s frugality with regards to household expenses. For example, once I traveled to Chicago alone, and Mom wanted me to call her collect when I got there. She would refuse the call, of course, as she only wanted to know that I arrived OK.

So it probably was with my dad and his former ship mates. The cheaper long-distance rates didn’t kick in until after 11:00 P.M. on weekdays, and as my dad rarely stayed up beyond 11:30 (he’d hit the sack after watching the local news), it’s unlikely he would have called Chick. I believe that the same rates applied to the weekends, so it’s possible that if Dad had wanted to catch up with Chick or anyone else he’d served with, he would have done it at that time, but I just don’t recall him ever spending that much time on the phone with anyone. Besides, nine months out of the year, his weekends were spent either playing golf or watching it (and baseball) on television.

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.

The Nakhoda

I suppose that my story has to start somewhere. In a way, it starts with my having discovered Teddy Bertone’s comments about my dad online, since it was the impetus for all the research I’ve done and continue to do. But there are so very many pieces to this puzzle that I’m going to back things up a bit to the somewhat unlikely beginnings of a millionaire’s fancy at the time of economic disaster.

The Zircon‘s pre-wartime incarnation was as the Nakhoda, a yacht designed by Cox & Stevens, Inc. and John H. Wells, Inc., and built by the Pusey and Jones Corporation of Wilmington, Delaware in 1929 for Frederick J. Fisher, of General Motors and Fisher Body fame. It cost Fisher somewhere between one and two million dollars, and the Navy acquired it for $155,000 as World War II loomed. The Nakhoda was one of three “sister” ships built at the time for Detroit-area millionaires, the other two being the Cambriona, built for entrepreneur and Detroit Tigers part-owner, Walter O. Briggs (purchased by the Navy in 1942 and renamed USS Crystal), and the Rene, built for Alfred P. Sloan, president, chairman, and CEO of General Motors (purchased by the Navy in 1941 and renamed Beryl).

The ship’s launching in Wilmington, Delaware was worthy of an item in the New York Times in August of 1929, as was its arrival at Brooklyn’s Tebo Yacht Basin for outfitting the following February in both the Times and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

New York Times, 22 August 1929 (left) and 8 February 1930

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 7 February 1930

News of the Nakhoda’s impending arrival was announced in the Detroit area, with nearly two-thirds of a page in the Detroit Sunday Times devoted to the ship, with photos and details of the ship’s elegant design.

Detroit Times, 8 June 1930

Items appeared in various newspapers about the ship’s ports of call, ranging from the Great Lakes to Miami, Florida. The Nakhoda‘s passengers included other captains of industry to Mrs. Woodrow Wilson and Jesse H. Jones, head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

Newport Mercury, 6 June 1930

Detroit Free Press, 23 June 1931

Detroit Free Press, 27 August 1931

Miami News, 5 March 1932

Battle Creek Enquirer, 27 July 1934

Detroit Free Press, 27 July 1934

Ironwood Daily Globe, 7 August 1935

In December of 1940, less than seven months before Frederick Fisher would die, his wife Burtha sold the Nakhoda to the United States Navy.

Detroit Free Press, 8 December 1940

Detroit Free Press, 19 June 1941

Two years later, much of the Nakhoda‘s furniture and miscellaneous items would be sold at auction.

Parke-Bernet Galleries Auction Program, 5 June 1943 New York Times