It was a Saturday morning in 1974 in paradise, a.k.a. Hawaii. As good nukes, we were all at “work.” After all, our ship was in the middle of a refueling overhaul in Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard. Saturdays were part of the “normal” work week.
Sometime mid-morning, the Skipper received a most unusual phone call from SUBPAC Headquarters. Apparently, Admiral Rickover called the Force Commander and chewed him out about one of his Submarines having a monkey in the Maneuvering Room. This had been reported by a local Naval Reactors Representative.
The Skipper jokingly relayed this info to us during lunch. We all laughed. THEN, I suddenly realized we had a Brass Monkey hanging from a bracket high in the Maneuvering Room overhead.
Background:
We had been on two back-to-back WESTPAC deployments in 1971- 1972. We spent a lot of time in the Philippines, and we had visits to Hong Kong (at that time a British Crown Colony) and Kaoshung, Taiwan (still a Democratic Chinese Republic). Somewhere along the line, many crew members purchased brass hanging monkeys. They had 2-inch bodies and 5-inch arms with hands turned toward the body so one could be hung from the next and so on. The string could be endless, limited only by the height of the top monkey. One of these fellows ended up hanging from the bracket up against the pressure hull in the overhead of Maneuvering. It had been there so long, we had forgotten about it. It witnessed TWO ORSEs from it’s lofty perch!
Realizing our Brass Monkey was the perpetrator, I sheepishly re- trieved it and showed it to the Skipper. I apologized for the embarrass- ment of having to come clean to the Admiral and told him he would never see it again.
I have no idea what he said to the Admiral. I’m sure he had to ex-plain it. But, true to his nature, nothing ever trickled down on us.
As Paul Harvey says: “And now for the rest of the story.” I lied. At a ship reunion, 33 years later, the ship having been long laid to rest, THE MONKEY REEMERGED brightly polished.
The Monkey was then presented to our skipper, Captain Mike Mc- Bride, CO USS Sargo, 1972-1975.
