GERALD CLARK

(Mickey Thomas did Gerald's story for the Osceola Sentinel-Tribune in his "Tales from the Aisles." He has generously given permission to use excerpts for a more complete account.)

I was on born on a farm south of Osceola close to Weldon, destined to be a sportsman — a passion inherited from my father, although it included nothing related to horses. He hated and always had trouble because of them. A couple of them had run away with him. One time, he ran over a bumblebee nest, the horses ran off and as he told it, there were pieces of mower scattered all over.

He decided to quit farming and go to barber school. I was only one year old at the time. We moved to Des Moines and he had six months of education, which was the length of barber school at that time, and then he had six month of internship with a barber in Weldon, Iowa. He was given his license and we moved to Osceola. His shop was where the Advertiser used to be, and from there he moved to the basement under Hart's Fashions. That was where he started his sporting goods store. Dad stayed in barbering for almost 30 years. While I was in the Navy, he bought the building where Murphy's Law Office is now, and had the largest sporting goods store in Osceola. Mom, Corda Clark, worked for many years at Robinson's store and helped Dad with the sporting goods. In 1941, the family moved to the house on the corner of Main and Pearl, where Mom still lives.

Growing up in Osceola was a ball. I had so much fun! I was in Boy Scouts and all that, Dad was into fishing and so was I. In fact, Dad was almost a legend as a fisherman around here. In the summertime, he would go out on the lake at sunrise, and fish until it was time to open the barber shop. Then he would be back out on the lake at 6:30 or 7:00, and stay until dark. He and I both fished East Lake, West Lake, and Grade Lake before there was any development to speak of. Dr. Sells owned the Grade and had his horse barn down there. That was where Rich Robinson had a boat house for his speed boat. He also had a beach and allowed us kids to go down and swim off his beach. As time went on, Rich became aware that there might be liability involved, and now there would be, but in those early days it was no problem. Dr. Sells sold the lake to Pete Allen, who was also a good friend of Dad's. Pete got the idea of forming a fishing club, and he asked Dad to do it for him He said, "I only want select people. I don't want everybody running wild," so Dad sold memberships, and was in charge of Grade Lake for quite awhile.

We caught some prize fish. Jim Davis, the basketball coach, fished with Dad occasionally, and he would get really irritated. Dad would row the boat, Jim would fish, and wouldn't catch anything. One day Jim said, "I'm not having any luck. Why don't you fish and I'll row the boat?" Dad made a cast and caught a 4# bass, made two more casts and on the third cast caught another four pound bass and turned them loose. Jim couldn't understand that. Why would you catch a four pound bass and turn it loose? But that was the way Dad was. He'd go out, catch a big fish and turn it loose. He never did have one mounted, and he caught some big fish!

The biggest he caught at the Lake of the Ozarks, where he had a home. It was a flathead catfish, weighing 72 pounds! He kept that one, had it steaked out, filleted, and we had a freezer full of fish. It was delicious! He was out there all by himself and I asked him, "How did you get it in the boat?" He said, "I really don't know." It took three of us to get it out of the boat.

Rich built speed boats and Dad got into the speed boats business also. He and I built the first three. We'd build them, sell them, build another a little bit better and sell it. I was probably the first to water ski or aquaplane on Grade Lake. An aquaplane is nothing but a board with a turned-up nose. It is hooked to the boat. There is a rope to hang onto but unlike water skis, if you get thrown off, there goes the board because it is tied to the boat. Wayne Ballinger, who was a dear friend of mine, and I spent hours at the lake water skiing and playing with the aquaplane.

I built model airplanes, and hung out at the airport. I'd ride my motorcycle out to the airport and hang around out there. Sooner or later somebody would come along and ask if I wanted to go up. Sure! In some way, Mom always knew I was flying. If I'd get home a little late, she'd say, "You've been flying again, haven't you?" I'd say. "Yep." That was it. Shorty Denley taught me to fly, along with the night manager at the hotel. He had a little Taylor-Craft and I used to fly in that plane with him, also. And there was Bill Touet, and Doc Baden. He had an airplane out there, and I was a good friend of his son. I did quite a bit of flying from the time I was about 13 or 14 — not alone. I always had someone with me. Before I got my license, I had bought an airplane and flew it all the time.

In 1952, while I was still in high school, I enlisted in the Navy. I was 17, so I was required to have my parents' permission. After a year of schools I became a submarine torpedo man. I was an adventurer, let's face it. I would try anything, do anything. I consider life an adventure or it is nothing at all. That's true. I went to submarine school, and was in submarines out of Key West, Florida for several years.

I met my wife, Deloris Afford, on a beach in Key West. Deloris was only 18 and I was 21. We went together for a couple of years and were married. It was a little more complicated than that. Her grandmother lived in Key West and Deloris was living with her and working. Her family lived in Cedar Keys, which is 80 miles north of Tampa. We announced that we were getting married so her mother came down to meet me, and she gave us her blessing. She called her husband, Bill, and told him, "These kids are getting married. I want you to get an affidavit, fill it out and have it notarized signifying that you give Deloris permission to marry Gerald." Three days later still nothing had happened. She called Bill and asked, "Why haven't you sent that affidavit?" He said, "No daughter of mine is marrying no damn Yankee!" She said, "Bill, if you don't send that affidavit, I'm not coming home." He relented and after we met we got along super. There were 11 kids in that family and he provided for them from what he earned as a commercial fisherman. He was the greatest! So was my mother-in-law. She was a jewel. Bill passed on at an early age, with lung cancer — a heavy smoker. His wife had never worked, had never driven a car. She bought a car, learned to drive, and got her license. She went to school, got a high school diploma, a job in an office for a corporation in OCLA, FLA, and lived well. She was an amazing woman. She passed on when she was past 80 years old.

From Great Lakes I went on a nuclear submarine, the USS Tullibee SSN 597, on which I spent less than a year, but I made Chief Petty Officer. They needed a Chief on the Admiral's staff so I was assigned to be a weapon's chief for Admiral Larance, the commander of submarines in the Atlantic fleet. I used to have to ride these boats to give inspections and that kind of stuff. Submarines, by the way, are the only ships in the Navy that are actually called boats by the crew. The reason was that the original submarines were carried on tenders on board the ship. Consequently a boat is carried on a ship, and they have retained the word "boats" even though the new missile submarines are as big as a WWII heavy cruiser.

We had a couple bad runs with the submarine, which made me realize I had a love for fresh air and sunshine I didn't want to ride submarines anymore. That is where I got my gray hair. I wanted to go into underwater demolition. The Skipper was preventing me from doing that. I played basketball against him in high school. He was from Pella, a guy by the name of Sinehorst. He called me in when I first went on base and reminded me we had played against each other. He asked if I smoked, and I said, "No." He said, "That's good because I don't like people smoking on my boat."
When. I told the Admiral I wanted to go into underwater demolition, he told me, "Tell you what, give me a year and I'll see that you are there." And he did. I was in underwater demolition for the rest of my career. If someone says I'm crazy, I am certified. A psychiatrist wanted to know what made us guys tick. He interviewed all the Chief Petty Officers, and when he finished, he put all his notes together and proclaimed that we were crazy to do the stuff we had done.

Mickey supplied the information that Gerald applied for and was accepted as a candidate in the Navy Seals. In a class of 280 trainees, he was one of only 37 who graduated. The first five weeks of training were rigorous physical conditioning, and the sixth week — "hell week" — was mental and physical torture. There were no rules. The purpose was to get the men to quit. There were such tests as having seven men, Gerald being one, carry a heavy sea craft on their heads for hours and hours in the mud flats of Virginia, washed them off with a fire hose, then they ran 1 1/2 miles to chow. That night they had to run 18 miles in three hours. There was a huge log with which they did push-ups, sit-ups, ran with it on their shoulders or heads.

A lot of it was fun — diving and playing in the sun. The only clothes we usually wore were a dungaree shirt or fatigue shirt, swimming trunks, a Rolex watch and a K-Bar knife — that was our "uniform." The knife we carried was for self protection and to cut any lines we might run onto. We were never without the knife, never!

To keep ourselves fit, the first thing we did every morning was to go out on a 7-mile run. We would run down the beach a certain distance, run back, and run to the barracks. That was simply part of our UDT (underwater demolition training). If for some reason we weren't going to run, we'd play soccer or rugby platoon against platoon.

Our head gear was a regular Marine Corps style hat. We deployed all over the world. How far we would go to do our job varied. I've locked out of the submarine eight miles off shore, swam to shore, did my job of reconnaissance, swam back out and met the boat four days later. The boat found us with sonar for which we had this really technical piece of equipment —two pieces of electrical conduit with a rope tied to each one of them. We would surface and bang these together, the submarine picked up the conduit bang and honed in on us.

We were in teams of 20 or 21 — a total of 100 men, broken down into platoons of 20 men each. But we seldom operated with more than three to five people. With scuba gear we were good for two hours underwater. This was our deep sea standard dress:

A lot of what we did, we did on the surface. A helicopter would fly down along the beach and every 25 yards one of us would jump from the helicopter into the water. This was called a helo-cast. He would be at 50 feet, going 50 knots, and we would swing out on a bar and enter the water with our swim fins and face masks. We had sounding lines with knots on it, every foot or so. By dropping the line, we could find the bottom and know how deep it was. We would continue doing that all the way to the beach, marking the depth on slates.

We would also note any obstacles like coral reefs or anything like that we found. We would swim what we figured was 25 yards, do a sounding, 25 yards more, another sounding, etc. All these 20 guys stretched out along the beach, would give their slates to the photographer. He

I made my first parachute jump on my third week, which is jump week, and I couldn't wait to do it again. The guy that landed beside me was a little black guy and he was happy, whistling as he was packing his parachute and parachute bag. I was, too. I threw mine up on the truck and he threw his on the truck and said, "So much for this crap." I looked at him and said, "Are you quitting?" He said, "Yeh, right now. Watch me walk down that road." He made one and only one jump.

To me parachuting was fun. I was Chief Petty Officer in charge of the 4th platoon. I had the whole thing. My corpsman was a great big tall guy, Don Strange. Don broke his leg playing soccer. He was over on the side of the field and I went over to him and said, "Get up. We need you." He said, "I broke my leg." I said, "Quit feeling sorry for yourself. It' probably just sprained." He said, "No, I'm a Chief Corpsman. I know when my leg is broke." I said, "It ain't broke." Doc Myers came over and asked what was wrong. He looked him over and turned to me and said, "It's broke."

They took him to the hospital, put a cast on his leg, and he came back. I went into operations. We had a Lieutenant from Washington, Iowa by the name of Durand. We sat and looked at each other across our desks all day. There was practically nothing to do after sports and that kind of stuff was over. George sat over there one day with a calculator and I asked what he was doing. He said, "I am calculating how to make a linear charge. And I think I just figured it out. I used aluminum foil, put the explosives in the foil and prime that, then under the primer I put a steel plate." I asked what it was for and he said, "To blow the cast off Chief Strange's leg."

When it came time for the cast to come off, Chief Strange wanted no part of the invention but he did bring the cast back. We took it to the explosive area, put the charge on the cast and believe it or not, when we set that thing off, it blew a fine line clear down that cast. There was one piece of gauze holding the cast together, and it wasn't even burned. I said, "George, that's good." We had experiences like that all the time. It was just a ball! There were times I'd like to forget when somebody was shooting at us. I had some experience of combat in Lebanon and Vietnam. Our main job, however, was reconnaissance and intelligence gathering.

I got out of the Navy in 1957, with an honorable discharge. I came back home, and made use of an earlier job of running the projector at the theater. I hadn't been back two days before Bob Hutte was knocking at the door wanting to know if I would run the "Ten Commandments," which he had gotten. The projectionist he had wasn't all that good and he asked if I thought I could run it. I said, "Sure." So for two weeks I ran the "Ten Commandments."

At the end of two weeks, I had put in applications for jobs, but you couldn't buy a job in those days. I was in the shop and Dad said, "Do you want to go to barber school? I'll put you through barber school." I said, "Dad, I think I'm going back in the Navy." I had 90 days to get back in to keep my rank and on the 88th day, I re-enlisted in the US Navy, and ended up in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. When my wife asked, "Where are we going?" I told her, "You're gonna hate this —Hawaii."

We spent three years in Hawaii and loved every minute of it. I was deployed quite a bit on the submarine, but we so enjoyed our time there! I had met her on the beach. She was a swimmer, I was a swimmer, and we spent all our time on the beach surfing or swimming We had neighbors there, one a Marine by the name of Les Venturi, and he and I got to be excellent friends. He was from the island of Kwai. That was his home. Deloris and I, after I retired, went back over and visited Les.

I rode the submarine for three years, and then Uncle Sam decided it was time this young lad had some shore duty, because at this point I'd always been at sea. I basically was shanghaied for shore duty and sent to Great Lakes as a drill instructor pushing "boots." I got the orders, went to the Skipper and said, "Is there any way we can cancel this? I don't want to be a Company Commander." He said, "This is the way it's going to be, like it or not." So we moved up to Great Lakes, had the car shipped to Oakland, California to the Naval Base, and flew into Travis Air Force Base, where my uncle picked me up. He lived at Rio Vista, California, which was a hop, skip, and jump from the base. He took us up there and we stayed with him for six or seven days, then took a ship in to get the car. We drove across country — before there were interstates — to Osceola, then I went on to Great Lakes and I was there by myself until we got Navy housing. After that happened, I brought Deloris up.

As Company Commander, the first three weeks was a nightmare because it was the blind leading the blind. The men were just starting to get into the routine of being in boot camp and that's hard for some of them. There was no way but just to grin and bear it. I was trying to get organized and not set anybody back. I pushed five companies in a year's time and then I spent two years as a swimming instructor.

I have run onto so many people that were in Great Lakes Boot Camp while I was there. The pilot for Muellers Company in Osceola was there in 1961. I reminded him when we met that I had given him his Swim1 and his survival swimming. I had every company so I knew I had to have been one of his instructors. One kid who came into the pools with his company was an outstanding swimmer. Because they had to tread water for 10 minutes, I stood on the diving board looking down at him and said, "Hey, kid, you're a pretty good swimmer. Where are you from?" He said "Cedar Keys, Florida." That was where Deloris was from. I asked if he knew the Allford family. He said, "Yeh! I went to school with them."

I ran into Roland Clark, my first cousin. He and Roger were twins. I was walking down the street in Hong Kong, coming from the Union Jack Club, which is a British enlisted men's club, and here was Roland coming the other way. In Little Creek, Virginia, I ran onto Becky Persels at a PTA (Parent Teachers' Association) meeting. Lyle was stationed there. Especially as a swimming instructor, guys would tell me that when they went through Boot Camp, I'd given them their swimming instructions. A Chief Petty Officer emailed me, to ask if I was a guy that coached a couple classes through the camp in 1960. I said, "Yeh." He said, "My name is Phillips. I was in your company." Here we were, I was retired, and he was a Chief Petty Officer, getting ready to retire. Time flies.

In 1973, I was getting ready to be out of the Navy, and I spent the last three years as a recruiter to ease myself back into civilian life. In 1972, we lived in the big house on Fillmore Street across from the library. The first four months, I was sent to Dubuque to take charge of the recruiting station there until they could get someone else. They brought me back down here and gave me my station at Creston. That was where I finished learning to fly. I went to the airport and met John Barcus, the manager. I had on my dress blues. He had no idea who or what I was. He said, "All I saw on you was gold." He asked, "What can I do for you?" I said, "You are going to teach me to fly." He looked at me kind of strangely and said, "Well, let's go get in the airplane." Of course, flying wasn't new to me. I was flying the airplane doing what he was telling me to do, and he said, "You are doing excellent. This isn't bothering you a bit." I said, "I've had 1200 parachute jumps. Why would this bother me?" I'd go over to Creston every once in awhile and get signed up to solo again, and after about 1 1/2 years, Sally Moseley, who was an instructor there, said, "Gerald, I saw you flying a twin engine airplane the other day." I said, "Yeah?" She said, "Don't you think it is time you got your license?" So I did.
I recruited over there until I was ready to retire, which was in 1975. I was at Great Lakes for over a month getting my physicals and everything with nothing to do. I went up and told the base executive officer, "I'm going out of my mind without something to do. I was swim instructor here years ago." He said, "You want to teach swimming?" I said, "I might as well, I'm going to be here awhile." So I went into the pools and was teaching swimming again while I was going into retirement. The day I retired, Deloris came out and was at my retirement ceremonies with me. As we drove back she said, "Let's celebrate." I asked what she wanted to do. She said, "Let's go to the Pier and have lobster." That was my Navy retirement celebration.

We weren't back here long before Bob Byers came to ask if I thought I could still run the projector. He and Carmen wanted to go to Las Vegas for a week. I agreed to do that and it was just like I'd never left the booth at all. Deloris came up and sold tickets. We ran it for a week and I made things orderly. When Bob and Carmen came back, they were at the theater on a Friday night when a bunch of kids were there. I ran the projectors, and when I came down out of the booth, Bob came up and asked, "What did you do while you were here?" I said, "What do you mean?" He said "The kids are pretty orderly." "I told him, I instilled discipline." And I did. With some of them, I did it a little bit the hard way but I instilled some discipline in the theater.

Carmen phoned me later and asked, "How would you like to own the theater?" I said, "I can't afford to buy that theater." She said, "You haven't heard my price." I asked what she wanted for it, and she said, $30,000. "If I get more than that, capital gains would kill me." I said, "Let me see what I can do," so I went to the bank and talked to one of the bankers who was one of Dad's friends. It sounded to him like a good idea and he said he would run it by the Board, "But you tell Carmen the theater is sold, because if they turn you down, I'll loan you the money myself" That is how I got into the theater business. Isn't it odd? Even though to this day I miss the Navy with all my heart, I did enjoy the theater. I had a lot fun there. Deloris sold tickets, and our daughters ran the concession stand. It was a real Mom and Pop operation.

Deloris died of diabetes in 1986. She and I had three children and now I have 11 grand­children, and three great-grandchildren. Donna was born in July 1957, in Key West, Florida. Debbie was born in 1959, on the 3rd of July one day before Hawaii became a state. She was born in a hospital in the territory of Hawaii. Rob was born in New London, Connecticut in 1965, at the submarine base hospital. They grew up loving the water as much as Deloris and I did. They lived in the water in the summertime. Donna is an extremely good swimmer. They all were good but she was probably the best. She's 5'11" and has exceptionally big feet. I always told her she was such a good swimmer because she was born with swim fins for feet.

Donna lives in a community between Sedalia and Warrensburg, Missouri. She married David Adair, a mortician who would like to locate here. Donna works as a nurse at the VA (Veteran's Administration) Home close to Warrensburg. This year she was named #1 Caretaker in all the VA hospitals in the USA. They told her that with this award she could get a job in any hospital anywhere in the world. She loves her job, and the old guys living in that home.

Both the girls have a set of twins. Donna's children are Gabriel, twins Joshua and Jacob, and Joseph better known as Toad. Debbie was a stay-at-home mom for her children Holly, Hannah, Hillary, and twins Haley and Kenny. Two graduated this year, Hannah from nursing school in Kirksville, Missouri; Hillary from the University of Missouri. She had a full ride scholarship for all four years from the Masons. Her ambition is to join the Secret Service, and I told Debbie, if I had known her grades and her ambition, I'd like to have gotten her into the Naval Academy. As it is, she has her education settled. The twins are still in high school. Rob has two boys, Tyler and Jorden. They live here in Clarke County.

Gerald concluded his story saying, "What I am doing now is playing. I play all day long. I play with my airplane. I'm overhauling one, but I also fly. I am building a WWII P-51 Mustang Fighter in Mom's garage. It is scaled down from the original size but it will look just like the real one, as did my German FW 190." In his retirement Gerald served as an Osceola City Councilman for many years and was Osceola's Mayor for four years.

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