Pineapple and A Deck Of Cards

Ripe Pineapple

During the five years Chuck was stationed in Pearl Harbor he grew to dislike the taste of Pineapple intensely. 

When the guys were low on funds and most of them always were especially just before payday because in those days the pay was little more than peanuts! They referred to payday as the day the eagle flies!

They would take some steaks and other food from the galley which could be grilled on the charcoal grills, and some gilley which was torpedo juice and it was pure alcohol, and go down to the beach and they would mix it with pineapple juice and party harty!

A couple of times he drank too much and he got really sick and barffed, he said,"It was so delicious going down, but when it came back up it really burned my throat and made it raw, and I eventually lost my taste for pineapple completely!"

A Fanned Deck

He also lost his desire for playing poker on those West Pac runs. He said, "There was this kid aboard whose Dad was a professional gambler, and he was a single parent." 

This kid grew up under his Dad’s tutelage, and he said to Chuck, "The only toy that I had ever had to play with was a deck of cards."

The kid said, "There are only 52 cards, and anyone can learn to fan them out and back, then turn them and call them." Chuck said, "He could do this time after time with a new deck, he didn't cheat, he didn't have to, and I also decided that playing poker was not for me either."

Chuck always sent his pay check to his home bank, and he always carried checks to use in any port they visited. No credit cards in those days! Once on another West Pac run they went ashore someplace in Japan, not sure where. 

He partied a lot and ran out of checks, but was not through partying. So he tore a piece out of a brown paper bag about the size of a check and wrote it out just like a check mainly as a lark.

He printed in big letters across the top the name of his bank, then wrote pay to the order of the business wherever he was, dated and signed his name, not dreaming they would cash it.

They accepted and cashed it, and when he did come home again and went into his bank to check on his account, and there on the front wall was his brown paper bag check; nicely framed and displayed for everyone to see.

He was quite impressed that his hometown bank would not only honor his check, but would display it in that manner for a sailor! But this was in the days when we were known personally, and not just as a number on paper!