Chapter 12
UT and the Navy
Not long after high school, Austin moved into the Grandview Apartments on Carlin Springs Road
in Falls Church, Virginia. Some of his
many roommates included Tony Castelda, Gerry Griffin and the irrepressible Jim
Campbell. “I still remain in touch with
these guys,” he recalled, “We partied all the time. Had nothing but women in our building and our
unit overlooked the pool.” To pay his rent, he worked for Harris
& Harris Insurance, near the corner of 15th And K Streets in downtown
D.C. H&H handled reinsurance, he
explained. “Take a large company and
understand that no one insurer could take the risk exposure. So a front company like Mission Insurance
writes the initial policy and takes 5% while laying off the remaining 95%. We would shop around the 95% to other
insurers like Metropolitan. Business was
good. I advanced to Claims Manager and
worked closely with Bill Cullen, a good man.”
It was a period of finding his
way in life. He knew that working at
Harris was not for him. Life was good,
but work, women and wine had their limits.
To offset his hedonism, Austin spent some time working with the Big
Brothers organization. It was an
excellent experience, and one that remains vivid and untarnished in his
memories.
Following a few months of being a working man, Austin applied to the University of Tennessee (in
Knoxville) on a whim. “To my everlasting
surprise, I was accepted,” he recalled.
He enrolled in time for the fall semester and arrived in Knoxville in
early September. The University of
Tennessee was “a major party school” and Austin dutifully pledged to the Delta
Tau Delta Fraternity. He even joined the
University’s redshirt football team, which served as practice fodder for the
varsity. Initially, he lived in one of the
school’s dormitories, but they were excessively noisy. His first roommate lasted about a month
before enlisting in the Marine Corps. His
next roommate, Bruce Crawford, would last much longer and remains a good friend
to this day. They eventually moved out
of the dorms and into the Shelburne Tower Apartments. When the rent proved too much to handle, he
found room in a large house on Clinch Avenue.
“It made sense since I paid no rent,” he noted, “but that old house had
no heat or air conditioning.”
The house left its own indelible
memories. One night, Chuck Iorio, a
fellow student and teammate on the ‘redhsirt’ team - carried a huge tree stump
up the stairs. Chuck lived in the room above
Austin’s and when he dropped the stump on the floor, “all the plaster on my
ceiling fell down. It rained plaster all
over me.” Despite the plaster rain,
Austin considered Chuck an improvement over the previous tenants. “Several foreign students were living there
and they used to cook their meals in the middle of the floor,” he paused before
adding, “It was my first contact with folks from the Middle East.”
Tennessee, he reminisced, was “…
a good experience for me. I met
top-flight people there like Bruce Crawford and
my first wife, Vicky Belle Siddens. She
was from Abingdon and we hung out at the Varsity Grill and G&H Grill among
others.” It was a lot of fun, but the
parties never ended and Austin’s schoolwork suffered as a result. With the advice of a placement counselor,
Austin enrolled at tiny Athens College in Alabama for the fall semester in 1964. During a visit home that summer, Austin
bought a 1964 Plymouth Sport Fury for $3,400 from Al’s Motors. It was a black convertible with red and white
interior, and a ‘souped-up’ 426 engine.
While UT had too much partying,
Athens had none. The school was located
in what was then a ‘dry’ county, although the Tennessee state line - where
alcohol was still available - was only 26 miles away. He joined the school’s soccer team and
focused on his studies until receiving a phone call from his mother in
1965. A family friend from the Arlington
County Draft Board informed her that Austin would soon be drafted for the war
in Vietnam. Austin returned home and
tried to enlist in the U.S. Naval Reserve but was turned down. Joining the Reserves would almost guarantee
that he would not be subjected to live combat.
It was during this period that
Austin began to frequent an Arlington pool hall in the evenings. He befriended a Navy officer and while
playing one night shortly after his failed enlistment, Austin related his
dilemma to him. The officer, Chief Luton,
told Austin to report back to the Naval Reserve Enlistment Center at 7:00 PM on
the following Wednesday evening. Austin
appeared on time as Luton directed, and as the Reserve recruiter began to
admonish him for returning, the telephone rang.
True to his word, Chief Luton had pulled some strings and following a
short test, Austin was sworn into the Naval Reserve that evening. As a Reservist, his formal training would not
commence until activation. For one year,
Austin waited for the call. Other than
the weekly meetings at the U.S. Naval Reserve offices, his evenings were spent
shooting pool and “bullshitting with friends.” Due to his high grades during initial testing,
and prior to activation, Austin received an E-3 ranking, the highest enlisted
level prior to certification/specialization.
Soon after his official
activation in 1966, Austin boarded a train bound for the Great Lakes Naval
Training Center in Waukegan, Illinois.
As he waited for assignment, Austin lived in the Transit Barracks and
was enrolled in Basic Electricity and Engineering classes, subjects that did
not agree with Austin. Following three
months of training, he was assigned as a Yeoman E-3 to the U.S.S. Somers
(DDG-34); although the ship was based in San Diego, it was being refitted in
San Francisco (Hunter’s Point) and Austin boarded the Somers in February
1967. The U.S.S. Somers was in the
process of being converted to a guided missile destroyer at Hunter’s
Point. Once aboard the Somers, Austin
requested a change in classification. He
passed the tests required of Firemen and earned a red stripe to his uniform’s
E-3 insignia. As a Fireman, Austin was
part of the Engineering attachment and assigned to one of the Somers’s two boiler
rooms. It was hard and often dangerous
work, and he still bears the scar of an accident involving steam.
In their off-hours, Austin and
his shipmates ventured into San Francisco for entertainment. It was 1968, he recounted, “the height of
hippiedom” in San Francisco. “We were
highly encouraged not to wear our uniforms in the city,” he recalled. With the Vietnam War raging abroad and massive
protests against the war raging in America, the Navy did not want its personnel
to become targets for anti-war demonstrators or thugs.
Austin was joined on these forays primarily by other boiler room Firemen
including Ron Botts, Chuck Aragon, and a sailor named Quinton (“Man, I have
tried to recall his last name,” he added, “but all I ever called him was
Quinton, and I don’t even know if that was his first or last name.”). While he loved San Francisco, especially areas
like Chinatown, the Wharf, Golden Gate Park and Sausalito, Austin did not care
for Californians. They were “like
cereal,” he explained, “once you got rid of the fruits and nuts, all you got
left are the flakes.”
During the period of 1967-1968, the U.S.S. Somers made
several voyages including sailing to Portland, Bremerton and Seattle,
Vancouver, Honolulu and Yokosuka, Japan; the latter served as the Somers’s
overseas home base.
On October 9, 1968, Austin received an honorable discharge
from the U.S. Navy in Long Beach, California.
The Navy gave him an open-ended airline ticket. Austin, along with a handful of other
recently discharged Navy personnel, packed into a convertible and drove all the
way to Memphis. He flew home to Arlington
a few days later. He continues to recall
his service with reverence and pride. The
Navy taught him new skills and a chance to see the world, as well as some
friendships that still endure over forty years later. He also acquired a deep love for
sailing.
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