U.S. Navy
Donald J. Curley

Although he served his country honorably and willingly during World War II, Donald J. Curley of Surry calls his contribution “humble” and “totally undistinguished.”

“Nobody ever shot at me,” he frankly notes.

Of course, it is highly unusual for people to shoot at Dartmouth College students. And a Dartmouth student Curley was, from 1944 through 1946, courtesy of his Uncle Sam, who wanted him to learn to be a deck officer.

For all that, Curley did his part. He just did it early.

“I think I did more for the war effort before I entered the service,” he said.

When he was a teenager growing up on Long Island, N.Y., Curley and three schoolmates worked for a defense department subcontractor assembling contact blocks for walkie-talkies.

The factory was the basement of the subcontractor’s house.

“He was an engineer for Nabisco,” Curley said. “We were all 15 years old … it was during the war: everybody had something to do.”

From 1942 to 1944, after school and on weekends and evenings, Curley and his three buddies assembled walkie-talkie contact blocks for 25 cents an hour.

“Some poor guy went ashore at Omaha Beach with a walkie-talkie we helped assemble,” he said.

Upon graduating from high school in June of 1944, his walkie-talkie employer gave him a gift of $20. Curley had already given himself a graduation present: enlistment in the Navy.  He’d signed up the previous March at the age of 17. All agreed he would complete his senior year, then report for duty before July 1, which is what he did.

His ambition was to be a pilot in the Naval Air Corps, but that was not to be.

By late spring of 1944, U.S. forces had so depleted the pilot ranks of the Japanese Air Force that the demand for new American pilots was down.

“The U.S. Navy wasn’t losing as many pilots,” Curley said.

So the naval command decided Curley should be a deck officer.

“They say ‘jump’ and you ask which way,” he said.

Because the Navy had too many aspiring pilots and not enough aspiring deck officers, Curley was sent to Dartmouth to study engineering, calculus and physics, among other subjects.  It was intense: a huge course load and classes five and a half days a week. It wasn’t Curley’s idea of college.

“I had a degree but not an education,” he said.

After he was honorably discharged in 1946, Curley went to work in New York City selling textiles.  He rejoined the Navy in 1949 for a year, just before Korea. Once again, no one shot at him as he did his service.

He returned to New York and started an insurance agency in Manhattan. The business prospered and Curley stayed with it until 1986, when he retired.  In 1987, he and wife Violet came up to Maine.

“Violet used to come up here” when she was younger, he said. When retirement time arrived, “I said ‘water’ and she said ‘Maine.’”

And here they are. The Curleys enjoy the outdoors.  Donald and Violet have two daughters, Lynn and Jean, and two grandchildren.

— Stephen Fay