Edward Conroy

The closest he’d ever come to the sea was opening a can of sardines. But even though Edward Conroy had never been on a ship, the Navy’s call to the young Pennsylvania man was strong.

Conroy was born Sept. 27, 1921, in Braddock. After graduating high school, he moved to Duquesne, where he took a job in the storeroom at Westinghouse Electric. Together with a group of five friends from Westinghouse, he decided to enlist.

“My father said, ‘Don’t go in the Army. Stay out of the Army.’ He was in the Army in World War I, in France. He said, ‘If you’re going to join, go ahead and join. Just don’t join the Army!”

So Conroy joined the Navy.

“But the Navy was full, so they put me in the Coast Guard,” Conroy said.

Conroy soon began to learn about being on the water. His training in Manhattan Beach, N.Y., would serve him well as a seaman first class on the USCG Storis, braving the cold, harsh storms of the North Atlantic. He would serve nearly four years, from November 1941 until 1945.

“We had a great, big storm one time that lasted for about five days,” Conroy said. “I almost went overboard. If it wasn’t for the lifeline, I wouldn’t be here now.”

On the Storis, Conroy crossed above the Arctic Circle, visiting ports in Iceland and Greenland while the ship broke ice when Army battalions stationed in the north became stuck.

“The ship goes right up on the ice,” Conroy said. “The weight of the ship breaks the ice down through.”

Sometimes, the Storis herself would get stuck in the ice. They’d use depth charges to break their way out. When the crew of the Storis wasn’t on ice duty, they were on submarine duty, hunting the Germans. One capture in particular, of a German U-boat in 1943, sticks in Conroy’s mind.

“It was during the night,” he recalled. “We had a general call us, ‘Man your guns!’ and so forth. We had some depth charges we’d throw down on top of them.”

Soon, Conroy said, the submarine came to the surface and the hatch opened.

“They decided they’d had enough of that,” Conroy said. “They surrendered.”

The Storis took the U-boat to the harbor in Newfoundland, where the prisoners were put into barracks.

“They went nice and peaceful,” Conroy said.

Hardly a day went by that they didn’t encounter a sub.

“That was one of the biggest shipping lines, coming from Newfoundland over to England,” Conroy said.

The Storis’ job was to protect the Allied shipping lines.

“We was pretty lucky,” Conroy said.

Movie actor Victor Mature gave up time in the middle of his successful career to serve on the Storis, as did some of the men from the orchestra of Xavier Cougat.

“We had a lot of celebrities on our ship,” Conroy said.

There was good food on the Storis, Conroy said, as well as group sing-alongs, plenty of poker and regular news via radio.

In October 1943, Conroy got married after two years of constant letter writing to his sweetie at home.

“It was about the only thing we had to do besides eat,” Conroy said.

He had met Pauline in 1941 when she and a girlfriend were waiting for a bus on Main Street in Portland in front of a Walgreen’s. Conroy was with another boy, and both were broke and looking for bus tickets. Pauline is still fond of the memory.

“Oh, he was a good catch,” she said.

Unfortunately, the sea called him back from his honeymoon. It was “more or less a lonesome feeling,” Edward Conroy said.

It was especially tough since their first child was born the next year with thewar still raging. Conroy was in Greenland when the war ended.

“We didn’t have any liquor. I celebrated with a Coca-Cola,” he said.

Conroy remembers just how he felt when he heard the news about the war’s end.

“I threw my hat in the sea,” he said, smiling. “It was just a joyous feeling.”

After the war ended, Conroy and his wife made up for lost time with six more children, the last born in 1962. They initially moved back to Pennsylvania, but Conroy said, “she disliked the place so much we decided to go back to Maine.”

That’s where they’ve been ever since.

Pauline, a Bucksport High School grad, brought her husband home, where he worked at the then-St. Regis paper mill for 35 years as an electrician before retiring during Champion’s reign.

Conroy kept in touch with a few close friends from the ship, and has since joined the American Legion and VFW. He said he’s unhappy about the current war in Iraq, although he supports the U.S. troops in the field.

“I don’t think we should be over there, but we still have to support my country anyway,” Conroy said. “I think in 1942, they supported it because they figured it was a just war. But this right here, this is not a just war. Before, we had something to go to war for, and now what do they have to go to war for? Something they don’t believe in.”