U.S. NAVY

Clayton Pomroy

Clayton Pomroy has always had a knack for numbers, a talent that wasn’t lost on the U.S. Navy during World War II.

Now 89 and long retired from his long career of teaching math and other subjects at various Hancock County schools, Pomroy enlisted in the Navy after being called to service in 1942.

At the time, the Hancock native was working in a machine shop in Hartford, Conn., turning out Colt Browning .30 caliber machine guns for the war effort.

A 1934 graduate of Ellsworth High School, Pomroy completed a three-year teaching program at Castine Normal School in 1938. That fall, he accepted a position as principal and the fifth-through-eighth grade teacher at a one-room school in the Franklin County community of Weld.

During an assembly in Bangor of more than 100 able-bodied and draft-eligible young men, Pomroy elected to join the Navy and was shipped out to Newport, R.I., for three months of boot camp. From there he was assigned to a radio technician training program based in Michigan City, Ind.

“They put me in a three-month, pre-radio program and, I guess because I was a public school teacher before going into the military, they selected me to be the teacher in this program,” he said. “I didn’t know a thing about electronics, but 90 percent of the participants in this program had been schooled in preliminary electronics. It was decided that the easiest and quickest way to teach electronics was through math.”

The level of math he taught there was comparable to first-year college math.

“Math was taught in this program as a means to an end,” he said. “My students were really being trained to be electricians. After a year of training, they were put aboard ships, submarines and aircraft to operate and maintain radar and sonar equipment.”

After six months of teaching math in the radio technician program, Pomroy was transferred from Michigan City to nearby Chicago, where he taught classes related to military electronics.

“I spent almost two years of wonderful service in Chicago,” he said. “I don’t know why, but the citizens of Chicago seemed to take a great liking to sailors, more so than other military personnel.”

During the war, the War Department took over Chicago’s Hugh Manly High School for a radio technicians training center.

“Toward the end of the war, they shipped me out of Chicago to teach math in California,” he said. “They sent me to San Diego, where the Navy had taken over a big, luxurious hotel with golf courses, swimming pools, everything. Just before the war ended, they shipped me back to Chicago, which was pretty much my home base throughout the war.”

For reasons he still can’t explain, he was transferred to Harrisburg Naval Supply in Pennsylvania just before his discharge in 1945.

“It was a huge supply depot that stocked everything from nuts and bolts to complete engines and power units,” he said. “I was only there a month, taking inventory.”

Pomroy held the rank of Petty Officer 1st Class at the time of his discharge. With his military service behind him, he headed home to Maine.

“I took over an ice business in the Hancock, Sullivan, Franklin and Sorrento area,” he said. “We built quite a large ice house in Sullivan, and we would cut ice in the winter and store it in sawdust for delivery with our one truck to homes and businesses in the area.”

Doomed by the emerging popularity of electric refrigerators, that venture lasted about three years. Pomroy went back to teaching at the Steuben Grammar School, where he served as principal and taught all subjects in grades five through eight.

“I later transferred to Sorrento and then to Hancock, where I stayed at each place as principal and a teacher for about two years. Finally, I moved to Ellsworth as a teacher of math only and taught there in the junior high for 20 years, retiring in the late 1980s.”

Although he was never sent overseas, Pomroy appreciates that his service was of value to the war effort.

“I never got out of the United States,” he said. “But I suppose that everyone in the service had a job to do.”

— Tom Walsh