MERCHANT MARINE, U.S. NAVY, U.S. AIR FORCE Gardner Gray Able-bodied young men were in such demand in 1944 that Gardner Gray was the only boy in the senior class of his high school in Steuben. With World War II raging on both fronts, Gray, 17, was eager to enlist, too, but was too young. “I wanted to go and would have if they had let me,” he remembers at age 79, now retired from lobstering and living alone in the Wonsqueak Harbor area of Gouldsboro. “Seventeen is too young to send someone out to get all shot up, but you don’t know that when you are 17.” Days before his 18th birthday on March 2, Gray enlisted in the U.S. Merchant Marine, leaving high school for New York and boot camp at Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. By the first week of May, he was headed from New York to North Africa, working in the galley of the S.S. Jonathan Edwards, a Liberty ship loaded with guns and ammunition. “Casablanca was quite a change from Steuben,” Gray said. “After we unloaded we came back to Baltimore, which was very fortunate. I didn’t know it then, but a lot of the vessels that shipped out of New York or Boston went to the North Atlantic, which wasn’t a proper place to go. If you got torpedoed, you didn’t have a chance in that frigid water.” From Baltimore, Gray returned to North Africa as the second cook aboard the S.S. Samuel F. Moody, a Liberty ship headed for Libya with guns, tanks, Jeeps and wheat. “The war was pretty much over by then in the Mediterranean,” he said. “Most of the fighting was going on in Normandy, so I thought I was pretty damn lucky to be headed back to Africa.” From Tripoli his ship was sailing with a convoy for Italy when it broke down off the coast of Sicily in the Messina Straits. “Our rudder broke, and we were going around in circles in an area known as ‘torpedo junction,’” he said. “We were scared we were going to spend the night there, but we got it fixed and caught up with the convoy in Naples.” After offloading their cargo of wheat in France, Gray and his crewmates headed back to Baltimore with a cargo of 200 German prisoners of war. Among those prisoners was a doctor, the only doctor on board. “I remember being sent to him after getting a quite deep cut on my little finger from a sardine can,” he said. “He cleaned it with some sort of salts and dressed it.” Christmas 1944 found Gray home in Steuben, enjoying a 30-day leave before heading back to southern France aboard yet another Liberty ship, the S.S. J.C. Osgood. “This time all five holds were filled with wheat,” he said. “They warned us that, if this vessel springs a leak, you guys are all done. When wheat absorbs water, it expands and bursts the plating. “We unloaded the wheat in Marseilles, which was about as close to the war and the hot spots as I would get. When we came back to Baltimore, I tried to get another ship, but I couldn’t. We were that far advanced in the war that everything was going out into the Pacific from the West Coast.” Gray tried to enlist in the U.S. Navy, but was told he would have to be drafted. “I went back to the draft board in Machias and begged to be drafted,” he said. “They said they’d do it, and the Navy took me in August of 1945.” After a few months of training, Gray was shipped to the Philippines, this time as a passenger aboard a Liberty Ship. “I just couldn’t get away from those damn things,” he said. “All the holds had been outfitted with canvas racks as bunks. That ship was loaded. When you came on deck in the daytime, there was hardly a place to sit down.” In the Philippines, Gray drove a truck, hauling coral for building roads and offloading cargo from incoming ships. He was a seaman first class when he was discharged in August of 1946, about a year after Japan’s surrender ended the war. Gray returned to Maine, but found the going tough and returned to lobstering. “There wasn’t any money down here,” he said. “This area never really got out of the first Depression, at least not in terms of wages.” After five years of pulling traps and building weirs, Gray joined the U.S. Air Force in 1951 at age 25. He was discharged as a staff sergeant in 1955, after working in Saudi Arabia and at other postings as a butcher. “I came back home and decided to get serious about lobster fishing,” he said. He also decided to get serious about Elsie Lindsey of Gouldsboro. The couple was married in 1957 and by 1961 had two children, Robert and Lora. A widower since 1979, Gray finally retired from fishing in 2001. “World War II helped me to start growing up,” he said. “It helped me to see what was going on in the rest of the world.” — Tom Walsh