U.S. NAVY Junior “Snuffy” Blevins   Junior “Snuffy” Blevins was only a high school junior when he was drafted in 1943 and opted to join the U.S. Navy. Why the Navy? “When I was a kid, growing up in West Virginia, I always liked the uniform on that sailor on the Cracker Jack box,” he says. Good thing, as Blevins would spend most of the next 23 years in one naval uniform or another after choosing to make a career of the Navy.  His first assignment took him to the Pacific theater of World War II as a diesel mechanic aboard the USS Dionne, a 290-foot Evarts class destroyer escort. “We escorted convoys and looked for mines and submarines,” he said. “We pinged a few submarines and dropped some depth charges. We saw some oil, but I can’t say for certain that we ever got a sub.”  If they had, he said, he would have been the last to know.  “I was only a ‘snipe,’ which is what they called everyone stationed below deck. We never had the same information as the people on the bridge.”  The USS Dionne was steaming near Guam when it blew one of its four engines. “We had to come back to the States to get a new engine, and I’m convinced that’s why I’m sitting here today,” he says. “Things were getting heavy then, and the kamikazes were beginning to hit small ships.”  After returning to the fray, his ship was assigned to patrol a long strait between the West Pacific islands of Saipan and Tinian. The Japanese occupied both islands, and the Navy was trying to prevent them from being re-supplied.  “One day we came across a skiff that had in it a young Japanese girl who was probably 10 or 12,” he said. “She was apparently the daughter of some important Japanese official on Saipan. Her family had cast her adrift, hoping to get her to safety. When we picked her up she had a lot of Japanese money sewed into her coat. “We built a bunk for her, as she wasn’t allowed on deck. She was on board for about three weeks, until we dropped her off in Honolulu.” Another encounter with a small boat off Saipan resulted in the capture of nine Japanese soldiers attempting to desert by hiding under the boat’s floorboards.  “We couldn’t communicate with them, and weren’t sure what to feed them, but they did eat rice, which we never did,” he said. “We locked them up in a pea coat locker and kept them under guard.  “I remember taking them out on the fantail and giving them cigarettes. Instead of taking more than one, they lined up and passed one cigarette down the line, with each taking a puff. Except for one young fella — they wouldn’t let him smoke.” After turning their prisoners over to another ship, the USS Dionne joined other vessels making preparations for a naval assault on the Japanese mainland. “They were assembling a fleet and getting ready to invade Japan,” Blevins said. “It was sometime in the middle of the night that we heard the Japanese had surrendered, so they began dispersing the fleet.” Blevins’s ship was sent to the Yellow Sea, the arm of the Pacific Ocean that separates China and Korea.  “We were sent to fire on mines, and there were mines floating all through the Yellow Sea,” he said. “We were there for about a month before we headed toward home. We spent a month in Hawaii — and all our money — before they shipped us back to the States.” After helping to decommission his ship in California, Blevins left the Navy, but only briefly. Back in West Virginia and Ohio, work was hard to find, which prompted him to re-enlist.  “I was trying to get back to Japan, to escape my wife,” he says with a laugh. “She wanted to get married and I didn’t. I tried to get away two or three times."  Blevins and Charlotte Cody of Bar Harbor were married in 1951. She passed away in 2000.  By the time he retired from the Navy in 1966, Blevins held the rank of engineman chief and had been assigned to a variety of vessels that took him from Israel to the Arctic Circle. Between 1967 and retirement in 1986 he worked as a civilian at the U.S. Navy’s base on the Schoodic Peninsula, organizing recreational activities for naval personnel.  A longtime resident of Winter Harbor, Blevins celebrated his 81st birthday on Aug. 31. — Tom Walsh