U.S. NAVY Robert L. Garland Robert L. Garland, 80, was born on the family homestead near Green Lake and raised in Ellsworth Falls. He entered Ellsworth High School but left after the attack of Pearl Harbor in 1941. He was 17 when he traveled to Hartford, Conn., and enlisted in the Navy in 1942. Why the Navy? “My father said, ‘I don’t want to see you guys in the mud like I was in World War I.’” He served on the then new Battleship USS Iowa, which had 16-inch guns and had just been commissioned in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. As one of the first crew, he was made a plank owner. Garland was a gunner’s mate 2nd class. His battle station was in the powder room of turret two. It was his job to heave 90-pound bags of gunpowder, filling 16-inch projectiles that would travel 25 miles to a target. He also stood watch in the lookout tower looking for Japanese suicide planes. The kamikazes would fly 20 feet over radar, straight into the bright sun. They would then drop down on the smokestacks of American ships. Most times there were so many planes it was difficult to identify them all. The Iowa first traveled to Newfoundland on a shakedown cruise to make sure all mechanisms were working properly. From Newfoundland, the ship went to Norfolk, Va., to pick up President Franklin D. Roosevelt and transport him to Casablanca in North Africa for the Big Three Conference in Tehran. Present at the conference were Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. The Iowa then traveled back to Norfolk, Va., where President Roosevelt was returned to shore. The ship sailed down to the Panama Canal and then on to Pearl Harbor and the Pacific Ocean, where they joined the Seventh Fleet. Admiral “Wild Bill” Halsey then embarked on the ship and the Iowa had its first major battle at Midway. This battle was one of 10 major battle stars won by the Iowa. Their next destination was the Philippines and many of the islands on the way to Tokyo, Japan. One of Garland’s most painful memories involved watching as an American plane, its pilot probably wounded in the fighting near Saipan, started coming in too low to land on a nearby carrier. It was headed for the bow and the crew had to shoot down one of their own guys. Awful, too, was his recollection of the fighting at Saipan and the sight of Japanese soldiers and their families jumping off cliffs rather than face capture by the Americans. Not long after, there was an announcement over the ship’s public address system. “President Truman dropped the atomic bomb. We thought it was a horrible thing, but it ended the war,” Garland said. The Iowa sailed to San Francisco after the war. Young Robert Garland of Ellsworth, Maine, stood in awe as they passed under the Golden Gate Bridge. “We were all on deck,” he recalled. He left the Navy and traveled to Washington state and from there traveled by train back to Hartford, Conn. Pleased and happy that he had survived the war, he settled in Hartford. Garland attended three years of barber and cosmetology school under the GI Bill and shortly thereafter opened up his own shop, the Esquire Barber Shop, in 1947. Garland then met his sweetheart, Mary Patriss, and they were married in 1948. When he retired in 1990, Garland moved back to his roots in Ellsworth, where he built a home on the site of the house in which he was born. Robert and Mary have five grown children and six grandchildren. Garland, trim and in good health, stays in shape by fishing, hunting, jogging and … standing on his head. — Stephen Fay