Throughout the course of our lives, we make many friends. One who brightened my existence from the early 1990s until his passing earlier this year was a retired naval officer, Lieutenant Commander George Van. I first heard from George in early 1993. He had just moved to Maryland and wanted to know if he could help the U.S. Naval Institute.
When we first met, I encountered a man in his mid-60s with close-cropped gray hair, a thin mustache, and an impish personality. He had retired from several jobs and was looking for something to do. I learned that after high school he had worked and attended junior college before enlisting in the Marine Corps in 1944. Thanks to his 90-words-per-minute speed on a keyboard, he served as a clerk-typist with Marine units in Gulfport, Mississippi, and Miramar, California.
After World War II ended, he received a fleet appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy, which he entered as a plebe in 1946. He graduated as a member of the class of 1950 and opted for a commission in the Navy. After finishing Supply Corps School, he served on board the escort carrier Badoeng Strait (CVE-116) and the escort destroyer Taylor (DDE-468). Varied sea and shore duty ensued. In 1961 he resigned from the regular Navy and settled in the San Francisco area, where he worked in the insurance and construction businesses. He officially retired from the Naval Reserve in 1971 and from his civilian career in 1991.
The George Van I got to know was a man who cherished his naval service for the personal relationships he had developed and the atmosphere of ships and the sea. With his naval knowledge and typing skills, he was a natural at transcribing oral history interviews. He was very good at it, and even better, he did the work pro bono—an ideal combination.
Whenever he returned tapes and picked up others, it was an occasion for sit-down visits, which we both enjoyed. We shot the bull often, and I have to say that he was an expert bull shooter. He had marvelous stories about his experiences and the people he knew, and he was blessed with a wry sense of humor. For instance, he reported that he was born on 4 July 1926. As he explained some years later, “What a wonderful party the whole country threw to celebrate my 50th birthday.” The occasion, of course, was the bicentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
When I received George’s typed transcripts, I had to read and edit them carefully before passing them on to interviewees for correction. That was because he had the habit of inserting comments, sometimes sarcastic, in between brackets, which ended with his initials, GEV. I recall a time when one admiral went on and on in a monologue. After a time, I came to George’s comment: “[Paul, you have the patience of Job. GEV]” A while later, when the admiral finally lost momentum and paused for a breath, I was able to interject a question. George responded to that by typing, “[Job speaks!]” Often his bracketed insertions contained correct information when the person being interviewed had remembered the wrong name, wrong ship, etc.
In addition to that great service, he performed another one for the oral history program. He was a voracious reader on naval topics, so he took home the completed volumes of transcripts and melded the indexes into one overall cumulative index that served as a superb finding guide for material on a variety of subjects. Because he had been both an enlisted Marine and a Navy officer, he was familiar with terminology and people. George had particularly enjoyed his duty on board the Taylor under Commander Bob McNitt, the skipper, who eventually became a rear admiral. George recommended that I interview him, and I was glad I did.
George was kind enough to invite me to his class of ’50 luncheons and his ship reunions. He surprised me at one reunion by telling me I had to make a speech about the Taylor to pay for my lunch, so I did. Fortunately, I was able to include a good story I’d heard from some of the ship’s sailors. Near the end of World War II, in the Philippines, they had acquired a little terrier the crew named “Subic.” When the Taylor transported Japanese news correspondents to the battleship Missouri (BB-63) to cover the surrender, the dog bit one of the correspondents on the ankle. The crewmen joked that Subic had inflicted the last personnel casualty of the Pacific war. George loved stories like that.
In 2005 George and his wife, Joanne, moved to Kansas, and I soon came to miss our frequent visits. I did get to see the two of them once in Kansas and a few times during their periodic visits to Annapolis. When Jo died last year, George’s friends concluded he might be along soon after. And that is essentially the way it worked out. He died in April following surgery at age 88. At Jo’s funeral last November, a small gold-colored box of her ashes fit half the available niche in the Naval Academy columbarium. This past July, George’s gold-colored box of ashes joined hers. The Navy had made a home for George Van in 1946, and it made a final resting place for him nearly 70 years later. It was my pleasure to know him as a special friend.