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TkI youngster [sophomore] year. ne first com
range. Cygon was
a"3/ 3t rifle
lhe err,^r|S u0t' w°uld watch
and 1Us,Sh,pTan nexl t0 him’
t° su as mat guy was about the s-i° ’ Cy8°n wou'd shoot at taropUme tar8et- The man tendin, Cygon \Vhe butts—-sensing target \ hlt—would pull the the .a °Wn t0 mark it just before mid hin°nd shot’ so ‘he other firin " Pman would find himself
until the first classmen got into the elevator—they were the only ones who were allowed to ride them—let the elevator get between floors, and then shut off the power, leaving them trapped there, with their train about to pull out. He’d leave them there a while before he started the elevator again.
We found out later that at night Cygon would go underneath Stribling Walk, where all the steam pipes were, and make his way to the academic buildings. After finding out from the secretaries in the academic group when
reer tl ^ Course °f a 45-year naval cans Ch^f Cu^m‘na,ed in his appointment ,eJ °f Naval Operations from Joint ni ■ and as chairman of the 1974 !YS °f^fffrom 1970 to inter .‘ra^ floorer dealt with many ntorpSUn^ peop^e’ but perhaps no one class Unusua^ than a Naval Academy r0ad te. Wb° started along the Navy
chose' r SOme point in 1929' hut 0follow his very own path.
Naval6 ?*tCrnoon 1 returned to the Chiefs £ademy with other former a pa ,° Naval Operations to observe manv 6 ^00^'n8 around brought back a younmem°ries’ ’n Part'cu'ar those of CV(.nn " m'dshipman named Jack
fro^ (h'nkmy.Class of 1933 ■ He set out which ? bc8'nn'n8 to beat the system, suCCe ’ must say, he did with superb break;S Unt'.' be finally reached the duri,, n^.po'nt ar>d left the Academy
contact I had with him
a8 at a blank spot in space.
Plebe r? ^ weather Want t reshmanl summer,'Xygon sirnpi 0 8° t0 drills anymore. So he batta/ g0t some excuse slips from the xigne \°n eommander’s office and said “p! note t0 the duty officer, which Cyan jease excuse Midshipman fever"1-. r°m dr'H. He has a slight Would °r s°mething like that. Then he could >SI®n b's own name, so they an 8et him for forgery, and add V/h ' r'ght underneath. f
canjc ?n tbe first classmen [seniors] they ac^ fiom their summer cruifeS? leave'f0U^ come ashore anxious to Was °f bome that same day. Cygon the e?n e'ectrical genius, and he wired fr0m ®Vat°rs so he could control them ls own room. He would wait they were going to type up forthcoming examinations, he would enter their offices at night and take all of the used carbon paper out so that they had to use fresh sheets. Then, the next night, he would go over, get the carbon paper, hold it up to the light, and read the exams.
Once, during practical work in the electrical engineering building, we were wiring motors—some of them parallel, some in series, some of them compound—and the professor came in and very carefully said, “Now whatever you do, do not connect point A to point C.” Of course, that would be the first thing Cygon would do. There’d be a big explosion, with sparks flying everywhere and hot wires on the deck. Meanwhile he’d be sitting there like he didn:t know what was up, despite knowing full well what he had done.
After he did a few things like that, he got interested in telephones. He went out to the Carvel Hall Hotel— remember, he’s only a plebe— and stole a pay telephone, bringing it back to the Academy under his raincoat. He, sawed off the bottom of the phone, then got hold of a Ford Modei-T coil. Model-Ts had one coil for each cylinder, and in order to get the voltage up, it had a wrapping of wire in the transformer that was about a hair’s thickness. He un- r wrapped this wire and ran it ’TcKvS.ietween the tongue ' "and groove of the hardwood floors all the way from his fourth deck room to the pay ephones in the rotunda.
In those days, the only way midshipmen could call outside was to use these phones. So Cygon tied in his phone line to a pay phone down there. He had a girl in Kansas City, and he
Jack Cygon—marksman, electrical genius, inventor, and prankster—set out to beat the system, but the Naval Academy does not have the easiest system to beat.
Pr
cd>ngs / September 1986
47
called her every night. Phone calls were quite expensive then, but Cygon could take a 25-cent piece and put the same coin into his own phone as many times as the operator said. If it was a ten-dollar call, he’d put it in there 40 times, then put the quarter back in his pocket to save for the next night’s call. The phone company finally got suspicious, and that was one of the things that eventually got Cygon in trouble.
The next thing he did was rig up a clock in his room. In those days the academy was equipped with step-bystep clocks. The clock jumped a minute at a time. Cygon ran some more wires to the duty officer’s room in the rotunda and wired into that official clock. About three minutes before a formation, Cygon would be sitting in his room, shining his shoes. If he didn’t think the shoes were quite up to snuff, he would take the minute hand of his clock and move it back, and every clock in the Naval Academy would go click, click, click backwards. Then, when he was ready to go to formation, he’d click it over to the proper time and all the bells would ring, and out he would go.
Once, he thought for some reason that he wasn’t ready to take an exam, so he went to the laundry, which was in the basement of the Bancroft Hall dormitory in those days, and sat in one of the big dryers until he got absolutely dehydrated and increased his temperature. He jumped in the elevator and went up to sick bay. The medical folks took his temperature, and it was still very high, so they rushed him to the hospital. By the time he got over there, his temperature was back to normal, but the thing had dropped at some abnormal rate, so now they thought he was dying. They made him stay there for observation for several days, which gave him enough time to get organized for the exam.
Cygon would come around to your room after taps and say that a few friends were going out on the town and ask what you would like to have. Well, I’d say, I’d like a pint of ice cream, a half dozen bananas, and a Time magazine. Then around 2330 you’d hear a little knock on your door, and he’d slide these things to you. He’d go out and get them.
The first classmen found out that this was going on, so they asked him how he did it, and if he’d take some of them. He agreed, and took them out. Then on the way back in, he said,
“This is very complicated. I go out one place and I come back in another.” In the meantime, though, he’d tipped off the jimmylegs [gate guards] exactly where these first classmen would return. Of course, he’d let them go first, because they were the first class, and when the last one went over the fence, he ran to another place to make his entrance. They caught every one of the first classmen but never did catch Cygon.
After a break of several years, we resumed our football rivalry with West Point in 1929, and played the Army- Navy game in New York for charity. The midshipmen were staying in the Commodore Hotel. We got to the hotel, signed in at the desk, and saw this guy about our age sitting in the comer sporting a big derby hat and smoking a cigar. Everybody said, “Hi, Cygon,” but he didn’t show any recognition. So we went up to him, and he pulled open his coat and showed us a great big star that said “House Detective.”
He had found out that the manager was not going to be around for the weekend, so he slipped into his office and got the manager’s stationery and wrote a note to the 12th floor desk clerk explaining, “Mr. Cygon has been employed as a house detective. Please give him suite so-and-so.” Cygon stayed there during the game and through that following Sunday, and then walked out. I’m sure they never saw him again.
In those days, plebes were not allowed to have radios. So Cygon attached one of those pantograph instruments to a typewriter desk, and fixed a little radio to it in the drawer of the desk. When you opened the drawer, the radio slid underneath the drawer; when you shut it, it came back into the drawer. The only way you could see the radio was to open the drawer and then look under the table, which nobody would normally do.
Then he wired the radio to his door with two thumbtacks. That was all there was to it, just two wires and two thumbtacks. He’d play this thing after taps, loud as hell, when there was supposed to be silence about the decks. 1 was about two doors from him, and I’d hear the duty officer coming down the corridor with his sword rattling. He’d hear all this and come charging down there and burst through the door. Of course, when he did that, the thing stopped. The officer would look around and there was Cygon lying in bed pretending to be sound asleep. Finally, he’d walk away and let the door shut. This radio had vacuum tubes in it, and the filaments had to heat up, so by the time the duty officer got all the way down to the other end of the hall, the radio would start blaring out again, so he’d come charging back, open the door, and then hear nothing. Cygon just had them mystified.
During the midshipmen cruises—'n those days we went on three battleships—there was great competition to see who could finish scrubbing the deck first. Every morning you had to scrub the decks before you could get >n the chow lines for breakfast. Those were austere days for the Navy, and there weren’t enough squeegees to dry the deck. Cygon would never deign to push a squeegee himself, but he volunteered to get more of them. So he went to the storeroom and came back with about a dozen brand-new squeegees f°r his division—about three times as many squeegees as any other division- The boatswain’s mate was amazed. He’d been turning in requisitions for these things for two or three years without being able to get a single one- The bottleneck was the squeegees, not the people doing the work—so Cyg°n and his group always got to be first if the chow line.
What finally got him in trouble, I think, was the telephone, because the phone company couldn’t understand why the midshipmen were making all these long-distance calls and there was never enough money in the phones’ coin boxes. I happened to be the junior officer of the deck when they sent Lieutenant Commander de Treville to examine Cygon’s room—he was under suspicion at that point. Everybody like him, but people began to talk about him too much. He got to be quite a legend.
When Cygon resigned from Annap0" lis, several electronics companies sought to employ him, but he didn’t decide on anything right away. Tragically, he died at home the next year while experimenting with a gas used for anesthesia by hospitals. He was only 19 years old.
The foregoing is an edited excerpt fro'n the transcript of an oral history interview of Admiral Moorer conducted for the Naval Institute by Dr. John T. Mason, Jr. on 21 April 1981. To obtain a catalog summarizing the appr0X' imately 150 bound volumes of oral history in the Institute's collection, please send $2.00 to Director of Oral History< U. S. Naval Institute, Annapolis, Mary land 21402.
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Proceedings / September
1986