Admiral Dunn, who recently turned 90, is now an elder statesman in the naval aviation community. This is an excerpt from a U.S. Naval Institute oral history interview with Paul Stillwell in March 1990. Dunn served in 1960–61 as flag lieutenant to Rear Admiral Joseph Clifton, Commander, Carrier Division Seven. At the time, then-Lieutenant Dunn was not yet an elder, but he was definitely statesmanlike in dealing with Mrs. Clifton.
My first encounter with the admiral came when he had me ordered to temporary additional duty in Corpus Christi in preparation for being his aide. In Corpus, I got qualified in the F9F-8T, the trainer version of the Cougar jet, and began hearing stories about both Admiral and Mrs. Clifton. It’s hard to say which stories are true and which are apocryphal.
One of my favorites took place at Naval Air Station Memphis. As a captain, he had been the commanding officer at Memphis, so he knew the place well. Later, when he was Chief of Naval Air Advanced Training, he would fly to visit the stations and units in his command in an F9F-8T. On landing at Memphis one time, he blew two tires. A tractor was sent out to tow him in, and, so the story goes, Admiral Clifton, dressed in a rather scruffy Air Force flight suit, asked the tractor driver whether or not there were some tires for an F9F-T available. The driver responded, “No, sir, there are no tires.”
“You mean there are no tires for an F9?”
“No, sir, no tires.”
“On this whole naval air station, there are no tires for an F9F-T?”
“Oh, yes, sir, there are, but we save them for Admiral Clifton. He always blows tires when he lands.”
Other stories centered on his wife, Virginia (“Ginny”)—“Mrs. Clifton” to me. She seemed to pride herself on being above the common herd and seldom entered into Navy social activities. While I was in Corpus for my F9F-8T checkout, I called on Mrs. Clifton in her quarters. It was not in any sense a “homey” place. On the other hand, she was gracious, and my early training in manners must have stood me in good stead, because we did get along, albeit a very stiff conversation from my point of view. Suffice it to say, I was always careful to be very respectful.
Admiral Clifton was a very enthusiastic guy. He was the original optimist and never met a person he didn’t like. Some people thought him far too unpolished, and many of his Naval Academy classmates looked down their noses at him, because they thought he was too rough and uncultured. That didn’t matter to the people he led, however; he was a leader; he could really relate to people. In ensuing years, I have run into countless naval aviators who went through flight training when Joe Clifton was at Miami during World War II, and all of them invariably remarked on his energy and enthusiasm and colorful ways. Later in the war, he was a fighter pilot of some note.
One of his better-known idiosyncrasies was his taste for ice cream. Every evening meal had to have dessert, and that dessert always had to be accompanied by ice cream. Sunday mornings at sea his favorite breakfast was waffles piled with four, five, or six dips of vanilla ice cream. Even once in a while during the day he would call for a dish of ice cream.
My biggest job was not so much taking care of Admiral Clifton, the flag mess, or my division officer responsibilities but taking care of Mrs. Clifton. The admiral was not at all demanding, but she more than made up for it. At sea there was a respite from that angle, of course, but when we were in port, her needs took priority.
During our Seventh Fleet cruise, she arrived in Hong Kong well prior to our arrival, so the admiral sent me in two weeks early to squire her around. One night she said, “Bob, I think we ought to go out to dinner tonight.” She picked out a place in Kowloon. It was a lovely night, and everything was just beautiful. After a drink, she said, “I think you’d like the pepper steak.”
In due course the steak came, resplendent in its tasty sauce. Shortly, I put my knife into my steak and found it just a little bit tough. I pressed harder on the knife, then a little bit harder, when all of a sudden the sauce-covered steak and the fork just skidded off my plate, right into her lap! I thought my naval career was over; I was mortified. As it turned out, she handled it with aplomb and was quite calm about it. She lifted her napkin, with the steak in it, out of her lap and said, “I think you lost something.” I laugh now, but I was far from laughing then.
The admiral retired in 1963. In December 1967, I had just finished my squadron commanding officer tour in WestPac and stopped in to visit him in Los Angeles. He was in the hospital, having had a series of coronary thromboses. That love of ice cream could well have contributed. When I saw him, they successively had amputated an arm and both legs. He was just lying there in the hospital bed, still positive in outlook but obviously in his last days. It was really sad to see him like that. He died on Christmas Eve, just a couple of days after I left. He was only 59.