They were building liberty ships on the river at Brunswick, Georgia. I signed up for the welding school, and I came out as a steam pipe welder. Then I got on the ship and working. Each place where a ship was built was called a “way.” There were six ways - six ships. You had six way foremen, all under one superintendent. They were real conscious of manpower hours that it took to build the ship. There was an incentive for each foreman of a way to get his ship built for less manpower hours. They had a great big sign in front of each ship - and a scoreboard with a big tabulation of the manpower hours every day. We were building Liberty Ships for the war - 576 feet long, and I believe it was sixty feet wide and forty feet deep.
I did well with welding. They made me a welder foreman of a crew, which consisted of twelve to fifteen men. I had worked on this one ship to completion. The last thing you do on one of those ships is weld the drive shaft just inside the fantail, which is just a few feet from the propeller on the inside. You take two brackets and weld them to the crankshaft and weld it to the shell, so when that ship hits the water it won’t screw that crankshaft backwards and twist the drive shaft. So you had to weld it right inside the fantail.
And so the quarterman, which is next to the foreman on the ship, told me, says, “Send your crew on down to the front and you do this last welding. Weld these brackets in yourself,” because he knew I was the best there was. And so I stayed on and welded it in.
When I got through, I cut the lead loose and threw it off the side. That was the last thing to be done, and I was making preparations to get on the platform and get on off the ship.
Well, they were having ceremonies up front to launch the ship, and the quarterman and foreman were still on there. The foreman told me, says, “Why don’t you just ride the ship down the ways with us and get off at the dry dock.” And I said, “I ain’t got any permission to do that. My crew is down front.” I was supposed to go down and pick that crew up and go to the next ship. Those manpower hours would be charged against that ship then, you see. But the quarterman was there and he ought to have known.
But he told me, “You might as well stay on the ship and ride down there. Just as soon as we hit the water, the tug will pick it up and push it to the dry dock. You’ll be off in a couple of hours or an hour. And you can come on back and move your crew over and pick up your orders. Ain’t nobody going to miss that. You might as well ride down with us.” They had permission. I didn’t.
So I rode it down the ways. Of course, by the time it got down the ways and got in the water, it was getting dark. It sat out there and it sat out there. I didn’t have a flashlight anywhere, and it pitch black dark. They had live speakers over the yard you could hear ten or fifteen miles. In other words, when they made a page over the loud speaker, you could hear it in every part of that yard, every building, every inch of that yard, you could hear it.
After a couple of hours they went to paging my name. “G. W. Clark report to the foreman of the foremen immediately.” Every damn fifteen minutes it got more urgent. I was out there on that ship and couldn’t get back to shore. It was way into the night when they finally docked that thing.
They finally docked it and I got off in a dead run. Back then I was in perfectly good shape. I could run ten miles if I needed to without stopping. I ran into W. C. Dobbs’ office. He was supposed to have done been off of work. And he was steamed, boy. I’m telling you.
Of course, I’d told the foreman over on the way, I’d said, “What in the hell am I going to do?” He’d pumped me up, you know. Said, “Well, whenever they dock this thing, just go over to W. C. Dobbs and run in the office. Jump right up in the middle of the desk and have a damn fit. That’ll cool him off.”
Of course, I didn’t do that, but I went in the office and God almighty knows! He was madder than a damn junk yard dog. He lit in on me. I want to tell you, what he told me won’t fit to tell nobody. He said, “I’m going to suspend you for ten days. I’m going to learn you a lesson. You weren’t supposed to go down that way.”
I tried to tell him, but he didn’t want to hear nothing. He was boiling to the rim. So I finally got a word in to him. I said, “Mr. Dobbs, if you suspend me ten days you might as well suspend me ten damn years, because you won’t never see me no more.”
He said, “You get your ass out of here. I don’t care if you never come back.”
So that was the end of that game. The next morning I went right over there to the auxiliary yard. They were building auxiliary tugs, and they needed welding bad, and especially with the qualifications I had. I just walked right in the office the next morning and told them what I wanted to do and they gave me a badge and signed my card. And I went right on out there and went to work, just like I had been working there all the time.
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