My father was a crewmember of the USS Yorktown. He was a Navy musician but during general quarters part of Dad's damage control duties was that of a "talker", maintaining communication with the main damage control center, on one of the platform decks. The Apollo 8 venture was big enough, breaking out of Earth's orbit, traveling to the moon and back was certainly noteworthy enough. It was "Dad's
Ship", as the prime recovery vessel that made it an event, especially on the morning it returned to Earth. I vividly remember "Live from the USS Yorktown" displayed on the TV screen and the astronauts' baseball caps.
That started the story telling from Dad. Soon after the Yorktown arrived in the Pacific, he said, a group of "airedales" from the flight deck purchased a number of long peaked baseball caps during shore leave in Honolulu, ostensibly to keep the sun out of their eyes during flight operations. (before this, seamen wore a blue dyed regular white hat)
"Jocko" Clark observed them and became intrigued with the new hats and ordered the sail maker shop to copy and produce a large number of baseball hats, with appropriate lettering USS YORKTOWN.
Click here for the free previews of the Academy Award Winning Movie about
the USS Yorktown, "The Fighting Lady.
The Navy's "at sea hat" is now the baseball cap. So, the Navy's "baseball hat" tradition thus began on the USS Yorktown because of those Yorktown sailors who brought some back from shore leave in Honolulu. The tradition went all the way to being flashed over the world on TV as the Apollo 8 astronauts were given and wore USS Yorktown baseball hats as soon as they touched aboard the flight deck. The Yorktown tradition has been passed on to all of NASA as you can see all the astronaut from Apollo 8 missions, shuttle missions and beyond, all wearing baseball caps.
Dad never mentioned that story before the Apollo 8 splashdown. Many of the veterans who went though the real tough combat are, or were like that; they don't talk about wartime service until something prompts them to talk about it.
Read more about the crew of the USS Yorktown picking up the astronauts of Apollo 8; the first men to the Moon. click here
Scrappy goes AWOL
Incidentally, Dad had an interesting story about "Scrappy" the little mutt shown in the movie "The Fighting Lady." When the Yorktown was in port and the crew returned from shore leave, it was customary to bring a crate, box, trash can, barrel, or whatever was stacked up on the dock. That shortened the time for the work party to bring supplies aboard later.
Some Yorktown band members spotted this little pooch wandering around the docks of Pearl Harbor, and on the spur of the moment, caught the little fellow, put him in a trash can and stowed him away until the ship was out to sea for several hours. But, Scrappy didn't like being drafted into the US Navy. Some months later, when the Yorktown was in port again, Scrappy wandered off the ship...never to sail again.
Scrappy probably wasn't interested in all this "hero" stuff and just wanted to get away from all that "boom, boom, boom" all the time!
click here Read more about the Movie made about the USS Yorktown "The Fighting Lady" in Technicolor!
by Bernard Hartz , in memory of his father Bernard R. Hartz (1923-1992) MUS 2nd Class 1943-1945
from Willie, SCRAPPY WASN'T THE ONLY YORKTOWN DOG
The little dog Frank Hummel is holding in this photo didn’t have a name but he was a veteran when he came aboard. We don’t know how he got aboard USS Enterprise but we were told they put him on a trash lighter in Ulithi because they could never deck break him.
He made Mt. 6 & 8 gun deck his home after the lighter crew gave him to us.
We all loved the little guy and he tried to do right but no matter where did his business somebody had to clean it up. I believe he wound up somewhere in the Philippines.
To the best of my knowledge he and Scrappy were the only two dogs we had aboard during our time