It was Navy night at Jack and Ralph Haxton’s house, with echoes of three wars and a peacetime a cruise, and a hcap of reminiscence.
A good time was had by all too, from the honor-guests (a retired rear-admiral and his Indy) on down through a long list of naval reservists, ex- aviators. ex-lcathernecks'. ex-engineers, ex-infantrymen, and one basso profundo who was an artillerist in that long-gone era when the caissons were horse-drawn.
We listened while a couple of old salts scraped their fiddles in duo for the first time since they were aboard a destroyer in the Philippine Sea. And we heard a lot of rather interesting arias. lncluding the proposition that monkeys have no tails in Zamboanga.
It was Admiral Carl Moore's first visit to Greenville since May 1912. On that occasion he had come upriver on the U.S.S. Petrel, a gunboat in his uncle's navy, and it must have been sort of a geodetic surveu deal. For he remembers taking soundings and platting the twists and turns of Ole Man River all the way from Port Eads to Arkansas City.
But the interesting thing to happen was when that future Admiral was walking down the main-drag In Greenville in 1912. For who should he meet but his friend 'Hax" (for Ralph Haxton) who was home on leave, and who had graduated just one year ahead of him at Annapolis. Carl learned that Hax would soon be shipping out lo the Phillipines. Just when he thought he might be saddled with the vagaries of the Mississippi River for years and years, Lieut. Moore received his orders for the Phillipines too and, when he got out there, was assigned engineer-duty on the Bainbridgc. Ralph was executive officer of the Bainbridge, and his old and Carl Moore's mutual friend Raymond Spruance was the C.0.
It was a lot of fun, meeting and knowing Ann Louise and Carl Moore. Two of their sons are graduates of the Naval Academy, and are in the Navy now. The third son finished at Bowdoin down in Maine (Yea Hodding) and is an officer In the Marine Corps. He is thinking of Marine Biology as a career when he leaves the Marines.
The Moorcs have five grand-children, and live in Washington. Furthermore, there's a sassafrass tree In the frontyard, their only tree In fact, excluding a small hemlock. (Just for the record we hope there's a murmuring pine somewhere In the neighborhood.)
All this Navy talk put others on the Haxton guest-list to recalling bygone days when the Navy, not infrequently used to show the flag at the future port- city of Greenville.
Lucille Finlay and Louise Crump even remembered the story of how their Cousin Lucy Yerger (great-grandmother of Humphreys McGee and Louise Henderson) made a rather spirited and statewide solicitation for funds for the purchase of a silver service for the battleship Mississippi in the first decade of the century. In her zeal for the cause, Cousin Lucy even promised that the big battlewagon would soon be dropping anchor at Greenville, so the time to buy the silver service was indeed now. But alas, remembered Mrs. Finlay, the river channel refused to accommodate a ship of the Mississippi's displacement any further north than Natchez.
However. Cousin Lucy raised the dough, bought the silver, and duly presented it to the battleship when the latter reached Natchez.
At this point in Lucille Finlay’s narrative, Ann Louise Moore made a wonderful contribution. For she is Navy too, backdrop, on stage, and footlights, and a grand-daughter of the late Admiral Charles Sigsbee ("Remember the Maine").
"I have often hcard my father (Summer Ely Wetmore Kittelle) tell about the presentation of that silver service at Natchez," said Mrs. Moore, "you see, he was Executive Officer of the Mississippi at the time."
A big battlewagon. a mighty river, a historic occasion and, all in all, a small world!
