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Nice. SUmmer cruises usually enjoy good weather because ships bound for English Channel, and North Sea ports take the North Atlantic route over and return via the Azores Islands, a southerly route which also assured the aid of ocean currents. Because of my experience on the SAGUCHE, I had no difficulty signing on the COLDBROOK as an oiler, now at $62.50 per month plus room and board:
LeHavre is a beautiful city at the foot of a small mountain. On the first day ashore, I enjoyed a superb seven-course dinner in a fine restaurant. The wine failed to quench my thirst so I asked the little waitress for a glass of water. I had finished the meal and was drinking the last of the wine when she returned with a small decanter of water. She had walked down to the town well to fetch it. That evening I went to Tortoni's Cabaret where I heard beautiful folk songs and arias accompanied by an excellent orchestra. Moody, one of my shipmates, walked into the cabaret with two pretty sisters. He said that one of them, Suzanne, would be my date as we were both seventeen. Suzanne and I became good pals and we dated every night until- the COLDBROOK sailed for Nice, ten days later. Nice was another pretty city on the Italian border, but we had little cargo to discharge there and sailed for the States after three days in port.
The trip home was marked by beautiful weather and calm seas. We made it back to New Orleans in nineteen days, very good time for a nine-knot freighter. I worked an extra week in port and got home in time to play baseball on our town team until school began.
I rented my cat rig to Major Payne, an instructor at Gulf Coast Military Academy.
In September, 1922, I entered the eleventh grade at Mississippi City. Professor Warrington was our principal that year. He was a wonderful man and teacher and father of my lifelong friend and now neighbor, James Warrington. It was the last year James, Murdock Cowan, Pat Murray, Billy Coon, Ferdinan Pecoul, and I were together in school.
Milton Pradat was another good school chum and we shared an interest in sports. In the spring of 1923 we played two baseball games against GCMA and won both with Pradat pitching and me catching. The opposing coach, T.L. Gaddy, was so impressed by
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our performance that he asked Milton and me to enroll at the academy that September. When we told him we could not afford it he offered us a scholarship. I accepted but Milton turned it down.
I shipped out again from New Orleans that June on the-ELKHORN, a twelve thousand ton flush-deck freighter built in Seattle, Washington. When I learned she was going to stop at LeHavre, I cabled Suzanne to meet me. When we arrived I was not surprised to see her standing on the dock waving her hankie. The ELKHORN spent fourteen days in LeHavre. On the fourth day in port I hired a beachcomber to work In my place and I caught a train for Paris! What a time I had on a hundred US dollars, the exchange at that time being twenty-one francs seventy-five centimes for one US dollar. I rode the elevator to the top of the Eiffle Tower and hacf a birds-eye view of that fabulous city. I visited the Louvre, saw Madam Butterfly at the grand opera, and found Camille's tomb in an old cemetery. I toured the city in a cab with an English speaking driver and wound up every evening at Montmarte, where one enjoys the life Paris is famous for. When I returned to LeHavre, eight days later, I still had enough money left to buy souvenirs for all the folks at home. I joined Suzanne and my friends at Tortoni's the night I returned. Suzanne was peeved because I spent so much time in Paris, but after Paris, who cares. We sailed to Antwerp, Belgium on the French day of Independence, July fourteenth.
Antwerp was another great city, but on my first night ashore I had an unforgetable experience. A couple of shipmates and I were having a beer in a gin mill on Skipper Straus when some girl dropped a Mickey Finn in my glass with the intention of rolling me for the money I so foolishly flashed around. Because I was in such good physical shape it took longer for the pill to knock me out than the girl anticipated. When we got up to leave she tried to get me to stay, but I refused. We walked down the street and around the corner to a nice clean restaurant where I ordered pickled herring and hard-boiled eggs. While waiting for the order, I began to feel faint, so I got up and headed for the front door to get some fresh air. I had gone but a few steps when I passed out. When I regained consciousness I was lying on two tables and had had a lovely dream but I was terribly thirsty. I drank a glass of water but felt
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