Fleet Week, or Navy Days, as it was known locally at the time when I was serving in the Navy, has a long tradition in San Diego. The very first celebration of the prototype of Fleet Week, or Navy Days, was held in San Diego during the California International Exposition of 1935. This was a week when the city had special activities honoring the Navy and civilians were invited to visit the Navy ships.
During the time that I was stationed in San Diego, the U.S.S. Chicago CG-11 was chosen to be opened to the public for the celebration of Navy Days in October 1975. (In 1972 Admiral Zumwalt had begun encouraging the celebration of the Navy’s “official birthday” on October 13th, and, as I remember, Navy Days included that day, and continued for several more days.)
We pulled up to the Broadway pier, right in the heart of San Diego and in the center of the tourist district. There were several other ships that were tied up near us, but we were the largest one and thus probably the most desirable one for civilian visitors to tour.
A Chief Petty Officer posted the duty roster the next day, showing our duty assignments for the time we would be moored at the Broadway pier. On it, I was listed as the leader of a group of sailors assigned to officially lower the flag on the pier at sunset on Friday.
This was terrible news! The sailors in my division worked on computers, and we took great pride in never marching. Our usual post was the computer room in the CIC (Combat Information Center), which was off-limits to visitors, and we were planning to hide out there for the duration of Navy Days. Besides, I had not marched since boot camp, and I had never called out orders to other sailors to march in front of an audience. I felt that the Marines would have been a much better choice to properly lower the colors at the head of the pier.
Also, I had not folded a flag properly since Boy Scouts. I was sure the whole thing was going to be a disaster.
I went and told the Chief Petty Officer of the Operations Department that I could not do it, and I listed all of the above arguments. I was sure that he would get someone who knew how to lead a marching color guard better than I did. But he just shrugged his shoulders and gruffly said something like, “You went to boot camp didn’t you? Every sailor knows how to march!” (I have cleaned up his language.)
So for the rest of the week, I watched as other groups lowered the flag and I tried to memorize the proper commands and figure out what to do.
Finally, Friday evening came, and as I expected, the pier was packed. I assembled about half a dozen sailors near our gangplank. When the time came, we marched out (at least as well as sailors can march—nothing like the snappy Marine version), made a left turn, and then marched up to the head of the pier, where it connected to the land, where the flagpole stood.
I gave the command to halt, to lower the colors, and to fold them, while Taps was playing. Then we turned and marched back to the U.S.S. Chicago gangplank. “Well, that was not so bad,” I thought, when it was all over. Everybody had been to boot camp, as the CPO had said, and we all got through the situation together somehow. There are probably still a few snapshots, long forgotten in boxes hidden away in closets somewhere, showing my team of sailors lowering the flag during Navy Days in San Diego in 1975.
