Registered: Oct 2001
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Strange People From My Past

Part of my electronic training in the Navy was at Gulfport, Mississippi, where for twelve weeks some very skillful and knowledgeable instructors attempted to impart to us the very latest technology in the field of radio design. The school was called Elementary Electricity and Radio Materiel School. Please take my word for it; there was nothing elementary about that school. It was believed by the students that if you dropped your pencil in a class you would be two weeks behind before you could pick it up. My class was initially 375 people. My ranking in grade at the end of the school was 247 from the top. Everyone 275 or higher was washed out of the program and sent back to the Third Fleet. So technically it was a bit tough for me, but I learned a lot.

Perhaps the most interesting person I met at EE&RM was Walt Swikart. We were quartered in steel Quonset huts with about thirty or forty people to a hut. Swikart (nobody called him Walt) had a cot next to mine, and I was witness to nearly everything that went on in his life for twelve weeks. He was a huge man. I would guess that he was six feet three inches tall. He was barrel-chested and probably weighed about 235 pounds. He had very fair skin and dishwater blond hair. Let me tell you a few things that I felt made Swikart a little different from the rest of us guys.

Liberty — We had open gangplank at EE&RM and could go to Gulfport any time we wished if not scheduled for a class or other duty. We were only a short 45-minute train ride from New Orleans, which was headquarters Fifth Fleet and as good a liberty town as there was in the states. In this situation I don’t believe that Swikart ever left the base during the twelve weeks we were there. He had no interest in seeing Gulfport, New Orleans, or trying to pick-up Mississippi girls at Gulf Park Girls College. I have known Swikart to jog a lap around the base, but he was not a body builder, a cult runner or a sports fan.

Pay — In the Navy the paymaster set up his desk in front of the chow hall on the first of every month and would look up how much the government owed you and pay you that amount in cash and mark it on the roster sheet. Swikart never drew a penny from the paymaster all the time we were at Gulfport. I asked him if he was not going to go get paid, and he said that he had about twenty dollars in his pocket when he joined the Navy and still had some of that left and didn’t intend to draw any money until he was discharged.

Religion — The subject never really arose. He was not Jewish or Islamic or if so didn’t observe the dietary rules. I have seen him eat pork. We never discussed religion. On Sundays I was rarely on base but when I was I never knew him to attend chapel.

Mail - Once a week Swikart received a package from his mother that contained edible goodies like cakes, cookies and little cans of tinned meats of various kinds. Swikart would eat from these packages for most of the week and skip going to the chow hall and then go to the chow hall until another package came in. In these packages there was always one other item - a mathematics text that varied from differential calculus to partial differential equations and vector and tensor analysis. Swikart was a math nut. He spent all of his spare time lying on his cot working the math exercises in the latest book his mother sent. It was wintertime, and even in Mississippi it got quite chilly at night sometimes. Our hut was heated only by a potbellied stove that burned coal, and we had a coalscuttle and a place on the base to go fill it up when it got low. As soon as Swikart worked all the problems in a book he would burn the book in the potbellied stove. I expressed surprise at this, and Swikart said, as if he found my surprise odd, that he had worked all the problems in that book and therefore no longer needed it. Besides, he was due to get another from his mother in a day or so. Sweikart never got any mail from anyone other than his mother.

Sex- If Swikart had any interests in sex either homo or hetero, I was never aware of it. As sailors do we spent a lot of time describing to each other the sexual conquests that we had made and greatly exaggerating their frequency and ardor — all except Swikart, who never joined in. When we would laugh raucously at a sexy joke he would occasionally smile, but that was the extent of it.

Talk — Swikart would talk to me a little, perhaps because I had the adjacent bunk. He would offer me a cookie from his box occasionally. He would explain in greater detail what the instructor had gone over in class and help me with whatever I was having trouble with in electronic theory or math. He would occasionally wonder off into a long quiet dissertation on number theory or Fourier series or some such thing and then would say, “But this doesn’t interest you, does it?” I lied and told him that it did, but he knew better. There was only one subject that I could talk to Swikart about and have a normal conversation, and that was animals.

He loved dogs and cats and white mice and gerbils and goldfish and everything alive. His hometown was the Bronx, New York, and he described the animals in the great Bronx Zoo and would almost cry, because he did not believe in keeping wild animals penned up. He would ask me to tell him about the cows and hogs and horses and mules on my Grandad’s farm. Swikart was an animal lover. But he avoided completely conversation with almost everyone else. He was a very silent man.

The Ant - We arrived in Gulfport in November and it was still warm, and rather than have one class in the classroom the instructor held it outside on the lawn. He brought a chair and set it up for himself, and we swabbies just sprawled on the lawn and soaked up the sunshine while the instructor lectured on the “Q” of Plate tanks and how to design High Q circuits. I was sitting beside Swikart as was my custom, and we were on the back row of the mob of sailors — there were about thirty of us. After the lecture had gone on for a few minutes I noticed Swikart edging away from me and reached over and jerked on his pants cuff and pointed towards the Instructor. He just grinned and turned his attention back to the grass and was soon lying on his belly moving slowly away from the crowd as though trying surreptitiously away.

I looked at the instructor and saw that he had also notice, but Swikart was far enough away from me that I could no longer reach him. Suddenly the officer stopped his lecture and asked Swikart what he saw in the grass that was so interesting. Swikart replied that he was following an ant to see where it would go, but he assured the officer that he had heard every word of his instruction. The officer challenged Swikart to repeat what he had said about High Q tank design and Swikart quietly began what appeared to us to be a letter-perfect repetition of the officer’s lecture. After a very few sentences the instructor said that it was evidently true that Swikart was taking in his lesson, but would he please do him the courtesy to return to the group and not follow any more ants away. Swikart’s reply was ”Sure”. Swikart was not long on the rules of military courtesy.


I often wonder what happened to the Swikart of my EE&RM days. I only knew him for that short twelve-week period. It is possible that he became a great mathematician. I Googled his name one time but didn’t get anything promising.

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Registered: Aug 2000
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Your ability to remember even the small details of so much of your life is astounding. If I remember how old I am, it's a good day for me. Thanks for the stories.

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