Tired of partying and chasing skirts, three ex-Navy swabs fresh from the war in the Pacific shipped over into the peacetime Coast Guard in February, 1947. Bill Archer was assigned to a tug at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco; Gene Goodrich went to the Personnel Office on Government Island, Alameda; and Wes Hall, the author, embarked upon the wildest two years of his life. In that short period of time he served as a radio operator aboard six different cutters that were based on the West and the East Coasts, in Panama and in Alaska. From air-sea rescue service aboard the Alert on the northern California coast, he went in quick succession to the Taney, the Chautauqua, and the Escanaba, all on weather station duty midway between Frisco and Honolulu. In early 1948 he shipped aboard a buoy tender, the Bramble, as radioman-in-chargeŅon his way to the ice-breaker Storis, which took him from Baltimore down across the Gulf of Mexico, through the Panama Canal, and up the West Coast to Juneau, Alaska.
In the winter of 1948 Juneau was a wild and wonderful little liberty town for the sailors aboard the Cutter Storis. When they weren't rescuing some fishing boat from a frozen cove, they were sipping hot buttered rums at the Triangle Bar on the outskirts. Great times!