63 years later, local Coast Guard heroes to be honored
Every so often, here in the storytelling factory, an especially interesting one comes along on the belt.
So here goes telling one of these — a 63-year-old story, in fact — with some quirky twists and turns of fate, heroism, good deeds and an uplifting happy ending.
It can't help but leave you with a warm feeling about the fine men and women of the Coast Guard who are busy securing our homeland every day.
It begins in 1953, late on a cold Monday night in February, when two enlisted men at Coast Guard Station New London were summoned with orders to ship out.
It seems an engine on a launch taking crew members to the lightship off Old Saybrook had failed, and two members of what was then a large station with barracks here — Amos Whittemore of New London and Guy Blucker of Jacksonville, Ark. — were assigned to head out and get the launch started.
A third enlisted man, Russell Waddell of West Creek, N.J., who heard about the mission from one of the men, his roommate, agreed to join them.
The men found the launch in Old Saybrook and got it running, but the mission took a dark turn when the engine failed again, as they were heading back to Old Saybrook Harbor.
The three men scrambled onto the stone breakwater off the harbor, close but not connected to land.
Whittemore and Blucker, after spending several hours drenched and cold on the breakwater, died of exposure that night. Waddell survived.
I wrote that much of the story, back in January, after a reader wrote to me with a general recollection about what happened to Whittemore, then the head of the family that lived on the same street as the reader, Ridgeview Circle in the College Heights section of the city.
"I have been trying to find the details of this happenstance for many years, with no results," William Bucko of Uncasville wrote to me in late January.
I was intrigued, especially because Disney was launching its new movie on Coast Guard heroes, and I wanted to learn more about these local ones.
Curiously, calls to all the official Coast Guard channels, from here in New London to Washington, produced no results.
No one knew anything about the story, and they confirmed that Whittemore's and Blucker's names do not appear on the Boat Forces Memorial, a list posted on the walls and bulkheads of every Coast Guard ship and station, remembering those who lost their lives "manning lifesaving service and Coast Guard station boats."
An astute Googler here in the newsroom, though, found a 1953 wire story from a Florida newspaper about the deaths on the Old Saybrook breakwater, and I wrote a column based on that story.
What I didn't know, until last week, was that an enterprising young man assigned to Station New London took it upon himself to correct the injustice of these names missing from the memorial.
Boatswain's Mate Third Class Maxwell Rozier of Wilmington, N.C., who joined the Coast Guard in 2011, serving in Miami before transferring to New London, turned out to be a more dogged reporter than I.
Rozier figured out that Blucker's name had been misspelled in the 1953 news story.
He tracked down a military history enthusiast in Arkansas and wound up filling out and confirming more of the story.
He also found and talked to the survivor, Waddell, who is now 85.
He told Rozier more of the harrowing story.
It turns out, he said, there was a moment when their hopes got up because a ship passed the breakwater, flashing a searchlight across the stone.
The light stopped, though, just before the spot where the men were huddled, Rozier said.
Waddell reported he then got up and ran down the breakwater and shouted to get the ship's attention again.
It worked, and the ship swung the search light back.
It eventually launched a rescue boat, but it was too late to save the others.
Waddell spent months in the hospital recuperating.
Rozier says the station, through an outgoing and new commanding officer, has secured arrangements to put Whittemore's and Blucker's names on the Boat Forces Memorial.
They also will put up a special remembrance at Coast Guard Station New London, which has lost to duty only those two men on that cold February night in 1953.
I met Rozier at the station this week to look at his research, and he showed me the collection of historical photos of the station that hang along the walls of the mess hall.
Rozier took it upon himself after he was assigned to New London to learn more about the photos. He did research with local historians and wrote explanations that now hang underneath each picture.
I didn't know, when chatting with Rozier last week, that the week before he had been on one of Station New London's five patrol boats when they rescued a young swimmer from the Thames River after she spent several hours in the water.
"One of the last places we decided to check was the Ledge Lighthouse, and as we were pulling up, we heard her yelling for help," Rozier told a television reporter, in describing the dramatic rescue.
It might as well have been a rescue following one last sweep with the searchlight across the breakwater rocks.
Rozier never mentioned it to me, just part of the routine of the rescue business at Station New London, I suppose.
The Coast Guard tradition is you always go out when ordered, even though sometimes you are possibly not going to make it back.
From Rozier, I saw proof of another Coast Guard tradition — that, as a matter of course, you routinely go above and beyond the call of duty.
This is the opinion of David Collins.
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