198 Crossing the Line 



1944, continued 



of the raging main, including the queen, the princess, tlie royal prosecutor, 



the royal chaplain, the royal doctor, the royal barber, the royal cook, the royal 



undertaker, the royal baby and the royal musicians. 



It was then that the JoUy Roger was run up on the foremast and the coinrt 

 was convened where thrones had been erected on the forward elevator now 

 lowered to the hangar deck. Here justice was meted out to the pollywogs, 

 all of whom had received subpoenas and svunmonses and many of whom had 

 been ordered to appear in special raiment. 



Lieut. ( j.g. ) John F. Druze of Irvington, N. J., who will be remembered by 

 sports fans as the 1937 Fordham football captain and former assistant to 

 Frank Leahy at Boston College and Notre Dame, was charged with boasting 

 about his prowess as a football player and athletic expert and was ordered 

 to appear in a costume similar to tliat worn by Charles Atlas in the strength 

 ads. He then was convicted and sentenced to demonstrate in every com- 

 partment of tlie ship the principles preached by that apostle of athleticism. 



While Lieut. Druze was demonstrating how to develop from a ninety-pound 

 weakling into 210 pounds of muscle, four messboys, blindfolded and wearing 

 winter underwear, were belaboring each other with boxing gloves on the 

 lowered after elevator. Two officers, dressed as somewhat exaggerated 

 admirals, meanwhile were going throughout the ship with tubs of water and 

 ship models and staging mock naval battles while lectinring on tactics. 



On the range-finder platform an ensign, dressed as Mahatma Gandhi, 

 stood with binoculars to eyes and reported all electricity producing clouds. 

 Every hour on the hour a lieutenant, accused of complaining about the food 

 in the officers' wardroom mess, set up a card table with dishes and silver for 

 one and consumed a box of cornflakes without benefit of cream or sugar. 



Down on the hangar deck and on the lowered forward elevator, meanwhile, 

 there was a steady stream of officers and men who crept forward on hands 

 and knees to pay homage to his royal highness and then to be hustled through 

 an assortment of treatments. While intermittent equatorial rainsqualls oc- 

 casionally showered upon the whole piratically garbed assemblage, they 

 first were sent crawhng through a forty-foot tunnel of canvas, from the out- 

 side of which they were belabored by royal policemen vidth stufiEed canvas 

 clubs. 



Then they were seated in an electrically charged doctor's chair to have 

 their mouths sprayed with gentian blue and, after being embalmed hberally 

 with floiur-paste, they then were rushed aft to the fantail, where they finally 

 were spilled from an elevated chair into a tank of sea water and became 

 shellbacks themselves. 



It probably is true enough that this is not the type of thing which you 

 yourself would want any part of in New York or in River Falls, Wis. You 

 may even wonder why men would want any part of it anywhere, and yet 

 for the officers and men aboard this ship this — and this alone — made the 

 war almost stop for about four hovurs today. 



