After being stationed in Japan for several years, my folks and I sailed back to the US and under the Golden Gate Bridge into Oakland. The ship we sailed on was the MSTS General W. A. Mann. The trip took two weeks to cross...
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“After being stationed in Japan for several years, my folks and I sailed back to the US and under the Golden Gate Bridge into Oakland. The ship we sailed on was the MSTS General W. A. Mann. The trip took two weeks to cross...”
My family sailed from Fort Mason Pier in SF to Hawaii on the Mann in 1961. Took five days. Only entertainment was a tetherball on the quarterdeck, playing with a shortwave radio set-up off the “dining room,” and walking our pets on the fantail.
3 days into the trip me and a pal were playing with the tetherball when the rope parted and the ball sailed over the side into the Pacific. So much for that.
I remember tuning the short-wave one day and finding a Hawaiian radio station playing - you guessed it - Hawaiian music. The movie “Tora Tora Tora” has a scene where the Japanese sailors do the very same thing aboard their carrier on the way to bomb Pearl Harbor.
San Francisco, and Hawaii, were much, much different - and better - places in 1961 than they are today.
I shipped out of Seattle (Ft. Lewis) for Japan in July 1958 on the USS Mitchell. When I came back in July 1961 it was on the Mann, through the Golden Gate.