Heritage+Stories-+Campbell,+Shelby

﻿ __My Family Story __

In 1955, my grandpa crossed the equator on a Navy ship. He was on the USS Boston Missle Cruiser. There were over 1,200 guys on the ship with him and the ship was over 750 feet long; which is like 2 1/2 football fields. They were over in the Atlantic Ocean, but they needed to be on the Pacific side. So they went through the Panama Canal. He said it took them about 8 hours to go through all the locks. Then when he got into the Pacific, they crossed the equator in Chile. He said it was so cold that they all had heavy winter coats and gloves on. They also crossed the International Dateline. So they had the same day twice.

 Next, he told me some traditions that the Navy ships had back then. One went like this. Back then there were two groups of guys on the ship. They were the Shallbacks and the Polliwogs. The Shallbacks always thought they were better than the Polliwogs. And they wanted all of them to join their group and become a Shallback. So they built a pool on the deck of the ship and filled it with saltwater. Then they made the Polliwogs get into the pool. They would hold them under the water til they were almost out of breath. Then they asked them if they wanted to be in the Shallback group. If they said yes, they were let go. If they said no, then they were put into this 50 foot long tunnel. This was the place where they put all the garbage on the ship til they got to land and could dump it. So they would put all the guys that said no into this tunnel and would make them crawl through the garbage. While they were crawling, some of the shallbacks had paddles. If the guys in the garbage weren't moving fast enough, they would hit them lightly to make them go faster. But there was this really fat guy in front of my grandpa that wouldn't go to fast, so it took even longer tofo through this tunnel. Finally, when the guys came out of the tunnel, most of them agreed to be a Shallback. If not, then they would put this dye in their mouths that turned it whatever color. So there were guys walking around with blue, green, red, and orange mouths. The Admiral had to do all of this too.