There's that scene in the movie "Jaws", the one where Hooper, Brody and Quint (played brilliantly by Robert Shaw) are all sitting around on the boat - the one that ends up being too small - engaging in a friendly competition involving their various scars. There's a lot of humor, especially when Brody looks forlornly at his appendectomy scar and realizes that he's a piker compared to these two seafaring men, and Hooper gets a good laugh when he points to his heart, claiming that it was broken by a girl named Mary Ellen Moffatt.
But when Hooper asks Quint to explain his tattoo, he launches into one of the most riveting monologues in movie history - the story of the U.S.S Indianapolis. Although Jaws is a work of fiction, the story of the Indianapolis is, tragically, very real.
I never realized until seeing this movie when it first came out in 1975 (on a family vacation to the beach , no less), that my father's first cousin was a crew member on the Indianapolis. Unfortunately, he didn't survive.
My dad was only about 10 years old at the end of WWII, so he probably didn't know Albert R. Kelly, S2, all that well, but Albert and his parents, Julia and Joe, lived right next door to my dad's family on Flowerdale Avenue in Cleveland. Fortunately, my dad was too young to serve in WWII and too old to serve in Vietnam, although he did spend two years in the Army upon his high school graduation in 1955.
I have vague memories of Aunt Julia and Uncle Joe. Julia was my grandmother Rose's sister. She was a very quiet woman and I remember Joe as being a small Irishman with a rather cranky disposition. But I was only a little kid when we went to visit there. Much too young to understand or even care about how the loss of an only son, an only child, can leave such an empty place in the hearts and lives of two people.
In the house where I grew up, and then in the house that my parents moved to when my dad retired, my mom had a collection of family photographs on one wall, dozens of photographs. There is one of Albert Kelly and three other sailors, in uniform, all sitting around a table and drinking beer, looking into the camera and smiling as if they had their whole lives ahead of them. I don't know who the other three were, and I don't know what became of them. Albert looked quite a bit like his mother. I wish I had a copy of that photo so that I could post it here.
That is the only person I know of in my family who died in service to his country. I just hope that he wasn't one of the ones who went into the water alive.
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Thanks, jimmymac. It really is an incredible scene in and incredible movie. And, of course, the story of the Indianapolis is equally incredible. The captain of the ship, Charles McVay, was court-martialed, and committed suicide in 1968. He was exonerated by a resolution of the United States Congress in 2000.
Also, the captain, Charles McVay, was the only Navy captain to be courtmartialed for losing his ship during WWII. He was blamed for failing to take effective evasive action to avoid being torpedoed, even thought the Japanese sub commander who ordered the strike testified (yes, they had an enemy captain testify against an American officer at his court martial) that evasive action would not have prevented the torpedoes from hitting the ship. Captain McVay eventually committed suicide, and it was five decades later that he was officially exonerrated, after a 12-year-old boy named Hunter Scott, who had seen "Jaws" and become fascinated with the story of the Indianapolis, joined with surviving sailors to petition his representative to have Congress redress the matter.
Can you tell that this story fascinates me? :-)