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 When did this happenModerators: Jump to page : 1 Now viewing page 1 [25 messages per page] | |
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Runner485 |
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COMSUBBBS Posts: 2673 Location: New Jersey | Subject: When did this happen I was just thinking about the SSN I visited while in Groton for the USSVI anniversary this year and noticed that the meals were served buffet style, as opposed to sitdown and the messcranks bought out platters of food from the galley. I assume this was a gradual transition. I was on boats from '61-'64. You old guys, how did your chow get served way back then?? | ||
| dex armstrong |
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COMSUBBBS Posts: 3202 Location: Alexandria, Virginia | Subject: RE: When did this happen Little Joe, It came out in dented and dinged up stainless steel bowls and platters. It was served by guys who were non-rated and who had to develop armadillo hides to fend off derrogatory comments, insults and multi headed harpoons. It was served along the same series of guidelines used for "feeding time at the local zoo". Emily Post would have had a cardiac arrest and your mother would have been justifiably apalled, if they had witnessed the behavior of the undersea warriors defending them....Eating aboard an operating smokeboat was governed by "Caveman Rules", utilized by most deep jungle aboriginal cultures. CPO's were the worst...they were tribal elders who demanded and got the first spoon fulls of damn near everything...It had something to some kind of Godgiven right conferred on them by the Almighty on a dark night in the goatlocker on Noah's Ark....Get between a hungry hairy chested Chief and a bowl of mashed potatoes and you could end up with fork tines sticking out of your palm or at worst a compound fracture of your forearm. At one point, I understand that SubLant actually considered issuing axes to resolve differences over ownership of the last pork chop and differing dimensions of sheet cake portions. Tradition outlawed use of firearms, flame throwers, grenades and the unleashing of wild animals...pretty much of everything else was OK. Your server attire was the universally acceptable sweaty dungaree shirt, week old dungaree trou, an apron that looked like a cross between the Shroud of Turrin and a Zambian drop cloth...and bent dog tags. At four-hundred feet, answering bells on the battery, you received very few visits by folks listed on the New York social register, passing European royalty, movie stars or members of Congress....The absence of the gentle influence of ladies, allowed behavior more consistent with Mongolian Yakk Feast than that found in the Main Dining Salon at the Waldorf-Astoria. Add to that mental picture the addition of engine-room creatons, who swung through the boat on ventillation likes and operating vent handles, like primates and you have as accurate a picture as I can cobble together. But, when you sat there with your worthless butt firmly planted on a padded potato locker, you were shoulder to shoulder with the finest men and most loyal friends God would ever give you and you were getting wrapped around the best damn food the citizens of the United States could provide....until operational longevity and Mother Nature conspired together rot and putrify everything perishible planned for future menus....Then, SPAM, bug juice, panther piss and canned goods appeared and you ate like guys on death row in Pakistan. Diesel Boat, "buffet style" was unlike the nook navy...buffet style required those participating to excavate cans of their selection from corrogated cardboard cases carpeting the passageways of the After Batterv crew's berthing and bringing their selections forward for heating. It was risky because anything considered unnecessary sleep interuption of the next watch, could result in blindness, limb removal or decapitation. Life aboard U.S. naval submersibles has become far more gentle and reserved....Submarines have come to understand that napkins belong in laps...elbows do NOT belong on tables, cigar ashes in passed food bowls is not a polite practice...and spearing baked potatoes and other things with an electricians knife is not conducive to the gentle life. Styrofoam cups have replaced ceramic coffee cups...cups if dropped could crush your foot or put one helluva dent in the toe of a safety boot. Cups that could be utilized as jury rigged battleship anchors or to be thrown in "repel boarders" emergencies. The addition of tablecloths, Waterford crystal vases filled with plastic roses, lace napkins and recorded renditions of Mozart, Brahams, and the Mormon Tabernacle Chior have gone a lone way to not only improve the quality of life and elevate the gentlemanly image of todays sailors, but to vastly improve the living conditions of close proximity living. Now if you'll permit me to excuse myself, I will retire to the kitchen aqnd zip the lid out of a can of Vienna sausage...grab a jar of Skippy and a box of Ritz crackers and prepare myself a smokeboat Torpedoman's luau. Now, if I can find some eating utensils that look like a rhino stepped on them...a half ton coffee cup with a chipped rim...and a damn plate that looks like it was at one time employed as a gorilla Frisbee...I can close my eyes and visualize the days Joe's post has transported me back to. DEX | ||
| Tom McNulty |
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Master and Commander Posts: 1455 | Subject: RE: When did this happen We got our chow family style from the mess cranks. The chiefs had their own table and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why the chiefs had oversized oval plates instead of the normal round ones the rest of us had. Was it to hold more chow? That made no sense because the older you get the less you need. Was it to keep the chow from integrating on the plate? Then there was the question, "are you left handed"? "Then sit on the end". Then there's the fried chicken dinner. Third call only got wings. I believe the inventor of buffalo wings was an ex submariner who always harbored a thought as to what to do with all those damn wings left over after third call. Of course if you had a crewmate nicknamed "chicken wing" it was not a problem. Ours was Larry Lee Long. I'm talking a whole serving bowl of them and yet he stayed skinny the, lucky b@#$%rd. Every boat had a slunge gut who could stay skinny as a rail. | ||
| GaryKC |
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COMSUBBBS Posts: 3673 Location: Kansas City Missouri | Subject: RE: When did this happen Much of my chow memories are as described earlier, the DBs cooks were quite good at serving the greasiest food the day before or on our being anywhere near Cape Hatteras. Wonder why! The best meal I had was while on my only FBM patrol, the Thomas Jefferson's last Atlantic patrol #36. It was also the first time I ate corned beef and cabbage, three large platefuls. My folks were from Chattanooga and had never served us kids that wonderful concoction. It is still my favorite to this day. BTW this post is true to the best of my recollection. | ||
| Bear |
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Great Sage of the Sea Posts: 781 Location: Port Orchard WA | Subject: RE: When did this happen 648 638 680 and 618 all were family style 609 was in overhaul so it was serve yourself (all though I think, we had a buffet on the barge as I recollect cause the XO wanted to keep cooks busy and not TAD to the base galley, all though that could have been last part of 648 or 680 in overhaul) Also served on TJ (as a 1st class Mess Cook, halfway night thing) in Pacific. The Tridents (727 in particular although I have dined on 7 now) were buffet style although there was a roaming mess cook to refill sodas etc. and help out, but the galley was specifically design that way, because space was certainly availiable. And there was still three or four mess cooks at any time to do trash, clean up, the dishes, and to be generally maligned and abused. (Still true to this day as she is now SSGN 727) But I was on the 638 after the 727 so I think it was not a time thing so much as a design. And to my knowledge the 688's were family style from the pictures I see, Joe you did not say what SSN you were on. so if it was an 88 then they changed by time, or maybe occassion, all the rest I am sure chnaged by class and design Edited by Bear 2007-07-13 2:22 PM | ||
| dex armstrong |
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COMSUBBBS Posts: 3202 Location: Alexandria, Virginia | Subject: RE: When did this happen Since I never served aboard anything having a hull number above 481, I'm no authority on fishion powered craft food consumption, except to say that on the two nookler submarines, I have visited, the messdecks have decidedly improved along with meal decorum. There was no garbage stench or loose jute potato bags lying all over the enlisted head decks. There were no number 10 cans wired under leaking overhead equipment or cases of cans tiling the passageways three deep. Messcooks didn't carry spud peelers on their dog tag beadchains and there were no rolls of nylon GDU bags suspended from vent operating handles or hard salami (horsec--k, for you old barnacle encrusted sonuvabitches.) looped over overhead electrical lines. No bananas hanging from the "python gang-bang" (copper piping leading to the tanks from the low pressure 10lb air blower.) Cooks looked remakably like chefs rather than third world sewage plant workers and messcooking seemed to have been elevated to rate designation status. We were fleas on the dying dogs we rode and loved. The entire smokeboat establishment was irrevokably infected by terminal obsolesence and we were condemed to some kind of going out-of-style death row limbo. Our Diolphins looked the same but we were, in the now famous words of Senator Allan..."Makakka waiting for the last Makakka collection wagon.". We ragged nooks...that was in our job description and what we did for a living. We had no idea as to what an "at sea" nookler man's diet consisted of. Rumor had it that nooklers ate filleted humingbird livers with imported wine and roving violin players. Most of our, at sea meals originated in containers it took a can opener to unlock. We were the Off Broadway nookler dietary test dummies. If we ate it and failed to toss our cookies in three hours it was deemed palatable and fit for nooks...if during that time, we failed and shot our lunch, the CNO allowed us to retain the remainder of that particular issue for as many repeat performances as it took to pinpoint the problem and correct it. Nooks went first class while dumbass conventional boatsailors were used as a test platform to locate the thin divide between the "acceptable" and "unacceptable". Nooks toned down the strength of issue coffee. They shaved the unruly bastard and filed his horns off...spayed the poor devil and reduced the strength to the minimally acceptable range. Air Corps pilots went from prop to jet with a wholesale seperation of function....The Army went from parachute troops to air assault units without the replaced function being condemned to indignity....Cavalry converted to tanks and highly mobile combat vehicles without making old senior officers feel like horse and buggy time refugees. So, please spare me the vitrioloic comment...whiny complaint and breastbeating. I enjoy pulling legs. Oddly enough "some of my best friends went nookler" and succombed to radiated testical syndrome causing their wives to give birth to six toed, two headed Coast Guard yeomen. Hey, if it bothers you...simple solution...ignore the crap. I enjoy swinging from limb-to-limb peeing on the petunias. DEX | ||
| vonzipper18 |
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| Mess cooking Posts: 17 | Subject: RE: When did this happen On the Madison I reportedd aboard just when new contruction was ending. I was FTB3(SU) and junior messcrank even though I was going on 3 years in the Navy. Ronny Owens was FTB2(SS), who went all the way to E-9 and COB on a couple of boats. All messcranks were from the weapons department and were E-5's. This only lasted for a couple of months. When the crews split, the seamen took over. | ||
| Donald L. Johnson |
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Great Sage of the Sea Posts: 602 Location: Visalia, Ca. | Subject: RE: When did this happen All the boats I went to sea on were family-style, although chow on the Broke-dragon (584) was more like what Dex described than what it was like on the 622, the 595, or the 715, since she was a transition boat with a nuke plant in a diesel boat hull. For long hauls north on Seadragon, canned goods were only 2-deep in the berthing-space passages, and tube #7 (ATR) became an auxilliary refrigerator so the milk and eggs lasted longer. On the newer boats, we put more canned goods in the engineroom, back in shaft alley and outboard the main swithgear. But I had ceramic coffee cups on every boat I rode. And yes, they made great weapons for repell boarders drills. | ||
| John J. Patterson |
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Crew Posts: 69 Location: Irwin, PA | Subject: RE: When did this happen On the Nathanael Greene gold crew in 1978 it was buffet style in port family style at sea. | ||
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