Status - John Skinner - USS Daly:
USS Daly (DD-519) - Argentia, Newfoundland
May 29th: Out to sea 7 AM to 6PM.
May 30th: At sea at 7 AM for the rest of the day.
May 31st: At sea until returning to port at 6 PM.
June 1st: At sea 9 AM to 10 PM. 32 men advanced in rating effective today.
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Memorial Day, or as it was also known, Decoration Day fell on Sunday, May 30th in 1943 and Mary McLaughlin was able to take a short vacation. She would not have had the Monday off, as we do today, unless she had used her vacation time. On this weekend, there was a trip to the beach:
Mary:
Doris and Phyllis invited our whole group: Peggy Chisholm; Janet Munro; Margie Winsor; and Jeanne Villeumiere to York Beach for Memorial Day weekend. They had an old cabin in the woods. There was no electricity, water, or bathroom there. We got water from the house in front of the woods which belonged to a relative of the Welches. Mrs. Welch came with us to the cabin and Mr. Welch came on the weekends. They seemed to enjoy being with us and the feeling was mutual.
York was so different when I first saw it from the way it is now. We would go down to the beach to swim and there might be two or three people on the whole beach. The blackout was still in force and it was really dark at night. The Coast Guard had a lookout station on the Nubble Road and the beach was patrolled.
One night we decided to go to a movie in York Harbor, about five miles away. Of course, we had to walk since no one had a car. We got about a half mile along the road when a truck full of soldiers stopped and asked if we wanted a ride, and they took us to the theater.
More and more often we went to York for weekends and soon were spending all our vacations there. Things didn't change much until the war was over but we girls biked and hiked and talked the time away.
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Here is a postcard of York Beach (Long Beach), from the 1940s, probably from after the war:
More Information:
- Official Navy Chronology, pp. 344-345 .
- Aleutians, Gilberts and Marshalls, Samuel Eliot Morison, pp. 22-48.
- Breaking the Bismarcks Barrier, Samuel Eliot Morison, pp. 120-137.
- Logbooks of the US Navy at the National Archives, USS Daly, DD-519, May, 1943
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