Claremont
Other patrons were being loud. Cursing.
This didn’t surprise Palmer. Even on weeknights, the place gets rowdier after 9, when some of Claremont’s other restaurants close and some people would rather drink than go home.
But on this particular night, a Monday in late September, it offended his sense of decorum.
“They’re all using the f-word,” Palmer recalled the next morning, sitting at the Claremont Senior Center, which he visits for breakfast a couple of times a week.
Many people would have gritted their teeth and borne the affront, but Palmer, who had lived through the agonies of war and then spent the last seven decades volunteering to build a better community in the Upper Valley, wasn’t the type to sit quietly.
He recounted how he piped up.
“I said to the waitress, the girl, I said ‘Hey, you know, everybody don’t like to hear that.’
“I said, ‘I’m not a prude or nothing, but you don’t hear that in the other clubs.’
“I said, ‘I even heard you say that.’
“I said, ‘You’re supposed to be telling them not to be doing that,’ ” he said.
Whether it was Palmer’s advanced age, the respect he’s garnered in the community, or his knack for addressing a person’s behavior without making the person feel attacked is uncertain, but Palmer got the outcome he wanted.
“They all apologized to me,” he said.
A few of the offenders came over to chat with him. “A couple of the girls gave me a hug. … The guy starts talking about a carpenter job I need. He gave me his card,” he said. “And when I left, they said ‘good night, good night.’ They’re all good to me. They call me Mr. Palmer. Some of the guys call me Coach. I probably coached them. I have something to do with almost everybody in the area.”
After leaving the club that night, Palmer got home around 11 p.m., hours past his usual bedtime. But instead of joining his 86-year-old wife, Lorraine, in bed, he indulged a new habit he’d developed over just the last few nights.
The front door of his home opens onto a little hallway, where there’s a shelf stocked with Palmer’s memories. A trophy commemorating his 45 years of umpiring baseball. Row upon row of photographs of himself with union leaders, politicians including Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders, community groups and sports teams, many from the junior sports league that he helped to establish and kept going for years. Some of his brother, Dick Palmer, who owned Palmer’s Barn in Unity, which sold hot dogs and hamburgers during foot-stomping hoedowns back in the old days. His 80th birthday party. His 90th, which had drawn people from all over to a big party organized by his wife.
He gathered up some of the photo books and took them to his favorite chair, stopping at the kitchen on the way to get a little coffee. “I was looking through them,” Palmer said. “My family, when all the kids were kids. Babies. At the beaches. It made me feel how lucky I was, to have my family like that.”
But of all the memories sitting on the shelf near his front door, none stir such raw emotion as the ones related to his service in the Navy aboard the USS Savannah and the USS Alaska. Thoughts of the war can still grip him with surprising rapidity. The next morning, he was praising the VA.
“They do wonderful for me,” he said. “Wonderful. I got glasses, hearing aids.”
The next instant, his voice was so full of emotion, it nearly ground to a halt.
“Whenever I talk about my service,” he said, “I kind of break up.”
For the past 70-plus years, he didn’t know exactly why that should be, but now, he thinks he’s finally coming to understand.
“Because,” he said, “getting hit with the bomb.”
When he was a teenager, Palmer didn’t think long about enlisting in the Navy to fight in World War II. He’d already left high school to take a job with the Goodyear plant in Windsor. Pearl Harbor impelled him to action.
“I was that type,” he said. “I’ve always been involved, you know.”
For a teenage boy from Claremont, the service opened up new worlds.
“It was another life,” he said. “Completely different.”
He first traveled to places such as Norfolk, Va., and the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In the summer of 1942, an 18-year-old Palmer traveled across the ocean for the first time, aboard the Savannah, headed to the coast of Morocco, Trinidad and Recife, Brazil. He had never been on the ocean before, and it took him a while before he could leave port without feeling seasick.
He was shorter than most of the recruits, but a willing worker and a good swimmer, sometimes taking advantage of time off to dive into the ocean and climb the long ladder back to the deck.
On the Savannah, a 600-foot-long Brooklyn-class light cruiser equipped with five giant turrets carrying 15 heavy-caliber guns, Palmer worked mostly as a signalman on the ship’s bridge, where large cloth flag bags held a series of letters, numbers and symbols that facilitated communication with other ships. He used a telescope to monitor their signals in return, logging messages onto a pad. It was vital work, especially when, traveling in a convoy of 30 ships, they needed to coordinate a simultaneous change in direction without running into each other.
Mostly, it was quiet. He talked with friends, played basketball in the hoops set up in the well deck, bet a dollar on the outcome of baseball games back in the states (Palmer backed the Red Sox against a fan of the Detroit Tigers).
His circle of close friends was small, but he knew almost every one of the more than 800 officers and enlisted men on board by sight, often from seeing them in the chow line of the mess, where his favorite meal was the chicken.
But there was action, too. In March of 1943, they captured a German blockade runner and took its 72 crew members prisoner. But as a Navy party prepared to board the German ship, a time bomb set by the exiting Germans exploded, killing 11 U.S. seamen. Palmer said some of the captured Germans were only 16 years old.
With Palmer aboard, the Savannah’s massive guns fired on Axis forces in Morocco, and, eventually, moved on to Sicily. In July 1943, it supported the advance of Allied forces up the coast of Italy.
The first couple of times the Savannah entered battle he performed well, he said, but he couldn’t stop his teeth from chattering in fright.
“We had a little closet with a urinal in it. The most it could hold was two people,” he said. “But after we said ‘cease fire,’ we probably seen seven people come out of there.”
As with the seasickness, Palmer acclimated to the acts of war.
“After a while, even in battle, to me it seemed like just doing a job,” he said.
Long before 2001’s terrorist attacks against the Pentagon and New York City, Sept. 11 was an important date to Palmer.
On that overcast day in 1943, off the coast of Italy, a 19-year-old Palmer looked up from his perch on the Savannah’s signalman’s bridge at a tiny, dark object against the vast expanse of the sky.
From 20,000 feet, it looked like a plane with smoke coming out of the back, but it was actually a new German innovation — a 3,000-pound glide-control bomb known as a Fritz X, a forerunner of today’s precision-guided munitions, directed with deadly accuracy by a high-flying pilot using remote control. The Savannah’s anti-aircraft guns began firing on it, but the closer the bomb got, the faster it seemed to travel. Near the end, it was too fast for the human eye.
“All of a sudden, we didn’t see it,” Palmer said.
The sound, he said, was like a long, drawn-out swish, punctuated by a terrific boom of detonation. The bomb scored a direct hit on one of the big gun turrets near the bow, not 40 feet from Palmer’s position on the bridge.
“It blew me up against the shields,” he said. “The flag bags were all on fire.”
It was a chaotic scene. Palmer saw an officer dash to a ladder and start to climb down to the deck, apparently forgetting that he was wearing headphones. “As he went down the ladder, he ran out of line and his head snapped back,” Palmer said. “He went flying the rest of the way.”
Palmer’s not sure if the officer survived.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I take care of myself.”
The smell of the sea was overwhelmed by the rank odor of oil and burning powder. Official Navy accounts of the attack say the bomb pierced the gun turret and “passed through three decks into the lower handling room where it exploded a gaping hole in the bottom, and tore open a seam in the ship’s port side.”
Palmer said he’ll never forget seeing a turret trapdoor opening to reveal a man, whose face he recognized from the chow line, “opened up and smoking.”
He was dead, but Palmer thinks he must have lived long enough to open the hatch.
“That’s what I really remember,” he said, in a thick voice.
For about half an hour, a series of secondary explosions in the gun room hampered the ability of the crew to fight the fires. Though some of the ship was flooded, the ship’s officers were able to keep it upright by strategically sealing off some damaged compartments, and opening other undamaged compartments to take on more seawater.
Shortly before 6 p.m., the Savannah was able to travel under its own power to a dry dock in Malta for emergency repairs.
There, Palmer realized his ordeals were not over. The bodies of many of his shipmates remained in the compartments below the decks, submerged in a toxic mix of oil and water. It was difficult to see, and difficult to maneuver in the cramped quarters. They needed someone who was smaller, and a good swimmer, to help retrieve the bodies.
So Palmer volunteered.
It was ghastly work, spread out over 14 days during which the bodies began to decompose.
“You pick up somebody and a leg would come off,” he said. He collected the parts and carried them back in a basket.
According to official accounts, the Savannah lost 197 crewmen in the explosion and its aftermath. Palmer estimates that he pulled about 25 corpses from the water before the job was done.
In 1945, the ship was part of the force that took President Franklin D. Roosevelt to the Yalta Conference, but it would never be in combat again.
The horrors of war are now deep in Palmer’s past, buried by decades of a rich and full life.
He worked a variety of jobs, including with Goodyear and as an electrician, raised a family, was active as a coach and organizer of many sports leagues and other nonprofits. He’s been a vocal supporter of local unions, and ran at one time for treasurer of Sullivan County. Over the years, there were many reunions of the crews of the Savannah and the Alaska, but they stopped holding them six years ago, when only 17 attended.
“There’s not enough of them,” Palmer said. “Old. Can’t afford it.”
These days, he plays pool at the senior center, grinning as the other guys, in their 70s and 80s, call him “old man.”
He drives down to Florida every winter, making a two-week trip out of the drive, visiting old friends and family that he’s stashed away up and down the East Coast. His son Andrew, 56, moved in last year to help out with cleaning, cooking and mowing the lawn.
He eats a few times a week at the local McDonald’s, and his friends razz him about his politics. He’s a lifelong Democrat, in the mold of his father.
“They’re only trying to have something to say,” Palmer said. “I like children. I like seniors. I like working people. I don’t like people that get more than they got, and they’re afraid to share it with people who need it.”
As he prepared to leave the Claremont Senior Center, he noted that he has a variety of health ailments, but he keeps them in perspective.
“I’m a little weaker today,” he said. “About a year and a half, two years ago, I come down with vertigo real bad. And a little bit has always hung out with me. … But I’m a lot better than everybody else.”
His feelings about war are mixed. He doesn’t like the thought of young men and women in harm’s way in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I’m sure that they know they’re doing the job and all that,” he said. “But I know that they wish they weren’t over there.”
Palmer said his recent bouts of reflection have helped him to draw the connection between his own service, the service of others, and the emotions that grip him when he is reminded of the day the bomb struck the Savannah.
“I know what they’re going through. And for years and years, I never even give it a second thought,” he said. “I just thought, I got no problems. I’m all right. I always pride myself on dealing with emergencies.”
For all that, he said, American ideals remain a noble cause.
“There’s nothing wrong with dying for this country,” he said. He got up, headed to his next social engagement. “You’re not going to live that long anyhow.”
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.