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Memoirs of Lloyd Moss: 1927

The ride back was in a proper passenger coach and I could appreciate the roadbed which was surveyed and engineered by none other than Herbert Hoover before World War I when he was a very successful civil engineer. We spent all of July at this place and it began to get pretty dull anchored out in the bay all this time. We ran out of movie film after awhile and began showing the same ones over again. There was a little British gunboat named "Cornflower" tied up to the coaling dock and sometimes her crew were invited over to our ship in the evenings to see the pictures. And a few times I accompanied the movie projectionist over to the British fenced-in community to show our pictures to the port executives and their families. The radio shack crew started printing a little sheet containing the world's news and passing it around every morning. A few Chinese merchants, called bumboat men, were allowed to come aboard once in a while and spread their wares out on the deck for us to buy. Embroidered silk, jewelry, brass objects and antiques. Of course there is always the scrubbing and gunnery drills for the deck force and the machinery cleaning and repairing for the black gang to keep the grew occupied. Finally on the 8th of August we hauled up the anchor and headed back to Shanghai where I went back to police duty in one of the world's most exciting cities very happily. I had come to know some of the White Russians who had escaped from Valdivostock by this time and they had some terrific stories to tell of recent happenings in Russia. More of this later.

On the 27th August it was goodbye again to Shanghai and we were off to the Philippines. After a brief stop at Manila we sailed out around Bataan and into Subic Bay where at a place called Olongapo was the big floating Dewey drydock. This was a most interesting structure built in three sections at Newport News, then towed separately through the Suez Canal and across the Indian Ocean to Subic where it was joined together to make a dock that would easily take our 555 foot cruiser up out of the water for bottom scraping, propeller checking, repair of sonic gear etc.. Olongapo was s dull little tropical town cut right out of dense jungle built mostly for the use of people employed at the drydock and the related machine and supply shops. However there was a trail that went two miles back into the jungle and ended at a bamboo pavilion called Gordon's Farm. It was quite a joint the dance floor was plain earth pounded very hard and oiled by the action of sweaty feet over years of time. The native girls never wore shoes but they did have bright colored dresses made of nipa fibre, very cool and practical for the jungle. Their perfume smelled like cinnamon and they could talk very little English, but what words they did know were very earthy and we laughed for weeks after at some of the things they said to us.

It was customary here to get together and buy a keg of beer for each table and with the tap being opened and closed almost constantly the keg would be drained about the time to return to the ship. Gordon had a Ford engine out back that made a lot of noise and powered a generator that lit up the place quite nicely but the minute we left the hall we were in the blackest kind of dark you could imagine. Someone usually had a flashlight but it hardly made an impression and there was always the danger of coming across a hug python or other known animal of the region. There was a twenty-five foot python skin stretched across one side of the pavilion from a snake Gordon had shot as it floated down the stream right beside the dance hall. So you know what we were thinking of as we stumbled along indian file back to town.

I took one walk along a trail that bordered the bay as far as the town of Subic and found it to be just a cluster of bamboo houses on stilts with some outriggers used for fishing in the bay. On the way I had to cross a small river on a little ferry barge that slid along on a wire.

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