Ernie: The Autobiography by Ernest Borgnine Page A

case of war, they could sail her without a crew. The plan was to fill it with explosives and explode it in some port they wanted to disable. There were two RCVs: the Lamberton and the Boggs . Years later, in Hollywood, the famous show business columnist Army Archerd came up to me and said, “You were in the navy?”
    I said “Yes, sir. I was onboard a ship called the USS Lamberton. ”
    He looked rather strangely at me and said, “Did you ever hear of the USS Boggs ?”
    I said, “Sure. That was the ship right next to us in the nest.”
    He said, “I was aboard the Boggs .”
    It is indeed a small world.
    In our newest configuration as an RCV, we were sent to Honolulu. However, before leaving San Diego I did manage to get my heart broken a little.
    I had this buddy, Vincent Lang. We went ashore and met a couple of girls, a rather tall one and a one a little bit shorter but still taller than either of us. We got to talking to them and started seeing them every time we went ashore. One day we got a car and took the girls up to see the stars at the San Diego planetarium. We had a wonderful day and became kind of chummy and one thing led to another.
    No, not that. I mean, we fell in love.
    Her name was Millie and I met her father, who thought I was quite a guy. When I shipped out to Hawaii, we promised to stay in touch and I said I’d hop a ship back to the States whenever I could. But one incredibly hot day in Honolulu I got a Dear John letter saying, “I’m sorry, but now I’m married very happily, thank you very much.”
    The temperature dropped about twenty degrees for me.
    I was heartbroken, but what are you going to do? We actually did stay in touch, and some years later I was doing the play Harvey on the road with my then-wife Rhoda. We were booked into Minneapolis-St. Paul, where Millie lived. I invited her and Vincent Lang’s wife—because he’d been lucky enough to marry his girl—to come see the show.
    I remember Rhoda and Millie talking and looking at me and occasionally laughing. I guessed they were bonding over the crazy guy one had ducked and one hadn’t. We’re good friends to this day, which is more than I can say for most of the women I loved and married.
    Upon reaching Honolulu we tied up in Pearl City. They put us in the backwaters of Honolulu Harbor and there we stayed. We discovered this was not a good place for us. If the wind was just right, our ships would be black in the morning from the residue when the sugarcane fields were burned. That was a process which started many years before, when one sugarcane farmer took a dislike to another and set fire to the other guy’s sugarcane fields. But the plan backfired when the victim discovered that the fire burned off all the leaves, saving the harvesters extra work. From then on they all burned their fields.
    When the ships were black with soot, guess who had to clean them up?
    If you ever wanted to hear unvarnished naval swearing—and I can’t imagine why you would—that was the place for it. The burnt sugar mixed with the salty air and formed a hard substance that clung to the hull like plastic. I used to think, “Where are those misguided spotter planes when you need ’em to blast something?”
    Apart from that, Hawaii was great. The climate wasn’t as chilly and misty as San Diego. We all knew our jobs so well by this time that work didn’t always feel like work, and leave was like a real vacation. We would go ashore and catch a bus going into downtown Honolulu. They paid us all on different paydays—the army was one week, the navy another—so that never the twain should meet. Because if we all went drinking on the same night, there would always be a fight over a slur or a girl or somebody’s home state.
    There was an ambitious young gentleman, a Japanese guy, who started selling beer on the corner where you caught the bus. First thing you know he was making so much money just selling beer to the sailors that he opened up a big place