Calling
By Storm
Chicago - September 2,
1954
The Chicago patrol officer
leaned his elbows on the top of his car as he watched the deepening night along
Lakeshore Drive. The moon was rapidly sinking in the west, following the sun
that had set a couple of hours earlier, but despite the hour and the fact that
is was a Thursday night, a somewhat festive crowd was gathering. That was one
of the reasons he was here. The other was that in a few moments the police
would shut down the lakefront thoroughfare to all traffic for the rest of the
night.
All that is, except one very
special vehicle.
The cop turned his gaze from
the crowd towards the east side of the road. There, looming under the harsh
glare of spotlights, was the reason for all the excitement.
The brooding hulk sent a
shiver down his spine as he considered it’s lean and deadly form. A U-boat
captured at sea by the US Navy during WWII, the U-505 sat in a special cradle
waiting to be carried across the road to it’s final home, the Museum of Science
and Industry. He reflected that it had taken months to get the boat here. First
the city and museum had had to raise the money to pay for shipping and
refurbishing; even though the Navy had agreed to give the boat to the
museum, they had refused to either move it themselves or pay to have someone
else do it. As a consequence, it had taken over a year to get to this point.
But now, once the U-boat crossed Lakeshore Drive, it would be irrefutably
committed to spending the rest of it’s days land-bound. He wasn’t sure how he
felt about that. He’d done a tour of duty in the Navy, yet he had to admit to
mixed feelings about this particular boat. As a former destroyerman he had no
particular love for submarines. As a sailor though… ships belonged at sea, not
sitting on dry land.
Movement in the shadows
caught his eye. He looked closer, then relaxed as he recognized the tall blond
boy. It was that firefighter’s kid. Somehow the thirteen year old had managed
to be here for at least a few minutes almost every day since the sub had
arrived back at in late June.
The cop shook his head, half
in admiration, half in exasperation. The boy’s father had no plans to have a
sailor in the family, something he’d made very loudly plain from the first day
when he’d come to drag the kid home. Yet the youth had defied his father to
continue to come see the boat - though he had become considerably more discrete
about it. It was quite clear to those observing the standoff between father and
son that the harder the old man pushed, the more stubbornly the boy dug his
heals in. One of the other officers, wondering if they had a budding juvenile
delinquent on their hands, had done some discrete checking. The Morton boy was
a model student, a Boy Scout and as far as anybody was able to discern, an
all-round good kid. But he did have a bit of a stubborn streak. And it looked
like from where the cop stood, the kid was bound and determined to go to sea on
a submarine.
He gave a small shudder - you
couldn’t pay him enough to shut himself up in a vessel that wasn’t much more
than an over-sized sewer pipe! One would hope that the kid eventually saw
reason… The cop let his gaze wander back over to the kid, studying his
expression.
Nope. Hopelessly entranced.
Officer Brooks just hoped the
kid survived the experience.