Well Al I always been use to sleeping with my feet in bed with me but you can’t do that in the bunk I have got because your knee would crack you in the jaw and knock you out and even if they was room to strech Hall keeps crabbing till you can’t rest and he keeps the room filled up with cigarette smoke and no air and you can’t open up the port hole or you would freeze to death so about the only chance I get to sleep is up in the parlor in a chair in the day time and you don’t no sooner set down when they got a life boat drill or something and for some reason another they have a role call every day and that means everybody has got to answer to their name to see if we are all on board just as if they was any other place to go.
When they give the signal for a life boat drill everybody has got to stick their life belt on and go to the boat where they have been given the number of it and even when everybody knows its a fake you got to show up just the same and yesterday they was one bird thats supposed to go in our life boat and he was sea sick and he didn’t show up so they went after him and one of the officers told him that wasn’t no excuse and what would he do if he was sea sick and the ship was realy sinking and he says he thought it was realy sinking ever since we started.
Well Al we got some crowd on the boat and they’s two French officers along with us that been giveing drills and etc. in one of the camps in the U.S. and navy officers and gunners and a man would almost wish something would happen because I bet we would put up some battle.
Lee just come in and asked me who was I writeing to and I told him and he says I better be careful to not write nothing against anybody on the trip just as if I would. But any way I asked him why not and he says because all the mail would be opened and read by the censor so I said “Yes but he won’t see this because I won’t mail it till we get across the old pond and then I will mail all my letters at once.”
So he said a man can’t do it that way because just before we hit land the censor will take all our mail off of us and read it and cut out whatever he don’t like and then mail it himself. So I didn’t know we had a censor along with us but Lee says we certainly have got one and he is up in the front ship and they call that the censor ship on acct. of him being on there.
Well Al I don’t care what he reads and what he don’t read because I am not the kind that spill anything about the trip that would hurt anybody or get them in bad. So he is welcome to read anything I write you might say.
This front ship is the slowest one of the whole four and how is that for fine judgment Al to put the slowest one ahead and this ship we are on is the fastest and they keep us behind instead of leaving us go up ahead and set the pace for them and no wonder we never get nowheres. Of course that ain’t the censor’s fault but if the old U.S. is in such a hurry to get men across the pond I should think they would use some judgment and its just like as if Hughey Jennings would stick Oscar Stanage or somebody ahead of Cobb in the batting order so as Cobb couldn’t make to many bases on a hit.
Well Al I will have to cut it out for now because its pretty near time for chow and that’s the name we got up out to Camp Grant for meals and now everybody in the army when they talk about food they call it chow.
On the Ship Board, Jan. 19.
Friend Al: Well Al they have got a new nickname for me and now they call me Jack Tar and Bob Lee got it up and I will tell you how it come off. Last night was one rough bird and I guess pretty near everybody on the boat were sick and Lee says to me how was it that I stood the rough weather so good and it didn’t seem to effect me so I says it was probably on acct. of me going around the world that time with the two ball clubs and I was right at home on the water so he says “I guess we better call you Jack Tar.”
So that’s how they come to call me Jack Tar and its a name they got for old sailors that’s been all their life on the water. So on acct. of my name being Jack it fits in pretty
