Currently viewing the tag: "The Great Depression"

Fighting the War Underwater

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by Priscilla Rall

John Henry Lehman was born in Reed near Hagerstown in 1922 to J. Henry and Elizabeth Hege Lehman. His grandfather, a Mennonite, owned and operated the Lehman’s Mill on Marsh Creek, one mile south of the Mason Dixon Line. The mill, first built in 1869, had been rebuilt three times, the last time using bricks made at the mill by Marsh Creek. The mill ground corn, buckwheat, and wheat for human consumption and for animal feed. It still had the original stone-grinding stones imported from France. His grandfather was progressive for those days. He installed a telephone in the mill and got rid of his horses and wagon, buying a truck to deliver his wares.

This upset the elders of the church, but Grandfather Lehman insisted that he was running a business and needed the phone in the mill. This might have been the reason that John was raised in the Lutheran Church. Eventually, the mill was sold to a woman who removed all of the milling equipment and then sold items made by the local women.

John’s father worked for the Western Maryland Railroad until the Great Depression hit and he was laid off.

John and his two sisters attended the Bridgeport school on the Cavetown Pike by Antietam Creek. It had one room, one stove, and one teacher. Later, they went to school in Hagerstown. The family survived the Depression, as their grandfather hired his father for small jobs and such. The Mennonites did not lose their money when the banks failed, as they only dealt in cash, which they kept in their homes, not trusting banks. The Lehmans saw many hobos during this time. John’s mother would always find enough to feed them a meal before they journeyed on, looking for work.

The family had a half-acre garden where the children would help plant, pull weeds, and harvest. At this time, they lived along the Cavetown Pike. Sometimes they would go to Hagerstown to the movies, but that was all the entertainment they had.

After graduating from the old Hagerstown High School, John went to the Bliss Electrical School in Tacoma Park for one year. Amazingly enough, Mr. Bliss had once worked for Thomas Edison! John then briefly worked for the C&P Telephone Company, but the war caught up with him. Before he was to be drafted, John joined the U.S. Navy.  A naval officer had visited the Bliss School and encouraged the boys to complete the course, saying that they would then be very useful to the Navy. So, the Navy it was!

At the Naval Yard, John continued learning about radios, even building crystals sets and one-tube radios. He returned to Bliss, which by now was under the Navy, and learned more about the budding science of radar. He then traveled to San Francisco and spent six months studying radar. Then, he was off to New London, Connecticut, to learn specifically about radar used on submarines. After finishing these courses, he traveled back across the country to Mare Island, where he joined the crew of the USS Barb (SS-220). With Captain John Waterman, John made five combat patrols in the North Atlantic and sunk one German ship. The seventh patrol began with a trip through the Panama Canal, and then off to Pearl Harbor, where Eugene Fluckey joined the crew for his final training. Waterman was old-school, and Fluckey was from the new; they clashed repeatedly. John could hear this from where he was stationed. Finally, Waterman said, “Shut up…I’m the captain!”

Commander Fluckey captained the submarine during the next seven war patrols, between March 1944 and August 1945, when the Barb sunk 17 enemy vessels. In addition, when a “hell ship” carrying Australian and British POWs was unknowingly sunk (as she had no identification) by the SS Sea Lion, the Barb raced for five days to reach the survivors just before a typhoon hit. She was able to rescue 14 Allied POWs from the SS Rakuyo Maru.

Captain Fluckey considered Lehman one of the best radar men he sailed with, noting him several times in his book, Thunder Below.

The last two patrols were particularly impressive. The Barb sank four Japanese ships, including an aircraft carrier, in the East China Sea, off the coast of China. Next, with John constantly monitoring the radar, the Barb sailed up a busy harbor on the Chinese coast, launching her torpedoes at a convoy of 30 enemy ships at anchor. This was the easy part…getting out of the harbor safely to open water was the tricky part. Then, running on the surface, she retired at high speed through the uncharted harbor, full of mines and rocks. Seaman 1st Class Layman was at his station the entire time. For this audacious feat, Fluckey was awarded the Medal of Honor and the USS Barb received the Presidential Unit Citation.

After John left the Navy, he worked for the telephone company. In 1960, he married Anne Pearce and adopted her two children from a previous marriage. They had one son, William, together. They eventually retired to Frederick at Homewood. John passed away on March 5, 2021, the last crew member of the famous submarine, the USS Barb.

USN — Official U.S. Navy photo 19-N-83952 from the U.S. Navy Naval History and Heritage Command.

USS Barb (SS-220)

Armstrong Rifle Saves a Boy’s Hearing

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James Rada, Jr.

Rifle use has been known to cause hearing damage, but Thomas Worthington’s Armstrong rifle once helped restore Worthington’s son’s hearing.

Worthington, who lives in Sabillasville, was born and raised in Annapolis. His family lived with his grandparents, because a month after Worthington was born, in September 1929, the stock market crashed, heralding the start of The Great Depression.

“We were in bad shape financially, so we all lived together,” Worthington said.

As his family struggled to make ends meet, Worthington’s world was the streets of Annapolis.

His father enjoyed reading outdoor magazines. Once, when Worthington was looking for something to do, he found one of the magazines. The cover showed a man fishing in a beautiful mountain stream.

“I’d never seen anything like it before,” Worthington said. “It was just gorgeous. I’d never seen a mountain before then because I had never been out of Annapolis.”

Worthington decided that he wanted to learn to fly fish like the man in the picture. He asked his father to help him. His father didn’t know how, but he did find a man who was a customer of his insurance business. The man agreed to have the eight-year-old Worthington come to his house twice a month on a Saturday morning. Worthington began to learn to tie flies, cast, and fish.

Once Worthington had learned the skills, the man took him fishing in Frederick County.

“We rode in a Model A,” recalled Worthington. “It took us about four hours. There were no superhighways or anything like that. We rattled along at 35 miles per hour, and usually, there’d be a flat somewhere along the line.”

They went to a spot on Big Hunting Creek at the base of McAfee Falls. They waded into the water, and Worthington started trying to cast where his instructor told him to. The problem was that he kept pulling the fly back before it hit the water. The instructor told him to let the fly land.

“No sooner did the fly hit the water, then the brook trout hit the fly,” said Worthington.

He remembers that his first fish was so red that he thought it was bleeding, but he learned that it meant the trout was a spawning male.

The trip to Frederick County began an annual trip that Worthington would make with the man.

Back in Annapolis, he soon discovered another passion.

Often, he would run errands for people to make a little extra money. Two of the men who he ran errands for were Confederate Civil War Veterans. He would do chores for them and listen to their stories.

At some point, said Worthington, the Veterans “decided to teach me to shoot a musket, in case they had trouble with the Yankees again.”

So they pulled out their old weapons and began instructing the young boy on how to care for them, load them, and fire them. Not that they could fire the weapons in the city, though. For that part of the instruction, the Veterans and Worthington traveled to a farm owned by Worthington’s uncle.

“I was too small to shoot, really,” said Worthington. “I had to stand on a kitchen chair to load the musket.”

Using a reduced charge, the young boy was allowed to fire at a target. He discovered that not only was he good at shooting, but he also loved it. On his fishing trip, he told his instructor about the thrill of shooting a rifle.

Instead of going to Hunting Creek that year, they went to visit the instructor’s friend, who lived in Emmitsburg. They fished on the man’s property. When the man learned of Worthington’s interest in shooting, he told the boy that he thought he had an old muzzleloader in his attic that he would be willing to sell him.

Worthington agreed, and he returned to Annapolis on a mission. He spent the next year running more errands and saving his nickels and dimes. By the time the next year rolled around, he had saved $24.00.

After fishing up in Emmitsburg, the man brought out not one, but two old rifles. One was a flintlock, and the other used a percussion cap. They were covered with soot and years of coal dust. The man offered to sell the percussion cap rifle for $10.00 and the flintlock for $8.00. Worthington agreed and had purchased his first rifles at ten years old.

“They were so long, we couldn’t fit them in the Model A,” Worthington said. “We had to put some sacking on them and put them in the rumble seat.”

When they got back to Annapolis, Worthington and his fishing instructor began cleaning the rifles, exposing the wood curves and metal inlays. They also discovered that the barrels had been filled with beef tallow to keep them from rusting. They held the rifles with the barrels pointed down over a hot stove so that the tallow melted and drained out, leaving the barrels clean and rust free.

In examining the rifles, they determined that Emmitsburg gunsmith John Armstrong made the flintlock. Melchior Fordney, a Lancaster gunsmith, had made the percussion cap rifle.

Worthington held onto his treasures. He never hunted with them, but he did shoot them in competitions. When he was in his late twenties and married with two children, one of his sons had a traumatic hearing loss. He was told that it could be treated, but it would cost $18,000, which was a huge sum in the mid-1950s. He wasn’t sure what he would do until the doctor’s medical partner, heard about Worthington’s rifles.

Worthington showed him the rifles and told him their story. The doctor offered him $4,500 for each one, on the condition that he never tell anyone who the doctor was or the farmer that sold him the rifles. Apparently, there was some bad blood between the families.

Worthington accepted the offer, and he never saw the rifles again. However, with half of the money for the operation raised, the bank was willing to loan the family the rest. The operation was a success, and Worthington’s son’s hearing was restored.

“I’ve always missed that Armstrong rifle, though,” expressed Worthington. “It was such a beauty.”

In fact, he missed it so much that he commissioned a copy to be made that he has hanging in his living room.

 

Thomas Worthington and his Armstrong rifle replica.