Last week we met Ornie Alness, who was born on the family farm in rural Clarkfield and grew up during the 1920s and ’30s. Ornie continued farming after the Pearl Harbor attack, but, realizing he would eventually be called to serve, enlisted in the Navy in 1942. He went through accelerated Basic Training in San Diego and was assigned to the Navy transport, USS Wharton.

Ornie’s ship was a former passenger liner, 535 feet long with over 500 officers and crew. The Wharton was built in 1921 for the military, but was leased to a steamship line that used her for the passenger and cargo trade to South America. In 1940 she was converted in Brooklyn, N.Y., to a naval transport. She transited the Panama Canal and joined the Pacific Fleet, ferrying military personnel, their families, and supplies between West Coast ports and Hawaii.

The Wharton was in dry-dock in San Pedro, Calif., when Ornie joined the crew. He described her overhaul activities.

“People were working all over. They were replacing plates on the hull. It was 3/4 inch steel plate and they were heating rivets red-hot, tossing rivets up to the riveters and they were catching them and sticking them in the holes and ‘boom-boom-boom.’ They were also mounting some guns,” he said.

Civilian shipyard workers were performing these tasks, but Ornie explained that the Wharton’s deck force had its own work while in dry-dock.

“We were doing some painting and scrubbing. The main promenade deck had a plank floor and you had to holy stone that every so often. You had a special cement block that had a little hole in the center. You got a plain stick … watered down the deck and … you had to go back and forth with that stone. It was just like rasping … It came out smooth, but you had to work your head off,” he said.

Ornie explained that the officers’ quarters, inside the Wharton’s superstructure, used to be passenger staterooms.

“The wood in there was absolutely beautiful, but that’s another big fire hazard … So we were tearing out that wood … we just got down to the steel bulkheads – the steel walls and painting.”

The deck force did a lot of scraping and painting.

“We had certain sections of the ship that you had to paint and we were painting all the time we were out to sea anytime you weren’t in any real danger area … You had to chip it off and then (scrape) rust,” he said.

Chipping and painting might not seem particularly challenging, but Ornie had a rather extreme experience.

“I’ve hung on a smokestack … on a little bos’ns chair when they couldn’t get anybody to go up … They pulled me up there with a paint can hanging on my waist and a chipping hammer … That (smokestack) was so big you could run a car down through the inside of it … It wasn’t always smooth going. The ship would rock … you’d look over and you didn’t see anything down below but water,” Ornie recalled, laughing, “But that didn’t bother me.”

Life aboard the Wharton was pretty good. The crew quarters, below the main deck, had double bunks with metal frames. Ornie explained how sleeping at the water line, though, required some adjustment, “The water hit the side of the ship while you were laying there, but you went to sleep anyway.”

Ornie appreciated the meals aboard ship.

“They had a great big mess hall there on the ship with cooks and bakers. They baked their own bread and made meals in a great big galley. We had big, walk-in freezers and coolers so we had quite a supply of fresh meat for a long time after we left harbor,” he said.

He smiled, recalling meals of grilled steaks and baked fish. When fresh food ran short, they’d turn to canned goods and used dehydrated eggs for meals. Ornie smiled again and said, “You got used to eating it.”

Ornie did not stay with the deck force long as he was soon reassigned to the shipfitters shop. Shipfitters are skilled craftsmen like metal workers, plumbers, and welders. Ornie described another shipfitter’s task, “We were in charge of the fresh water tanks.”

Ornie managed the Wharton’s freshwater for six months. Each day he reported the freshwater status to the Executive Officer, used a key to turn on freshwater to the washrooms during designated hours and then came through again at the end of those hours to shut it off.

“So you had to shower during that time,” he said. “If you didn’t do it then, you had to use salt water and that wasn’t very good.”

He chuckled, recalling how sometimes a shower user would holler when he turned off the fresh water. He always gave them time to rinse off. Although he never used it, Ornie wore a holstered .45 automatic while completing his freshwater duties.

Ornie explained how using evaporators to convert seawater into freshwater created extra work upon return to port.

“When you’d come back into port, you’d have to tear that evaporator down and you’d have that scaling on there from the minerals that was in the seawater,” he said.

Ornie’s tasks took him all over the ship. He said it took a while to find where things were, “But you caught on pretty quick … I did anyway.”

The Wharton eventually carried Ornie and the rest of her crew to the combat theaters of the Pacific.