The ship had been in the Yellow Sea early in the war to assist in amphibious assaults on the North Korean military; but by the time Foos arrived, it had been reassigned to NATO operations in the Mediterranean. On some occasions it was diverted to the Atlantic Ocean with stopovers in such cities as Bar Harbor, Boston, New York, and Norfolk before heading down to Guantanamo and Panama. Although his notes are brief on this subject, he acknowledged losing his virginity thanks to the hospitality of one particular bordello shaded by palm trees at some undisclosed location.
At sea with him always were erotic images of his aunt Katheryn and lasting recollections of his losing Barbara White. His voyeuristic passions subsided during his service years, diminished by the fear of being discovered and the disgrace he assumed would cling to him if he were dishonorably discharged. He made very few friends while in the Navy and corresponded mainly with his parents. His father, Jake, took care of the sports-card and memorabilia collection in Gerald’s absence, and even added to it by acquiring such valuable items as a baseball signed by the Hall of Fame baseball player Honus Wagner, who was with the Pittsburgh Pirates in the early 1900s. Gerald wrote, “My father and I had very little in common except for our love of sports.”
Jake Foos had been such a fine semipro baseball player in the early 1930s that a major league scout had expressed interest in signing him to a contract. Gerald had been told this by his mother, Natalie, who used to watch Jake play shortstop (Honus Wagner’s position) for her hometown team, the Windsor Merchants, located in a wheat farming district in northern Colorado not far from Ault.
The Windsor Merchants were excellent, Natalie said, talented enough to have once defeated Leroy “Satchel” Paige’s African American barnstorming group that visited Windsor during the summer of 1934. Days earlier, Satchel Paige had been the winning pitcher at an annual tournament in Denver sponsored by the Denver Post, one that featured semipro and independent professional teams from around the nation and was including black players for the first time—this being thirteen years before Jackie Robinson would be admitted into the major leagues by the Brooklyn Dodgers, in 1947. (A year later, Satchel Paige came to the majors via the Cleveland Indians, at the age of forty-two.)
But Jake Foos (who, according to Natalie, singled twice against Paige during the exhibition game in Windsor) never aspired to being in the major leagues. In 1934 he had just gotten married and was about to have his first son; and, as Gerald described in his writing:
On the farm, Dad seemed happy just getting up early in the morning to be outdoors . . . In early spring we planted oats, wheat, corn, beets and beans, and milked the cows . . . At home, however, things weren’t always peaceful. My Dad was a wonderful man and provider—until he drank. I knew the moment the ice cubes went into the glass, he would become a different person, an angry drunk. It was confusing to me, because sober he was very lovable. I didn’t understand that Dad was an alcoholic, but just about everyone’s father was in our part of the country, and that was especially true of Aunt Katheryn’s husband, my uncle Charley.
During one of Gerald Foos’s furloughs while in the Navy, the USS Worcester remained at port in New York for a few days prior to leaving for Panama. After buying a ticket to a game at Yankee Stadium, Foos sat in the front row of the bleachers and had a close view of Mickey Mantle’s back while the latter was standing in center field. Although Mantle hit a home run that day, Gerald was most impressed with Mantle’s speed and agility while covering the outfield.
I watched Mickey Mantle take off after a long fly ball in the vast plain of centerfield, and I thought he wasn’t going to catch it. I thought he wasn’t running fast enough. He just seemed to be gliding easily beneath a speeding white speck, which he had detected before I heard the crack of the bat, and before I understood why Mantle was moving. And just as I was about to go insane worrying that Mantle wouldn’t catch it, he let the ball sink into his glove as if he had known all along that his glove was the only place the ball wanted to go.
In later years, Foos would collect many items relating to Mantle: vintage baseball cards, signed baseballs, a signed Louisville Slugger bat.
Years after being discharged, and many months after building the viewing platform in his attic, Gerald Foos felt at times that he was still in the Navy, adrift in calm waters, peering down through the louvered slats in his motel as he used to squint through his binoculars while on deck duty, directing his gaze outward for great distances without spotting anything of interest. His life in the attic was humdrum and uneventful. His motel was a dry-docked boat whose guests endlessly watched television, exchanged banalities, had sex mainly under the covers if they had sex at all, and gave him so little to write about that sometimes he wrote nothing at all.