Ships
- USS Stanly (DD-478) Captain, 2 December 1942 – 12 December 1942
- USS The Sullivans (DD-537) Captain, 22 July 1944 – 19 September 1945
By the summer of 1944 the Navy Register had him a lieutenant commander, and the citation for October 1944 still styles him that way. By the spring of 1945 the citation and the Register both call him a commander. Lieutenant fits the ten days on Stanly, if those ten days are his, and it does not fit The Sullivans. The dates themselves are not in the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships. They come from a compiled commanding-officer list. DANFS does put him in command of The Sullivans for the work that earned the first Silver Star. It does not mention him on Stanly at all.
The file number that stays with him from the wartime registers through 1960 is 75096. The birth date on the 1960 register is 27 March 1913. The obituary's Ralph J. Baum of Coronado, born that day and dead on 19 December 2011, is the same officer. Other men named Baum appear in the same registers. They are not this one.
Origins
The Register of 1 January 1960, in the line captains, prints his birth as 3 27 13, the digits for 27 March 1913, on the same line as his name. The Register of 1 January 1950, where the columns are less clean, still shows 3 27 13 in the birth place on that line. The Coronado obituary prints the same day, March 27, 1913, and calls him a Leavenworth, Kansas, boy. The 1935 Lucky Bag heads his sketch "Leavenworth, Kan." Nothing read for this essay names a father, a mother, or a brother or sister. Leavenworth is the town the midshipman claimed and the town the obituary remembered. It is not, by itself, a proved birthplace, though the two books agree and no other town has turned up.
The obituary says he received an appointment to the Naval Academy in 1931. The Register of 1 January 1934 already lists him among the midshipmen, in the alphabetical run of the class that would finish in 1935. The day he reported is not printed on a line of his that was read. A commanders' compilation on the web gives 15 June 1931, the ordinary entrance day of that class. That day was not found beside his name in a register, and it is not used here as a fact.
The Lucky Bag is classmate prose, written to be clever, and it should be read that way. The nicknames are "Vicki," "Ralph," and "Balmy." The sketch says he forsook his native city "to the tune of The Bars and Stripes Forever" and set a course for Crabtown, the midshipmen's name for Annapolis. "Casting off the Black and Grey (don't take us too literally) he came east to wear the Blue and Gold." The parenthetical is theirs. The yearbook does not name the school whose colors those were, and this essay will not guess it. "A veritable Steam savior, he is always ready and willing to lend assistance to those wooden in that subject." Steam was the hard subject. They remembered him as the one who would sit and explain it. "With the O. A. O. back in Kansas, Ralph has not been addicted to dragging. Books, bridge, and tennis claim a large share of his time, and he has spent considerable time in developing a beautiful friendship with that generous divinity, Morpheus. He likes the Navy."
O. A. O. is the regiment's abbreviation for the one-and-only, a girl at home. Dragging is taking a date to a hop. Morpheus is sleep. The portrait they wanted is a Kansas boy who was good at steam, played bridge and tennis, slept when he could, kept a girl in Leavenworth, and did not bother much with Annapolis weekends. The last sentence is the one that is not a joke. He likes the Navy. Under the sketch the credit line reads "Log Staff 3, 2, 1" and "G. P. O." He worked on the Academy's Log in the second-class, third-class, and first-class years. G. P. O. is not expanded on the page. It sits where other men's sketches put a petty-officer billet. It is left as printed.
The registers do not give his class standing. They do not say he was turned back. He finished with the class he entered the first-class year with. The Register of 1 July 1942, on the lieutenants' page that contains him, footnotes that class: commissioned ensign 6 June 1935. The Register of 1 January 1960 prints 6 06 35 as his service date, the date from which commissioned service was counted. Six June 1935 is the day.
Formation
On 1 July 1935, less than a month after that commission, the Register has him an ensign, signal number 6249, and the duty column reads Colorado. Colorado was a battleship, BB-45. The register does not give his billet. An ensign on a battleship is learning a watch, a division, and the manners of a big ship. He was not her captain. The Coronado memorial later calls this his first sea duty. The register is what dates it.
By 1 July 1936 the Register has moved him. He is still an ensign, signal 6117, and the duty is Dent. The Navy Directory of 1 January 1938 still has him an ensign on Dent. Dent (DD-116) was an old destroyer, a four-piper from the last war, not a new Fletcher. Two and a half years on her, if he stayed between those two lists, is a long junior-officer cruise on a small ship. The books do not say what he did on board, or whether he asked to stay.
The rank changed in the first half of 1938. The Directory of 1 January 1938 still calls him ensign. The Register of 1 July 1938 indexes him a lieutenant (junior grade), signal 5567, and the duty in that book is still Dent. The ordinary day for that promotion, three years after the ensign's commission, would be 6 June 1938. That day is not printed on his line in the registers that were read. The two lists only bracket it.
He was still a lieutenant (junior grade) on Dent in the Directory of 1 January 1939. By 1 July 1939 the Register has him on Chester, signal 5309, still a lieutenant (junior grade). Chester (CA-27) was a heavy cruiser. Between New Year's Day and the July register he had left the old destroyer for a cruiser. The register does not say whether that was ordered as a promotion in responsibility or simply as the next set of orders. A lieutenant (junior grade) on a heavy cruiser is still somebody else's officer.
The Directory of 1 June 1940 has him a lieutenant (junior grade) on Swasey. The Directory does not print a hull number. The Coronado memorial, written in 2018, calls this ship USS Swasey (DE-248). That hull did not exist in June 1940. DE-248 was a destroyer escort of the next war, commissioned in 1943. The Swasey in commission on 1 June 1940 was the older destroyer DD-273, brought back into service at the end of 1939 and, before the year 1940 was out, turned over to the Royal Navy. The Directory's bare "u s s Swasey" fits that ship. It does not fit the escort. The memorial attached the wrong hull to a real billet.
He did not stay for the transfer. The Directory of 1 November 1940 has him a lieutenant (junior grade) on Philadelphia. Philadelphia (CL-41) was a light cruiser. Five months, or less, on Swasey, then a cruiser again. The Directory of 1 April 1941 was searched and his name did not turn up in a form that could be read. The Register of 1 July 1941 still has him a lieutenant (junior grade), signal 5167, in the block of the class of 1935. Wartime registers were already dropping the ship, or the optical text of that page does not keep a duty that can be trusted. Philadelphia on 1 November 1940 is the last station the Directory prints for him before the war.
The obituary and the memorial fill the years after that with a list: Sigourney, Philadelphia, Corry, then command of Stanly, then command of Paul Hamilton, then The Sullivans. The order is not the order of the directories. Philadelphia is already his ship in November 1940, before Sigourney (DD-643) existed. Sigourney and Corry (DD-463) are wartime destroyers. Corry was lost off Normandy on 6 June 1944. Nothing read here puts Baum on her, and nothing puts him in the water that morning. If he served in her at all, it was before that loss, and the only source for the service is the obituary and the memorial. Paul Hamilton (DD-590) is a separate problem, taken up with the commands. The European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal in the obituary means some qualifying time in that theater. The paper does not say on which ship. Corry, if the memorial is right about the name and wrong or silent about the dates, would be one way to earn it. It is not established.
On 1 July 1942 the Register has him a lieutenant, signal 5039, number 780 in the grade. The date of rank at the head of his block, dittoed down the page, is 1 January 1942. A web compilation gives him a temporary lieutenant commander's rank on 1 May 1943 and a temporary commander's rank on 1 March 1944. The Register of 1 July 1944 does not say that. It indexes him a lieutenant commander, signal 4900, file number 75096. The October 1944 citation, signed off in November, still calls him lieutenant commander. The temporary-commander date of 1 March 1944 is not used. When, inside the two years after January 1942, he became a lieutenant commander is not printed cleanly on a line that was read. He was one by 1 July 1944.
The war, as the paper has it
From the autumn of 1940 until December 1942 there is no station that a register or a directory will support, except the July 1941 rank. No letter, no fitness report, and no deck-log signature from those months was found. He may have stayed in Philadelphia into the Atlantic war, gone to Corry, gone to a school, or gone to new construction. The books used here do not say where he was when the war began, or where he was through the first year of it.
Stanly (DD-478), a Fletcher, was laid down at Charleston on 15 September 1941, launched on 2 May 1942, and commissioned on 15 October 1942. DANFS names Lieutenant Commander James M. Robinson in command that day. It never names Baum. The compiled list that the compiled list follows, the list NavSource credits to Wolfgang Hechler and Ron Reeves, and the same dates on a public commanders' site, insert Lieutenant Ralph Jacob Baum from 2 December 1942 to 12 December 1942, between Robinson and the next officer on that list. A photograph in that same NavSource file, dated 10 December 1942, shows her at the Charleston Navy Yard being configured to handle aircraft. If the ten days are real, they are yard days, on a ship that had not yet gone to the Pacific and had not yet become one of the destroyers of Squadron 23. The Presidential Unit Citation later given to that squadron, and the fights those ships fought in the Solomons, belong to other captains. They do not belong to a lieutenant who, on the only list that names him, had already been relieved before she sailed for the war. The ten days are reported because the compiled list reports them and the compilation agrees with itself. They are not in the official ship history. No deck log was found to settle them.
There is then another blank, from the middle of December 1942 to the summer of 1944. The memorial says his next command was Paul Hamilton (DD-590). The same compiled list that inserts him on Stanly for ten days, and that gives him The Sullivans for fourteen months, does not give him Paul Hamilton. DANFS was not found naming him on her. The obituary lists the ship among the ships he served in. It does not, in the obituary's own wording, say he commanded her. The memorial does. The two community accounts disagree with each other, and both disagree with the commanding-officer compilation. Command of Paul Hamilton is not treated as fact here. Service aboard her, as a department head or an executive officer or in some other billet, is possible and unproved.
The Sullivans (DD-537) had been laid down as Putnam, renamed for the five brothers killed in Juneau, and commissioned on 30 September 1943 with Commander Kenneth M. Gentry in command. DANFS follows her through the Marshalls, Truk, the Marianas, the Philippine Sea, and the early strikes on the Philippines under that first captain, and does not put Baum's name on any of it. The compiled list relieves Gentry on 22 July 1944 and gives the ship to Baum through 19 September 1945. DANFS does not print those two days. It does name "Comdr. Ralph J. Baum" for the rescue and salvage work of mid-October 1944, and the narrative from the late summer of 1944 through May 1945 does not insert another captain. What follows is that narrative, on the assumption that the July date is about right. Where DANFS does not attach his name, the sentence says so.
If he had her from 22 July, the first weeks were other people's strikes and his screen. Late in July the ship is with a task group hitting the Palaus, then with the heavy bombardment group, then back to Eniwetok. In early September she is on radar picket while the carriers work over Japanese airfields in the Philippines, and she is still on picket when the raids shift to Manila. None of that is a story about him. It is the job. On 28 September, at Tanapag Harbor, Saipan, she went alongside the battleship Massachusetts for ammunition and provisions. The cross-swells slammed the destroyer against the battleship's side and damaged hull and superstructure. DANFS does not say who had the conn, or who signed the damage report. It is the first hurt the ship took in the months that are probably his, and it was not the enemy. It was the sea, against a friendly hull, in an anchorage.
She went on to Ulithi and lay alongside the tender Dixie. A storm blew a nest of destroyers off the tender. The Sullivans drifted free, got steam up in a hurry, and collided with Uhlmann. Small boats were being thrown around the anchorage. She picked up four men from Stockham's gig before the gig went under. DANFS tells that as the ship's story. It still has not said his name. A captain in an Ulithi blow, with his ship adrift and another destroyer's boat sinking, is the man who has to decide whether to chase the boat or save his own stem. The history does not record the decision in his words. It records four men taken out of the water.
On 6 October she sortied with the carriers for Formosa and the Ryukyus. On the evening of the 12th, as the planes came back, radar picked up the first of a long Japanese attack from the north. For about six hours, DANFS says, fifty or sixty aircraft kept at the force. The Sullivans sighted a Betty low on the starboard side and took it under fire. In fifteen minutes the formation shot down three planes. Between 1856 and 1954 the destroyer herself took five under fire. The formation changed speed between 18 and 29 knots and made eight emergency turns. A second phase ran from 2105 on the 12th to 0235 on the 13th. The Japanese used window to jam the radar. Flares lit the ships. The formation made smoke. DANFS counts thirty-eight simultaneous turns, at 22 to 25 knots, while the guns kept firing. This is the part of a captain's night that does not look like a citation. It is six hours, then more hours, of not being hit.
The next night the torpedo planes did hit. Canberra was torpedoed. The Sullivans helped screen the damaged cruiser. On the 14th a Betty torpedoed Houston. The two cripples, towed, became the group the sailors called CripDiv 1, and The Sullivans joined the screen that was to take them toward Ulithi. On the 16th the Japanese came back to finish them. Houston took a second torpedo aft. The Sullivans fired on the Frances that had made the attack and splashed it. With Stephen Potter she took a second Frances under fire and knocked it down off the bow of Santa Fe. She took 118 men of Houston on board and kept them until the 18th, when she transferred them to Boston. A photograph in the NavSource file shows injured Houston men going across to Boston that day. While the cripples crawled, a Japanese surface force tried to close, and Task Force 38 turned it back. The Sullivans passed salvage gear to Houston and helped with the wounded.
That is the action the first citation describes, without naming the cruisers. The text, as reprinted by a medals compilation and attributed to Commander, Third Fleet, serial 0113 of 26 November 1944, awards the Silver Star to Lieutenant Commander Ralph Jacob Baum, file 0-75096, "for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service" as commanding officer of The Sullivans, "assigned as a screening vessel to a Task Group protecting the withdrawal of two severely damaged ships, under tow, from enemy waters during the period 13 to 17 October 1944." The ship, it says, performed rescue, transferred personnel "under adverse conditions of win and sea" and under air attack, and her work in the screen helped the salvage. "Win and sea" is how the compilation prints it. The sense is wind and sea. The original letter was not in hand. DANFS, telling the same days, says the Silver Star was for directing the rescue and salvage, and it calls him commander, not lieutenant commander. The citation and the July register say lieutenant commander. DANFS, written later, uses the higher title. The citation is the one followed for the rank he held that week.
What the citation does not say is what it felt like to have 118 strangers on a destroyer that was still in the screen, still liable to be the next ship hit, with a cruiser astern that had already been torpedoed twice. It does not say whether he slept. It does not quote him. It says the ship did the work, and that his leadership was an inspiration to his men, which is the sentence the Navy puts at the end when it means the captain held the crew to it. Courage, in that document, is seamanship under air attack while taking people off a wreck and keeping them alive until a larger ship could have them.
He was not finished with the Philippines. On 20 October The Sullivans was back with a carrier group for the Leyte landings. On the 24th, the day of the fight in the Sibuyan Sea, she was in the screen; an order-of-battle compilation of that battle lists her under Commander R. J. Baum in Destroyer Squadron 52. That compilation is not a deck log. It agrees with the rank the spring citation would use, and it is early for the July 1945 register. DANFS says that on the morning of the 24th she shot down an Oscar. On the 25th she was put into Task Force 34 and sent north after the Japanese carriers, then into a fast striking group with Iowa, New Jersey, three light cruisers, and seven other destroyers. They missed the Japanese force by three hours. They reported sinking an Atago-class cruiser. DANFS says Japanese records do not confirm the claim. She then swept south along Samar looking for cripples, found the carrier group again, and stayed in the Philippines on screen and plane-guard duty through the middle of November. On the evening of the 19th her guns damaged a Betty that flew off smoking and would not fall. On the 25th she set a plane on fire and splashed it. She was back at Ulithi two days later.
In December she went out again, screening strikes on Manila and southern Luzon. On the 17th she started to fuel and, with the weather going bad by the minute, broke off. The storm that followed, on the morning of the 18th, is the one that sank three destroyers. DANFS, in the text used here, calls it Typhoon Viper and clocks the wind at an estimated 115 knots. Other accounts of that same morning in Halsey's fleet call the storm Typhoon Cobra. The name is in conflict. The morning is not. Three destroyers were lost. The Sullivans came through undamaged. DANFS mentions the lucky shamrock painted on her funnel. On the 20th she searched for men who had gone overboard from other ships. The strikes were cancelled. She was at Ulithi on Christmas Eve.
A captain who has just kept a destroyer afloat in that storm, and who then spends the next days looking for other crews, has been shown something about the sea that a citation does not cover. The history does not say what he said to his officers afterward. It says the ship was whole, and that she looked for the men who were not on whole ships. That is the cost sitting next to him, even when it is not his own dead.
After a run to Manus and back with Iowa, she left Ulithi on 30 December to screen strikes on Formosa for the Luzon landings. Heavy seas postponed a high-speed run. On the evening of 9 January 1945 the force went through the Bashi Channel into the South China Sea. Carrier planes hit Saigon and Cam Ranh Bay. A bombardment group, including The Sullivans, went into Cam Ranh Bay and found it empty. She served on radar picket, ten miles ahead of the group, during later strikes on Hainan, Hong Kong, and Formosa. Upkeep at Ulithi, then out again with the carriers against the Japanese home islands, Tokyo and other targets on Honshu on 16 and 17 February, then the air support for Iwo Jima. On 28 February she sighted a drifting mine and destroyed it. On 1 March the carriers hit Okinawa and met no opposition. She was back toward Ulithi.
Twelve days later she sailed for Kyushu and southern Honshu, still screening, for the Okinawa invasion. On 20 March she fueled from Enterprise at 1152 and cleared the carrier's side five minutes later when a kamikaze alert scattered the formation. At 1439 she started back alongside Enterprise to take a part for her radar antenna. Another attack broke the ships apart before a line was passed. She bent on speed and cleared. A Japanese plane came through the gunfire and crashed into Halsey Powell astern, while that destroyer was fueling alongside Hancock. Halsey Powell lost steering and started to sheer across the carrier's bow. Hancock maneuvered clear.
The Sullivans closed to help. She stopped eleven minutes later and lowered a motor whaleboat to put her medical officer and a pharmacist's mate onto Halsey Powell. While the boat was still going into the water, another kamikaze came for The Sullivans. At 1610 her radar had the Zeke. As soon as the whaleboat was clear of the water she went to flank speed, right full rudder, and her 20- and 40-millimeter guns fired. The plane passed a hundred feet over the masthead and got away. Halsey Powell was then able to steer at five knots. The two destroyers retired toward Ulithi together.
That is the moment the second citation is talking about, and it is the moment that shows the choice. He had stopped his ship, in an area where kamikazes were already hitting destroyers alongside carriers, in order to put a boat and two of his own men onto a cripple. The next plane arrived while the boat was still alongside. He waited, on DANFS's account, until the boat was clear, and then he ran. He did not leave the boat in the water to save the ship a few seconds sooner. He also did not stay stopped. The plane missed by a hundred feet. The citation does not tell that sequence. DANFS does. The citation, attributed to Commander, First Carrier Task Force, Pacific, serial 0382 of 19 April 1945, is a Gold Star in lieu of a second Silver Star, to Commander Ralph Jacob Baum, for 20 and 21 March 1945, "covering the withdrawal of a badly damaged destroyer from enemy waters," "despite two days of enemy aircraft attacks and the hazards of enemy submarines." It praises the withdrawal and "his brilliant defense of the crippled unit." It does not mention the whaleboat, the doctor, or the hundred feet.
The second day is in DANFS and not in the citation's detail. At 1046 on 21 March The Sullivans picked up a plane at fifteen miles, a twin-engine Frances, and took it under fire with the five-inch battery at 10,000 yards. Halsey Powell joined. The Frances crashed about 3,000 yards abeam. A Hellcat from Yorktown, directed by Halsey Powell, splashed another Frances. A Hellcat from Intrepid, directed by The Sullivans, splashed a Nick or a Dinah. On 25 March the two destroyers reached Ulithi, one for upkeep and training, the other for battle repairs.
She rejoined the fast carriers off Okinawa. On radar picket on the 15th she was attacked, shot down one plane, and was not hit. Her picket station ran twelve to twenty-five miles out from the force. On the afternoon of 29 April she was fueling from Bunker Hill when another alert forced her to break away. Hazelwood and Haggard were both crashed that day and survived. On the morning of 11 May a kamikaze crashed into Bunker Hill. The Sullivans closed and picked up 166 men who had been forced over the side by the fires. She transferred them to ships of a logistics group, fueled, and went back to the screen for strikes on Kyushu. The obituary says that in 1945 he received a Commendation Ribbon with a combat "V" for picking up survivors from Bunker Hill. The citation text was not found. The 166 men are in DANFS. The ribbon is in the obituary. A medals compilation that prints both Silver Stars does not print the commendation. That does not mean the ribbon is false. It means the ribbon rests on the family's notice.
Three days later, 14 May, Enterprise was hit by a kamikaze in a morning attack. Four enemy planes were shot down in that fight, one of them by The Sullivans. DANFS calls it her last combat action of the war. She anchored at San Pedro Bay, Leyte, on 1 June, left on the 20th, and reached Mare Island on 9 July. The overhaul began two days later. She missed, DANFS says, the last fleet operations of the war. Japan capitulated on 15 August while she was in the yard. If the compiled list is right that Baum was not relieved until 19 September 1945, then he was still her captain when the war ended, and he ended it at a California yard, not at sea. DANFS does not say so in those words. It says the ship was in overhaul, and it has not named a new captain. She was decommissioned at San Diego on 10 January 1946. The compiled list gives her, from 19 September 1945, to another officer. Baum's war in command, on the paper, is one new destroyer for ten disputed days in a South Carolina yard, and then fourteen months on the ship that carried the Sullivan brothers' name, from the summer of 1944 through the yard at Mare Island.
The obituary lists the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal with six stars. DANFS gives The Sullivans nine battle stars for the whole war, which includes the months before he had her. Six is the family's number for him, not a star-by-star reconstruction. The same notice lists the American Defense Service Medal with fleet clasp, the American Campaign Medal, the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal, the World War II Victory Medal, the Navy Occupation Service Medal with European clasp, a National Defense medal whose name is printed twice and tangled, the Philippine Republic Presidential Unit Citation, and the Philippine Liberation Ribbon with two stars. The fleet clasp and the American Defense medal fit the prewar sea duty the directories actually show. The European clasp on the occupation medal is postwar, and no ship is named for it. The European-African-Middle Eastern medal is the one that the Pacific narrative does not explain. It is left as the obituary's claim.
The memorial's writer, summarizing him for a Coronado honor roll in 2018, says the Silver Star was awarded "with a 'V' for combat valor." The Silver Star is itself the valor award. The combat "V" in the obituary belongs to the commendation ribbon, not to the star. The memorial also quotes only the opening of the first citation, and it has him commanding Paul Hamilton and the wrong Swasey. It is a community sketch by a named author, useful where it agrees with the registers and the citations, and not a substitute for them.
The cost
No source read here says he was wounded. No source says The Sullivans was hit while he had her. The damage DANFS records in his months is the bruise against Massachusetts in a Saipan swell, and the collision with Uhlmann in the Ulithi storm. The enemy killed other ships alongside him. Canberra and Houston were torpedoed and lived. Halsey Powell was crashed and lived. Bunker Hill burned. Hazelwood and Haggard were crashed. Three destroyers went down in the December typhoon. He took off 118 men, then put his doctor into a boat, then took off 166 more. The citations call that gallantry and seamanship. They do not say what he carried afterward, or whether the hundred feet over the mast ever left him.
The choice that cost something, on the paper, is the ordinary one made visible on 20 March. Stopping a destroyer to put two men into a whaleboat, with kamikazes already in the formation, is a decision that can lose the boat's crew and the ship together. Waiting until the boat is clear, and then going to flank speed, is the same decision held for one more minute. DANFS says that is what the ship did. It does not say he debated it. A captain who has already spent a night screening two wrecks, and a morning searching a typhoon's wreckage, and who then stops again, is behaving like a man who has decided that the people in the water are the job. That is as far as the records will go toward character. They will not go as far as a motive he never wrote down.
Nothing in the registers, the citations, or the ship history quotes him. The Lucky Bag sentence, that he likes the Navy, is the only judgment of his own that the paper preserves, and it was written by classmates when he was twenty-two. The girl in Kansas is not named. Whether she was the woman he later married is not said.
After
The Register of 1 July 1945 calls him a commander, file 75096, and prints "(E)" after his name, in the place where that book prints special qualifications. The letter is not expanded in the passage that was read. It sits beside a man the Lucky Bag had already called a steam savior. It is recorded, not translated beyond that.
He was still a commander on 1 January 1950, file 075096, in the line. The Register of 1 January 1955 places him in the captains' section. The index of that book calls him captain. The optical text of the captains' page prints the letters CDR on his line and on his classmates' lines, which is the kind of misreading that column smash produces, and it is not taken as a second opinion that he was still a commander. The date of rank printed with him there, and again in the line captains of 1 January 1960, is 1 July 1954. On 1 January 1960 he is a line captain, designator 1100, lineal number 01127, service date 6 June 1935, date of rank 1 July 1954, born 27 March 1913. A public compilation says he retired on 1 July 1961. That day was not found in a register that was opened. He is on the active list at the start of 1960. He was not found in the 1966 register index that was searched. The memorial says he served thirty-five years. From the 1931 appointment to a retirement in the early 1960s is about thirty years, not thirty-five. From the 1935 commission it is less. "Thirty-five years" is the memorial's round number. It is not a computed date.
The obituary gives the shore and sea list the registers, in the volumes read, no longer carry as duty stations. After the war, it says: NROTC at the University of Kansas; Boxer; the Naval Academy; Baltimore; the Armed Forces Staff College at Leavenworth; Ajax; and Service School Command at the Naval Training Center, San Diego. The memorial says he served in Boxer and Baltimore and that Ajax (AR-6) was his last afloat command, and that the shore jobs included the Kansas ROTC, the Naval Academy, and the San Diego school command. None of those postwar orders was confirmed in a register line that named the ship or the school. They are what the family notice and the city sketch say he did. The shape of them, if they are right, is a surface officer sent back to school and to the training of other officers, with one more cruiser and a carrier under other men's flags, and a repair ship of his own at the end. Leavenworth, for the staff college, would have been a return to the town he left in 1931. The paper does not say he treated it that way.
The obituary says he was a fifty-four-year resident of Coronado, which, counted back from his death, puts the household there in the later 1950s, while he was still a captain. After the Navy he worked for General Dynamics in San Diego and in Boston. The memorial says he got tired of being away from his family and came back to Coronado as a building inspector for the city, and that he reviewed and approved some of the Coronado Shores buildings. The obituary says the same job, without the sentence about being tired. When he retired from that, the obituary says, he played tennis several times a week, did the household jobs, and rode in the Sunday morning bicycle group that ended at the Mexican Village for breakfast. Tennis is the one thread back to the Lucky Bag. The rest is a long civilian life, and it is told only at the end.
The memorial says he was married to the former Katie Foster for sixty-seven years. The obituary does not give a maiden name and does not give the sixty-seven years. It says he was preceded in death by his wife Katie, and it prints her dates as 10/25/15 – 02/27/11, 25 October 1915 to 27 February 2011. Sixty-seven years before her death falls in 1943 or 1944, which would put the marriage in the war, around the time he took The Sullivans or a little before. That arithmetic is the memorial's figure, not a marriage record. The Lucky Bag's girl in Kansas is not identified with her. She may be the same person. The books do not say so. He survived her by about ten months.
The obituary names four children: Tajie Major of Palos Verdes Estates, Simmi Baum of Coronado, Nikki Cummings of Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Ralph Baum of Chula Vista. It says eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. The names are printed as the paper printed them. They are not expanded. No birth dates, no spouses' full names, and no account of what he was like as a father were found. What he left them, on the paper, is the house in Coronado, the long marriage, and a service record the city later put on an honor roll. A graveside service was set for 7 January 2012 at 2:30 in the afternoon, at Glen Abbey Memorial Park in Bonita, by Pastor David H. McElrath, with a reception afterward at an address on First Street in Coronado. The obituary asks for donations to Sharp Coronado Hospital instead of flowers.
He died at home, in Coronado, on the morning of 19 December 2011. The obituary says peacefully. He was ninety-eight. The captain who had stopped a destroyer beside a burning carrier, and who had kept 118 men on his decks off Formosa, died in his own house, ten months after his wife, with four children living and a Sunday bicycle ride behind him. The sea and the war are in the citations. The survival is the date.