My childhood was filled with people who served in the Merchant Marine.

I didn’t have any relatives who had served (that I know of). And while I’m sure that some of the adults I knew had served as mariners, I didn’t know about it. But others, who were important to me did serve.

Popeye, for example, was in the Merchant Marine before he joined the Coast Guard.

The Skipper on Gilligan’s Island, who was a regular in my life, also was in the Merchant Marine before he went on that ill-fated “three-hour tour.”

And Lt. Cmdr. Quinton McHale, the namesake of McHale’s Navy, another regular presence in my life, was in the Merchant Marine before he joined the Navy during World War II.

None of this, of course, is to deny the importance of the Merchant Marine, whose importance and achievements were celebrated in today’s #stampoftheday, a 3-cent stamp issued on February 26, 1946. It was the next-to-last of series of stamps issued in 1945 and 1946 honoring the US Armed Forces: the Army, Navy, and Coast Guard as well as the U.S. Marines hoisted the flag at Iwo Jima and the Veterans of World War II.

The Merchant Marine is not part of the military. Rather it is the fleet of private ships that carries imports and exports during peacetime and becomes a naval auxiliary during wartime to deliver troops and war materiel. While the idea of using private ships for military means dates back to the Revolution, the Merchant Marine’s in its current form, really dates to the Merchant Marine Act of 1936 which was “It is necessary for the national defense…that the United States shall have a merchant marine of the best equipped and most suitable types of vessels sufficient to carry the greater portion of its commerce and serve as a naval or military auxiliary in time of war or national emergency…”

This led to the creation of the US Merchant Marine Cadet Corps two years later on March 15, 1938. Up until this time, training programs were largely run by the states. This new program used civilian Maritime Commission and US Coast Guard instructors to train Merchant Marines. They trained on ships and in temporary locations until the US Merchant Marine Academy on Long Island opened in 1943.During World War II the fleet was in effect nationalized, that is, the U.S. Government controlled the cargo and the destinations, contracted with private companies to operate the ships, put guns and Navy personnel on those ships.

The Merchant Marines grew quickly leading up to and during World War II – nearly quadrupling in size from 55,000 to 215,000. These included at least two other people who would be important to me as I grew older: Jack Kerouac and Woody Guthrie.

Kerouac signed up at a time when the German Navy’s submarine’s had launched an aggressive campaign against American ships.-a decision that Kerouac biographer Paul Maher Jr. wrote was “either brave or na•ve.” In his journal, Kerouac (who was one of several Beat poets and writers who were mariners, noted: “My mother is very worried over my having joined the Merchant Marine, but I need money for college, I need adventure, of a sort (the real adventure of rotting wharves and seagulls, winey waters and ships, ports, cities, and faces & voices); and I want to study more of the earth, not out of books, but from direct experience.”

Kerouac was assigned to the SS Dorchester, which was bringing about 600 construction workers from Boston to Greenland. According to Wills, he was happy to find that the crew included (in Kerouac’s words), “drunks, Indians, Polocks, Guineas, Kikes, Micks, Puddlejumpers (Frogs, me), Svedes, Norvegians, Krauts and all the knuckleheads including Mongolian idiots and Moro sabermen and Filipinos and anything you want in a most fantastic crew.”

But he only stayed for three months. According to Wills: “At the offset of his journey he noted in the eyes of his fellow sailors the ‘flowers of death,’ and when he returned to Boston he decided to go back to” Columbia University where the football coach was urging him to return. This proved to be a fateful decision because a Nazi U-Boat sank the SS Dorchester on its next voyage, killing about 70 percent of the people on board, including the four chaplains immortalized on a stamp issued in 1948. (He wrote about that experience in an early novel that wasn’t published until decades after he had died.)

Woody Guthrie served as a mariner from June 1943 until 1945, an experience he described in a few songs, including “Talking Merchant Marine,” whose verses include the following:

In bed with my woman, just singin’ the blues,
Heard the radio tellin’ the news:
That the big Red Army took a hundred towns,
And Allies droppin’ them two-ton bombs.
Started hollerin’, yellin’, dancin’ up and down like a bullfrog!

Doorbell rung and in come a man,
I signed my name, I got a telegram.
Said, “If you wanna take a vacation trip,
Got a dish-washin’ job on a Liberty ship.”
Woman a-cryin’, me a-flyin’, out the door and down the line!

…Ship loaded down with TNT
All out across the rollin’ sea;
Stood on the deck, watched the fishes swim,
I’se a-prayin’ them fish wasn’t made out of tin.
Sharks, porpoises, jellybeans, rainbow trouts, mudcats, jugars, all over that water.

This convoy’s the biggest I ever did see,
Stretches all the way out across the sea;
And the ships blow the whistles and a-rang her bells,
Gonna blow them fascists all to hell!
Win some freedom, liberty, stuff like that.

So you can see, the Merchant Marine played a big part in my life, even if I didn’t really know any mariners personally. (As an adult, I did play soccer with a great guy who spent time in the Merchant Marine.)

Be well, stay says, “win some freedom, liberty, [and] stuff like that,” fight for justice, and work for peace.