4-23-16
While Okinawa raged on, the men of the Boston were stateside, enjoying their hard-earned and well-deserved 21 day leaves. While they were away, the ship was being worked on around the clock as she lie at anchor in San Pedro.
As you probably know, I had the rare and awesome opportunity to meet, interview, and becomes friends with six crewmembers (and one officer) of CA-69 while I was working on the Baked Beans books. Each one of them told me amazing stories, many of which ended up in the books. They all had great stories about what they did and where they went on leave. They also had plenty of liberty time between when the ship arrived in San Pedro and left again right back into the War three months later. John Farkas told this story:
We had lots of leave and liberty after we got back to San Pedro. Me and a couple of buddies decided to hitchhike to Tijuana, Mexico. So here we are bumming a ride on the freeway out of LA and we get picked up by none other than Bing Crosby. When he found out where we were going, he had his driver bring us to a hotel. He paid for the room and all we could eat and drink for our whole leave. That kept us out of trouble.
One of the guys on the ship also went down to Tijuana. Days later, they found him dead in a ditch by the side of the road. Never did make it back to the ship. I guess we were damned lucky.