Part 1
A BAG OF STUFF
Josh D. is a bit of a history buff – and he loves hunting for bargains, preferably ones with good stories attached to them. A limousine driver for V.I.P clients at one of the big Las Vegas resorts who lives in Henderson, Nevada, Josh spends a fair amount of his free time at yard sales, estate sales and thrift stores, searching the tables, bins and shelves for unique and intriguing items. "I like to look for things like old movie reels, 35mm color slides...Vegas photos from the sixties...old Super 8 footage," Josh tells me during one of our phone interviews. Most of the items he rummages through are quickly passed over. When he does make purchases, he often resells them on internet sites such as eBay and Craigslist, in order, as he put it jokingly, “to not end up being a hoarder."
Bargain Brothers Thrift Store was one of the brick-and-mortar establishments in Henderson that Josh often frequented to dig for hidden treasures. “They bought all kinds of stuff from places like old storage lockers,” Josh laughs, “but they weren’t very organized”. One day, picking his way through the newest Bargain Brothers inventory, Josh came across a bag of old video tapes and 8mm film reels. As he quickly rummaged through its’ contents, a small cardboard box near the bottom of the jumble caught his eye. Printed on the box were various phrases, “magnetic sound Recording Tape”, “Audio Magnetics Brand”, “Full Frequency-Recording Response”, “GUARANTEED QUALITY”. On the back of the box was handwriting in faded ballpoint, something about what Josh thought might be a US Navy ship, the USS Gurnard, and about it being somewhere in the middle of the pacific. There was also a name written on the box, Wyman Riley. Inside the box was a small reel to reel recording tape. Thinking this might be a good find, Josh slipped the tape back into the box and into the bag, took the lot up to the cashier, paid the Bargain Brothers for his newest acquisition and headed home.
CONSTRUCTING AN UNDERWATER MILITARY DETERRENT
Building a nuclear-powered submarine is a highly complex, hugely expensive and very time-consuming endeavor, requiring the skills of thousands of highly-trained professionals. These underwater warships must be capable of travelling virtually anywhere there is an ocean, at any time, undertaking any number of routine – and not so routine - missions in defense of the nation. Years can go by before a sub goes from the drawing board to being launched and put into active duty. Decades can pass between when a “nuke boat”, as it is often called by those who serve on them, is put into service and when it is retired.
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| USS GURNARD launching - May 20th, 1967 - San Francisco Bay Naval Shipyard (courtesy Vallejo Naval and Historical Museum) |
USS GURNARD - A WORKHORSE OF THE COLD WAR
The USS Gurnard (SSN 662), a Sturgeon-class nuclear powered fast attack submarine, was ordered by the United States Navy on October 24th 1963 and built at the San Francisco Bay Naval Shipyard, Mare Island, Vallejo CA. She was launched on May 20th, 1967 and commissioned on December 6, 1968. At that time, during a period of prolonged Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Sturgeon-class submarine was considered the workhorse of the U.S. Navy’s nuclear attack submarine fleet, and variants of this class were built from 1963 until 1975. The USS Gurnard served from December 6, 1968 until April 28, 1995.  |
| photo courtesy of Vallejo Naval and Historical Museum |
The Sturgeon class itself was a variant of the Thresher/Permit class nuclear submarine, with increased overall length and a larger sail, which allowed for intelligence-gathering masts to be raised and lowered when needed. In addition, the dive planes on this new, larger sail could rotate up to 90 degrees, which gave the sub the ability to punch through relatively thin ice sheets in order to surface the boat if necessary. The S5W nuclear reactor allowed Sturgeon class boats to reach a top speed of 26 knots (48 km/h). During her time at sea, this class of submarine was capable of carrying the Harpoon missile, the Tomahawk cruise missile, the UUM-44 SUBROC, the MK37 SLMM and MK 60 CAPTOR mines, along with MK-48 and ADCAP torpedoes.
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| USS Gurnard participating in rescue of downed airmen (photo courtesy of Vallejo Naval and Historical Museum) |
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| courtesy of Mare Island Museum |
DE PROFUNDIS
While the USS Gurnard is no longer with us, having been decommissioned by the Navy on April 28th, 1995 and scrapped in 1997, an important piece of her history was about to resurface at the Vallejo Naval and Historical Museum in Vallejo, California. Brendan Riley, board member and author of “Solano Chronicles”, which can be read every Sunday in the Vallejo Times Herald, stopped by my studio in the museum one day with a package he had received in the mail. Inside the brown padded envelope was the small cardboard box with the reel-to-reel tape recording, found by Josh D., the bargain-hunter from Henderson, Nevada, who had discovered it in the box of old videotapes and 8mm films at the Bargain Brothers Thrift Store.
Josh recalls that he didn’t know Brendan Riley at the time he found the recording. However, the little cardboard box with the faded handwriting had caught his interest, and that was all it took for him to begin a search which would eventually bring the recording to Brendan’s doorstep. “I remember finding the tape,” Josh recounts, “thinking this could be something really cool, something really valuable. It had a lot of things that collectors like. I knew there was potential for this to be a valuable item. So, for me to sell it on eBay I would have to really research it.” As he told me during one of our interviews, “when I don’t know what it is, that’s when I get really excited”.
Josh began digging, to see what else he could learn about the little reel to reel tape in the cardboard box. Googling “USS Gurnard”, he turned up information regarding a nuclear submarine of the same name, built at Mare Island in Vallejo, California. A similar search for “Wyman Riley” produced links pointing to a man by that name who had been editor of the Vallejo Times Herald, during the same time period in which the USS Gurnard was being built. This search also turned up information about a Brendan Riley who, Josh found out, was a Vallejo newspaper reporter and author. Brendan, it turned out, had just recently published a book titled, “Lower Georgia Street – California’s Forgotten Barbary Coast”, a colorful portrait of Vallejo’s all-but-forgotten infamous red-light district and its’ alleged connections to the criminal underworld in the forties, fifties and sixties. Josh recalls that it was Brendan’s book which really caught his eye and piqued his interest during his initial research - for more personal reasons. As it turns out, while he was already busy being a full-time dad and husband, driving a limousine for a living and scouring thrift stores and estate sales for vintage treasure, Josh was also doing research for a book about his late grandfather’s time working in Vegas casinos.
In 1949, Mayer Biller was living in Miami Florida and looking for steady work. A roulette dealer by trade, Biller was having increasing difficulty finding regular employment at the local casinos, due to government regulations which were beginning to crack down on gaming in the state. To find somewhere he could ply his trade, he and his family uprooted from the sunny shores of Miami and headed out west to the exciting new desert city of Las Vegas and the fancy casinos being built there. Mayer initially found work at the Flamingo Hotel, moving later to the Sands Hotel when it opened in 1952. From what Josh had told me, being an employee at any one of the big casinos during the nineteen fifties and sixties was really interesting, as it was still very much a mob town, and it was not uncommon at all to see known gangsters at the casinos on a regular basis. I learned that he and many other casino employees of the era had, over the years, become loosely acquainted (“not associated”, as Josh likes to point out with a sly laugh) with various Las Vegas mobsters who regularly came in and out of these establishments, sometimes for business, other times for pleasure.
After reading more about Brendan Riley, his recently published book and its' references to organized crime during a similar era in a similar setting, it seemed to Josh as if the fates were somehow conspiring to help him, and he believed Brendan might just be able to provide additional insight into some of the underworld figures to which Josh's grandfather might have run into. He even thought Brendan might be able to tell him more about the tape recording in the small cardboard box he had found at the thrift store.
In 1949, Mayer Biller was living in Miami Florida and looking for steady work. A roulette dealer by trade, Biller was having increasing difficulty finding regular employment at the local casinos, due to government regulations which were beginning to crack down on gaming in the state. To find somewhere he could ply his trade, he and his family uprooted from the sunny shores of Miami and headed out west to the exciting new desert city of Las Vegas and the fancy casinos being built there. Mayer initially found work at the Flamingo Hotel, moving later to the Sands Hotel when it opened in 1952. From what Josh had told me, being an employee at any one of the big casinos during the nineteen fifties and sixties was really interesting, as it was still very much a mob town, and it was not uncommon at all to see known gangsters at the casinos on a regular basis. I learned that he and many other casino employees of the era had, over the years, become loosely acquainted (“not associated”, as Josh likes to point out with a sly laugh) with various Las Vegas mobsters who regularly came in and out of these establishments, sometimes for business, other times for pleasure.
After reading more about Brendan Riley, his recently published book and its' references to organized crime during a similar era in a similar setting, it seemed to Josh as if the fates were somehow conspiring to help him, and he believed Brendan might just be able to provide additional insight into some of the underworld figures to which Josh's grandfather might have run into. He even thought Brendan might be able to tell him more about the tape recording in the small cardboard box he had found at the thrift store.
Josh knew it was time to take his search to the next level.
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(This is Part One of a multi-part story.) (Click here for Part Two)
(Updates to this story will also be made from time to time, as new information becomes available.)
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