| Summary: | Gorden Lampert in park playground Gorden's Obsession The Community Park has become Gorden Lampert's obsession. Hardly a day goes by that you don't see him in the park, mowing, picking up debris, trimming and watering trees and flowers. The community appreciates the many hours Gorden has spent in keeping our park so beautiful. He was instrumental in getting playground equipment and also acquired the cement barricades to protect the park from parking cars. He also takes care of the outside restrooms. Gorden's home is in an ideal location, next to the park so he is able to watch over his projects. Operation High Jump (1946) By Leonard Norheim Henry Seitz and I were aboard the USS Canisteo, an oil tanker, assigned to a task force with Admiral Byrd to go to the South Pole for geological exploration of the ocean floor and charting of the waters. Principal objectives were cold weather tests of ships, men and equipment plus studies of the weather, ocean currents and winds. We left Norfolk, Virginia, November 27, 1946. Enroute we stopped at Aruba, Netherlands West Indies (an oil refinery) to load oil. From there we went through the Panama Canal and sailed to the South Pacific. When crossing the equator we were initiated into the "Ancient order of the deep." We arrived in the South Pole area on December 30, 1946. The icebergs were so thick it was even difficult to count them. The ship took a zigzag course to evade them. We nearly crashed into an iceberg at night. The radar had failed and the fog was very dense. We then pushed into broken ice so thick it would have been possible to go for a walk by jumping from one ice flow to the next. The ship would rumble and quiver when hitting the ice, or growlers as they were called. An ice breaker ship and another ship got stranded in a lagoon that froze over during the night. The ice breaker had to break their way out at the rate of three miles per day for a week. A PBM plane from one of the other ships met with tragedy when it crashed into a mountain near the pole. A search found six survivors, but three men were killed. On a calm clear day the water was a deep blue and icebergs blinding white. A very beautiful scene. There were stormy days, too. Winds blew up to 200 MPH. We were in a 100 MPH wind with the waves coming completely over the ship and freezing on the ships metal. This gave the ship a ghostly appearance. One nice day I took the motor launch and a few officers and we went seal hunting among the ice floes. The officer shot a seal. When we weighed it after returning to the ship, it weighed 406 pounds. By the end of January the sun never set. It would dip to the horizon and go back up. The temperature while we were there ranged from -0° to 28° above. In winter, or summer, it gets as cold as 90° below zero. On another nice day we went out in a boat. We found a penguin about the size of a tame duck. Because penguins are very curious, it walked directly to us. When we tried to pick it up, it ran. One of the fellows ran after it, dived onto and caught it. We brought the penguin back to the ship. After a couple of weeks of being fed our food it died. The crew got sick of the food, too. Powdered milk, dried fruits and canned rations becomes a monotonous diet. We missed fresh fruit and vegetables. Once a month a plane would bring us mail from home — a happy day! When we had bad weather, it was difficult to get any rest because of the rolling and pitching of the ship. Once we hit an underwater mountain range and did some damage to the underside of the ship. We anchored at Rio De Janeiro on the 18th of March after 98 days at sea. At the mouth of the harbor we gave a 21 gun salute three times. The shore batteries of Brazil returned the salute. We had liberty in Rio for a week and enjoyed every minute. Rio is a very beautiful city! From there we sailed to Trinidad, "The Port of Spain", a very beautiful tropical island. After a couple days we set sail for Norfolk, Virginia. Home at last on the 21st day of April 1947. V *#% *V- Leonard Norheim USS Canisteo -7- Scanned with a Zeutschel Zeta book scanner at 300 dpi. Edited with Multi-Page TIFF Editor.
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