A salty St. Louis scrapbook moves on

By Harry Levins
POST-DISPATCH SENIOR WRITER

Early this afternoon, at the St. Ann Community Center, the local chapter of the U.S. Navy League will surrender a couple of pounds of naval history.

It’s a hardbound package of memories titled “United States Ship St. Louis: ‘Her Book.’”‰”

“You could call it part social register, part officers’ wardroom scrapbook,” says chapter President Bob Eade of Washington, Mo.

He will hand the book over to two veterans of service aboard the St. Louis, a World War II cruiser. In turn, they’ll give it to the D-Day Museum in New Orleans.
The book records the Navy’s frothy side — for example, the ship’s launching in 1938, complete with a champagne bottle swung by Ladue debutante Nancy Lee Morrill.

The book also records the Navy’s bloody side — for example, the ship’s escape from the tight confines of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, earning it the nickname “the Lucky Lou.”

The early pages teem with peacetime pomp and protocol. It has carefully handwritten lists of senior officers, for example, and honorary golf-club memberships extended by any number of Caribbean islands to the ship’s officers — even a fancy wardroom menu for a Thanksgiving dinner capped off by “mixed nuts, coffee, cigarettes.”

The later pages reflect the darkness of WWII in the Pacific — for example, magazine accounts of kamikaze attacks off the Philippines late in 1944.

As grass-roots history, it’s a gem, and the Navy League’s Eade says he’s happy that it’s finding a home in a museum.

But how did it first make a stop in St. Louis?

“I got it in January, when I took over as president from Dr. Nick Colosi,” Eade says. “He gave it to me, and I said, ‘What is it?’ He said, ‘It came in an unmarked package from Florida.’”‰”

Eade theorizes that a crew member smuggled the book off the St. Louis when the ship was decommissioned in 1946.

Last year, Eade muses, “His widow or son didn’t know what in the hell to do with it. So they probably Googled the Navy League and tracked down the St. Louis chapter.”

In turn, the chapter heard from the USS St. Louis Association. To pick up the book, that group is dispatching Pearl Harbor veteran Marty Barnes of Warrenton, and kamikaze attack veteran Jack R. Jones of Cambridge, Ohio.

About the St. Louis: It went into mothballs in 1946 and then to the Brazilian navy in 1951, steaming under Brazilian colors until 1976. In 1980, Brazil sold the ship.

In August 1980, the St. Louis was being towed across the Atlantic toward the final indignity of the scrapyard when it sank.

So the St. Louis got what real sailors want: a burial at sea.

As a bonus, “Her Book” lives on — on dry ground.

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