(Navy Wedding Cake Topper- photo copyright Helyn Rose Studio 2010)
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Rex had a wonderful marriage of 49 years to Derlie, formerly of Jacksonville, Florida. It only ended with her death in 1998, and they adored one another. It has occurred to me frequently in the course of this long wandering through the life and times of the Admiral that the big mystery is not about war, promotion or boring Pentagon in-fighting.
 
For me, the curiosity is about the full context of life, and how a high-octane Naval career that began in World War Two and lasted past the end of the Vietnam War was managed on the home front.
 
I have a copy of the Naval Officer’s Guide that is so ancient that it contains an exemption for use of strategic materials from the War Production Board. It mentions marriage only in the context of filling out a will, and spouses not at all.
 
There was far more to it. Oretha Awarz was the Miss Manners of the military. She published her first edition of Service Etiquette in 1959, when Rex and Derlie would have already known all the rules.
 
It was an issue item at the Academy, which we should remember was before and after World War Two the preferred method of procuring officers for the professional force.
 
Rex was not a product of Annapolis, though he had the bearing. Service Etiquette compiled the manifestations of a determinedly patriarchy society, though one in which the women played a distinctly important but indirect role.
 
Rex’s son Earl could tell you about the pains of dislocation for the kids. I have known a few dozen military brats- formally known as “Navy Juniors” who had to adapt to the peculiar gypsy life. But managing it, all those moves and re-establishments in distant places, was distinctly the role of the unpaid member of the career officer.
 
The Service expected a “Two-fer” on the deal- two adventurous souls for the price of one.
 
That system of etiquette- grading the one on the performance of two- was effectively dead by the time I wandered into the pressure point of Aviation Officer Candidate School on Mainside at NAS Pensacola. At this distance it is too alien to interpret without asking someone who was there.
 
Since I cannot ask Derlie about what it is like, I will have to use the metaphor of a parallel career. That would be the story of  the widow of one of Rex’s contemporaries, and an Academy man, CAPT Barney Martin, Class of ‘46.
 
After he passed away (yes, Jinny, I will quit smoking, soon!), Rex and Jinny found one another  and subsequently enjoyed a rich and abiding affection for the last dozen years of Rex’s life.
 
Jinny is a feisty gal and a great friend. She has written of her early days as a Navy Wife, and it is far more nuanced an experience than I can convey. It is a rich narrative all its own, played out across the globe. Like Derlie and their friend Sue Sourbeer, they had wings of their own, and a penchant for adventure.
 
They were strong and they were risk-takers, arguably more than their men.
 
Jinny was a beauty, and like the women she was about to join in the Navy, had one of the most glamorous jobs of the day open to her: she flew for American Airlines as a stewardess, based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She had been on the job for four years when she met her prospective husband.
 
I had an experience not much different than this years later, so I am going to assume that there is a commonality in the experience of attempting to have a personal life in a system run by the Bureau of Personnel.
 
Barney was based in Pensacola, a young Navy pilot who was performing flight tests on Twin Beech aircraft. He had flown into Tulsa in May of that year to be best man in his brother’s wedding- one of those dual purpose “cross country” training flights so beloved by the aviators.
 
His brother’s fiancé was a friend of Jinny’s and they met at the wedding.
 
She wrote later that “We dated by air, meeting in several cities throughout the country the entire summer and fell in love.  I even was invited to spend the Fourth of July at his mother’s beautiful summer home on Lake Michigan, in North Muskegon, MI.  Barney had been urging me to visit him in Pensacola and when the American Airlines pilots struck at the end of July 1954, I took the opportunity to go there.”

That was right at the time Barney received surprise orders to report to Alameda Naval Air Station for six weeks training for further, highly classified duty overseas. They had been dating for only here months and did not have the social option of living together or any of the new training-wheels that society had adopted for relationships these days. The Navy was grim and puritan. If you were married, you had certain entitlements. If you had a girlfriend, you just had a personal problem.
 
It actually is still that way today, one of the last American institutions that treats men (and now serving women) as individuals with a purely binary choice to their relationships: heterosexual and married or not.
 
Jinny remembers that because Barney’s orders were classified, she was to ask no questions and keep the matter strictly confidential.
 
“At the time we didn’t know what was to take place after that or even if we would be separated.  Having been reared a small town Ohio girl, the only thing I knew about the military was from my WW II memories of my schoolmates joining the service to fight for their country. After the war they came home to civilian life.  Almost all of them had been drafted and were enlisted personnel.  It never occurred to me that people actually made a career of military life, or that I would be part of it.”

Jinny returned to Tulsa to resign from American, pack the few belongings she had for the Navy to pick up. Some of it would go to storage and some for further transport to a duty station an ocean away. That was just the start. Jinny then “chose a wedding dress, going-away outfit, find  and ones to outfit  a matron of honor and a bridesmaid,” drove to Ohio from Oklahoma to pick up her mother, and then on to Michigan.
 
“Barney didn’t get leave approved until the day before the wedding so I had to acquire my marriage license with a lawyer friend by proxy.”
 
Eight weeks later, traveling in a dress on a slow prop plane, she stepped down in the humid Philippines at NAS Sangley Point, as Mrs. Barney Martin.
 
By contrast, the guys sure had it easy.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra and Jinny Martin
www.vicsocotra.com
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