hope you are finding this site to be both entertaining and informative, and that you'll come back again and again to see what's here in the way of memorabilia and news about the Navy, the Tidewater and our former shipmates. Also, I hope you'll please contact me with any suggestions or ideas you may have on what you'd like to see here at the USS Tidewater Home Page.

That includes our posting some of your pictures and stories about your tour of duty. If you would like to be among the sailors and families who have contributed pictures and stories to make this site what it has become, again, please also contact me and we'll arrange to get your pictures posted and quickly back to you safe and sound.

When I first reported aboard AD31 in the early Sixties, she was going into dry-dock at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard getting some major revisions below deck and having a new Distant Airborne Sonar Helicopter (DASH) hangar installed on the fantail. That was in October of 1962. For the next three years, the Tidewater was my home and place of work as an Electronics Technician in R4 Division.

Since my Navy days and college, I have spent most of my years in Chicago working at IBM and retired several years ago after a long and wonderful career (30 years) there. During that period, I learned a few things about computers and web sites and started my own internet company just before retiring. Now living in Florida, I do web sites and other things like that for a few of my old customers.

Building and maintaining this site for the Tidewater Association has been a rewarding and memorable experience, in itself, for me. I've met and become reacquainted with many of my Tidewater shipmates and some who weren't on the Tidewater but stopped by anyway just to say "Hi." My thanks to the many sailors and their families who have helped me and have contributed photos and stories and making this site what it has become - a place for all of us to remember the good old days and show off our photo albums.

I hope you'll feel what other sailors and their families tell me they feel while visiting our Home Page, the sensation that for some brief moment while peering into our past here, the screw of the grand old USS Tidewater, whose sailors served their country with distinction for nearly three decades, turns again.