The idea of the Navy reserve is to prepare sailors for mobilization by immersing them in the Navy experience one weekend a month. For reservists who live nowhere near a ship or air station, this means reporting in uniform to a training center for two days of highly regimented training in exchange for a monthly paycheck.
Then there were the public affairs companies. Because I was a public affairs officer when my active duty ended in 1968, I joined Naval Reserve Public Affairs Company 9-2 in Chicago. In those days most public affairs reservists were not paid for monthly drills, and this gave the program an unmilitary degree of flexibility.
Instead of drilling in uniform at a training center, we met once a week after work, in civilian attire, in downtown Chicago. It was nothing like the Navy I knew: more like a group of freewheeling Michigan Avenue professionals who were on a first-name basis and wore identical suits once or twice a year.
The unit’s reservists (nearly all officers) included newspaper reporters and editors, advertising executives, public relations and marketing people, a magazine publisher, a bank president, a publicist for Playboy Magazine and, briefly, a TV anchor. We met at the Wrigley Building because the unit had a former member named Wrigley (who, the story goes, raised eyebrows at the Great Lakes Naval Base as an ensign when he arrived for duty in a chauffeured limousine bigger than the admiral’s).
These folks worked closely with the Chicago chapter of the Navy League, a civilian group of Navy boosters that included top business executives. One Navy Chief of Information called the reservist-Navy League alliance the Navy’s Chicago mafia.
Unlike other reserve units, public affairs companies didn’t just train: They did real-time communications projects for the Navy. Weekly unit meetings were brief because project work took place during business hours. I was impressed by how much time these guys took away from their high-powered jobs to work for the Navy. Their civilian jobs and connections enabled them to get things done that would have been difficult or impossible for active-duty public affairs officers.
My reserve drill site
- Whenever a top admiral visited Chicago, our unit arranged a media tour that included newspaper editorial boards. Every admiral who took command of the Great Lakes Naval Base was immediately introduced to Chicago’s movers and shakers.
- In those days the Navy had no paid TV commercials for recruiting and had to rely on public-service TV spots that aired in off-hours. One of our members was an ad agency media buyer whose job gave him lots of clout with TV stations. Once a year he persuaded the Chicago stations to air a bunch of recruiting spots in a prime-time ad blitz.
- When American Prisoners of War were repatriated from Vietnam in 1973, our unit mobilized on a day’s notice to handle media coverage of returning POWs who arrived at the Glenview Naval Air Station for medical evaluation at the Great Lakes Naval Hospital. One of our members tapped his business contacts to arrange for each POW to get a reclining chair in his hospital room and the use of a new car from an auto dealer during his stay.
- In its early days, the unit played a major role in bringing the captured German submarine U-505 to Chicago in 1954 to be placed on permanent display at the Museum of Science & Industry. At one point the unit signed for temporary custody of the submarine.
The original members of reserve public affairs companies were World War II veterans. Some of those guys were still around in 1968, along with veterans of more recent Navy service. Many of our members, however, had come through a direct-commission program that recruited professionally qualified people with no prior active duty.
So some of our most talented people knew very little about the Navy beyond what they’d learned in a two-week orientation. Occasionally we had to remind them to wear their insignia correctly and take off their hats when they walked into the officers’ club. I was an old salt by comparison, a lieutenant who actually had been to sea. A few of these “instant ensigns” stayed in the reserves to eventually become commanders and captains.
The oddball public affairs companies proved their value to the Navy, and in the late 1970s reserve public affairs was upgraded to a paid program and reorganized into units with mobilization missions. Getting a monthly paycheck was welcome, but meant that we had to rejoin the more traditional Navy with uniforms and weekend drills at the training center.
Integrating public affairs reservists into the operating Navy paid off years later, when public affairs reservists were activated for the Gulf War in 1990. But nothing could replace the Navy’s Chicago mafia.