Nick Mariano-Author

When I was a child my father was away in the U.S. Navy for long periods and being young I had no idea where he was or why he wasn’t home. Over the years he told me stories of his 18 years as a sailor in the Navy. I had every intention of one day, when I was older, to sit down with dad and have him retell me all his stories so that I could write about them at some future date.

Unfortunately dad had a stroke when he was in his early 80’s and he wasn’t able to speak after that, so I never got around to hearing his stories again and getting them all down on paper. Over the years since his death I think back to the many tales he told me as a child and although I still remember many of them and will try to reproduce some excerpts later in this book, I know that I will miss many of the details. Recently I was going through a closet and found a very old salt water taffy box from Atlantic City, where we went twice a year without fail, when I was young.

Inside this box were many of the letters that my father had written to his mother and father while he traveled around the world as a sailor from 1935 to 1937. I had never taken the time to read them and almost forgot that I even had them. One rainy day I decided to pull the box out of my closet and start reading them. I was amazed at the detail of my dad’s letters and the fact that he marked each day’s account with the calendar dates so that you could follow his travels as he sailed around the world day by day and week by week. Unfortunately the box only contained letters from 1935 to early1937 and I’m not sure if there were more somewhere and when or how they may have been thrown out. They are fun to read and rather than summarizing them I thought I would just reproduce the whole content of each letter and let you decide if they were as interesting to you as they were for me.