Winter in Drydock, 1968-1969

During the winter of 1968-1969, USS Suffolk County (LST-1173) was being overhauled at the Horne Brothers shipyard in Newport News, Virginia. At night in winter, a naval shipyard can be quite an otherworldly-looking place: Four fellow junior officers and I rented a cottage in Virginia Beach -- a good 45-minute commute from the shipyard -- and lived there when we weren't on duty aboard ship. Virginia Beach is a lively seashore town most of the year, but here's what it looked like at night in January 1969: Main drag, downtown. Beach promenade. Winter is cold and dark pretty much wherever you go in non-tropical latitudes, it seems. We burned a lot of firewood in that little cottage -- and a lot of scrap wood we liberated from a nearby demolition site. Quite the band of jolly buccaneers, we were. At least we got away with it (most of the time). Those were the days. Cherish them, cherish them.