At the Foot of Broad Street

IT'S PROBABLY NOT generally known, but at the foot of Broad Street in Philadelphia, at the U.S. Naval Base, is what's left of the Henry C. Mustin Naval Air Facility -- a military airfield now abandoned and slowly being reclaimed by Mother Nature. Grass and even small trees sprout between cracks in the concrete of what once were runways where vintage warplanes took off and landed in the 1930s through the 1940s and perhaps even into the '50s. My little springtime wandering brought me to this place, which I'd last seen in 1976 when I was stationed at the Navy yard as a liaison officer to visiting ships during the Bicentennial celebration. Here's a big hangar which now serves as a commissary for Navy Yard personnel, of whom there are fewer and fewer with every passing year (note the jetliner making its approach to Philadelphia International Airport several miles to the north of Mustin Field)... I wasn't sure whether I was venturing into forbidden territory as I drove north along the Delaware into the semi-wilderness of the old airfield. I didn't see any "Trespassers Will Be Shot" signs, but I remember the Navy Yard being a seriously security-conscious place back in my Cub Scout field-trip days, when they didn't even allow cameras to be brought through the gate.

Adjoining the airfield complex were a goodly number of abandoned row homes, which undoubtedly housed base families back when Mustin Field was a going concern. It was an eerie feeling to be wandering in the midst of a ghost town within the geographic limits of one of the nation's largest cities. It occurred to me that, homelessness being the urban problem it is, these structures might have been fixed up and put to good use in some fashion...

The Naval Base is also the last stop before the razor-blade factory for a number of ships comprising the nation's mothball fleet. Back in the day, the carrier Enterprise and the battleship Iowa were moored there, along with a host of cruisers, destroyers and other ships of the line. On this particular day, however, I saw mostly retired amphibious vessels and minesweepers. Here's an image of a dock landing ship of the type that steamed with our squadron deployed in the Caribbean in 1968 and 1969... And the strange-looking ship you see in this image is a Newport class tank landing ship that wasn't even in commission back when I was an LST engineering officer in '69... Back in MY day, the stars of the LST fleet were the Suffolk County class -- bigger than but essentially no different from the ships that landed tanks and vehicles over the beach at Normandy in 1944... Although I can say with a straight face that I served in the country's naval forces in the Vietnam years, I got real lucky with respect to WHERE I served. If I had extended my service contract for an additional year, I was looking at shore duty with a beachmaster unit in the Mediterranean. But I'll never know what an adventure that might have been because I opted to return to civilian life at the first opportunity.

I guess we can drive ourselves nuts pondering what might have been.

It was a rather melancholy thing to see what's become of Philadelphia's Naval Base, but I was glad to have dropped in for a look-see. The next -- and last -- stop on my sentimental journey was 1714 Sylvan Lane, Gladwyne, PA, where my family lived from 1957 to 1997. There were a number of trees in the front yard which survived the grading and landscaping during construction, and it appeared one of them had finally given up the ghost. The new owners had done something I've never seen before, and I must say it's one of the most creative and imaginative uses of a dead tree I've ever seen... My Dad was a talented whittler. I think he would have approved this piece of work.

And so, surfeited with nostalgia, I charted a course for Reading (which is not an easy place to get to from Philadelphia when the traffic is heavy), and the next day I was back in harness, slogging away through the swampland known as The Practice of Law. If I keep practicing, and if I live long enough, I just may get it right.