Pay Attention – NOT!

There are times in your life when you don’t want any attention. You want to just keep your head down and your nose clean. Plebe summer at the United States Naval Academy was one such time in my life. If I could have been invisible that would have been ideal because attention meant correction, some form of humiliation and demerits.

It was bad enough being a woman in the earliest years of integration at USNA. Attention was difficult to avoid when out of a thousand-member class women numbered ninety and the number was dropping daily. Almost anything in our physical appearance stood out as obviously different than the majority. I had the additional identifier of wearing eyeglasses as this was previous to any form of available vision correction surgery.

Part of plebe summer training entailed sailing lessons. I can still picture standing behind heavyweight wrestler, Pat Brady as we disembarked from our training sailboat. As Pat swung his body over the front rail he was so much taller than me that his hand brushed by my face and knocked my prescription glasses overboard. I saw a fuzzy image of them sinking into Santee Basin. I had received a varsity swimming team waiver for my legal blindness but didn’t think jumping into the water at that point would have brought back my glasses and my vision.

I chopped (double time running) back into the hall squinting and ran into my squad leader, Mr. Vierra who could see that I was minus my “eyes”.

“Plebe halt!. Miss Andrews, where are your glasses?”

“At the bottom of Santee Basin sir!”

“Holy @#$%&! How bad is your vision, Miss Andrews?”

“Sir, If you were standing next to Lt. Holder I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference by looking at your shoulder boards.”

“Holy @#$%&!”

“Well, Sir, I can call home and ask my mother if I have any other glasses at home.”

I grew up in Annapolis and my mom could make a delivery in 10 minutes or less. Turns out all I had at home were prescription sunglasses and thus I spent a couple of weeks during plebe summer walking around in uniform in sunglasses. To say this was nonregulation and that it got some attention is an epic understatement.

I was chopping through one company’s area with my “new” glasses when I heard the dreaded…

“Plebe Halt!”

As I stood braced up against the wall, I was questioned by two first class whose attention I had gained.

“Midshipmen Andrews, I see you’re wearing sunglasses. You must think you’re cool. Are you cool?”

“No, sir!”

Well, we’re a very cool company. Wouldn’t you rather be in our cool company?

No sir!

“Well, then whenever you travel through our company area you must stop chopping and walk with rhythm moving and grooving and saying for the entire time it takes to get through our area…

So off I went being “Cool Ray” while making my way across what became for me “No Mary’s Land.”

During that summer, whenever I needed to chop through that area, I made sure to chop up two flights of the ladder and back down in order to avoid that cool company and the special attention of two first-class midshipmen who dubbed me “Cool Ray”.

Years later at a reunion, the sunglasses came up in conversation but that’s another post.