Voyage One
SS David G. Burnett - Page 6
When we got back to New York we were discharged and paid off (at the Waterman Steamship Co. office on 7/16/43). I sent a post card from Halifax to Della telling her that when I got home we were going to get married. I guess that was a proposal. We had been dating off and on for more than three years. We had broken up a couple of times but for over a year we'd been going steady. Della graduated from Ball High School in Galveston in 1941. She was a year older than me. At that time she was working for the Austin Insurance Agency as an insurance clerk. She typed policies, filed records and answered the phone. Back then she worked six days a week and had Sundays off. She was excited when they started letting her off at 1:00 pm on Saturdays and she still got her full pay. That was back before the five day work week.
I took the train home with Johnny Johnston as he was from Galveston,too. He'd been raised by the Copelands, real nice people. He had been abandoned or given up or something when he was a kid and the Copelands took him in. He had tracked down his real father and he was rich but he didn't want anything to do with Johnny. We were good friends and we shipped together a couple of more times. We went home the southern route down through Virginia. That was breathtaking. Here I'd been across the Ocean and seen some of England but I had never been out of Texas, in fact, not more than sixty miles from home. So that was an adventure getting to see so much of the United States. We had a lay over in Alabama - I sent Della a post card from Mobile. We came through Mississippi but I don't recall just how we crossed through Louisiana, but we had to have come down through East Texas to get to Union Station in Houston. We took the bus the last fifty miles from Houston down to Galveston Island.
Click here to read about Adelaide's account of her wedding when Danny came home from this voyage.