Voyage Two
SS Edwin W. Moore - Page 9
We arrived in New York ( on the afternoon of January 17, 1944 ). I was discharged and paid off at the Waterman Steamship Co. 's New York office ( January 20, 1944 ). Usually it took them two or three days to pay off the crew. We stayed on the ship and cleaned up and replenished the stores while we were waiting. The Captain had called ahead and let Waterman know that we were out of everything. They had trucks waiting at the pier when we docked. Somebody told me we would have fresh ice cream that night, but I went and ate ashore. It had been almost five months since we boarded the Moore in Houston and I wanted off the ship. The mates all gave me tips - twenty, thirty, fifty dollars. The Chief Mate wanted me to stay on the ship for the next trip and wait the officers's mess but I wanted to go home and see my wife and family.
Somebody had been telling us before we got to port how cheap it was to take the bus home instead of riding the train. So I decided to take the bus and save some money. I think a one way ticket from New York to Dallas was $25.00 on Trailways Bus Company and they allowed me $.25 voucher for breakfast and lunch. I don't remember coming home that time with any close friends like Johnston or Prothro, but there were seaman on the bus.
It was wintertime and the roads were snowy. We came across Pennsylvania and Ohio. It was hilly and very pretty just like a Christmas card. We went through South Bend, Indiana. I got out there and looked over the Notre Dame University campus. We stopped in St. Louis and then came on down to Dallas. I had to get off in Dallas because the bus was going on through to California. I caught one of these old relics of a Greyhound bus that they had put back into service during the war. It was packed and I had to stand up all of the way from Dallas to Houston - several hours standing up and holding on overhead. The whole trip from New York back to Galveston took four days and it was miserable; I never wanted to ride a bus again. Afterwards I always rode the train.