The ABOUT Page

Webmaster Norm’s fascination with the Davis.

 

What possesses a fellow to build a site like the DE357.com?

I looked it up. The initial build took place late in 2002. It’s the middle of 2018 as I write this. That would have made me 47 then while I’m just 63 now. And I thought I was younger than that when I first ran it up. My how time flies.

So happens that the DE357 was only the second major site that I had built up to that time. I have done 80 or more since then. Nowadays I write books when I have the time. Look me up on Amazon under my pseudo name Buck Hunter. https://www.amazon.com/Buck-Hunter/e/B00VL7CGVC …. You know, if you’re curious. I may not even be around any more when you read this. It’s my hope that the family will keep the site going. If you are here when I no longer am then they did.

The original site was built using a program called FrontPage by Microsoft. Well, they dumped that program around 2007 or so, but it still worked for a few years. It’s all gone now. So I’m spending a LOT of time moving it over to WordPress, which you’re looking at now. It’s the current defacto standard in web stuff. Maybe by the time you see this you’ll be using brain induction. Some kind of gizmo from the all powerful Google Corp. Things change.

What started the whole thing is the one day, working with my electrician father, we did a job for a local fellow who happened to be a convoy commander over in the Atlantic during the war. He gave me a name and contact for a fellow who adored him who live(d) in South Carolina. (The author, and owner of the DE357 lives in Alabama.) That fellow served in the Navy and he had a yen for history. I don’t know how they hooked up, but they did. And that fellow who I got to know and love did some research which led me to understand that the shipmates had been doing reunions for the last several years. That was in 1990, or thereabouts.

Well, my father, Norman E. Morrison Sr. died in 1991. To honor him…I went to a reunion in Nashville about six months later of the same year.

At first the shipmates didn’t quite know what to make of me. Evidently I was the first family member sans shipmate to make one of the affairs. One of the old salts accosted me in the hotel elevator and asked who I was and what I did on the ship. Ha!

Frankly, I sort of got the cold shoulder. I didn’t know it but there was some confusion in the ranks for this new phenomena. I almost called it, packed my bags and came home, but my wife talked me out of it.

That evening, reluctantly, I went to the banquet. Turns out that in the interim the guys finally figured out that I was the son of their shipmate and they laid some sneaky plans.

We ate and then they played the video about the ship they you can view elsewhere on here. I was still sort of hurt at the cool reception but then here came this little snip of man, Stanly Cohen. Stan was a radar tech (radar girl) aboard ship. You MUST look at his collection. Anyway he plopped down into my lap, and we proceeded to have a GREAT chat with my wife looking on. I was gob smacked. But that ain’t the best part.

After the video someone got up and they passed out hats and other trinkets….calling everyone by name….and then they called MY name! I went up and the MC introduced me and announced that they had decided that I was to be a honorary shipmate!

As you might imagine I was feeling pretty darned important after that and they all swarmed me. Now here’s the important part. Right there and then the precedent was set. IF you are a family member…and I don’t care whether you are a direct one, nephew, or great great cousin…and you actually give a damn….then YOU ARE ALSO A HONORARY SHIPMATE!  Hello shipmate!

This honor is NOT lightly given…and it must be earned. If you care about the DE357 then you’re in. Simple as that and you should be proud to be a member of this exclusive club.

Time rocks on. My trinkets were put on the mantle and in the hope chest and I NEVER forgot that evening. I wanted to do something for my father, and for his shipmates to honor them. That was always in the back of my mind.

There was no internet back in 1991. For me that came later in 1995. I did my first web work in 1997 and the guilt over my notion to build a site for those wonderful guys steadily built up. So in 2002 I finally built the site. And lo and behold by and by shipmates and honorary shipmates found it and so began the collections. The first was the Morrison Collection, naturally, but as you have seen more came along.

Thanks to the honorary shipmates who did yeoman’s work on their end, preparing the photos and things and sending them to me you have the site you see today.

As I mentioned the original build finally went belly up, so I moved it to the WordPress platform in 2018. A LOT of work. But the way I look at it, it’s as important…maybe more so today and in the future as it was then. It’s the record of the men who shaped the world we inherit. Literally without them, there would be NO honorary shipmates. And as for everyone else, without their sacrifice you’d be reading your internet pages in German or Japanese, depending on which one of them won their war which would have eventually happened.

When I first delivered the DE357.com site there were a great many memorial sites like it…but time takes a toll and I’m sure many of them no longer exist.

If you are an honorary shipmate, while it is not strictly necessary, I feel it only right that you have some skin in the game. Make a donation to me or whoever the next webmaster is to defray the yearly expenses of keeping this site alive. Hosting is not free. You need to help, if you can. Be a working shipmate. It will make you feel good.

The site is dedicated to the shipmates, and the honorary shipmates. To the shipmates of the future. As they say, as long as we remember then their sacrifices will never be forgotten. We owe them everything.