Let me second that request for the speech being shown here, too.
It will take awhile, but will do.
and i’m sure i won’t be the only one keeping an eye on this thread.
OK, the speech is next week, and I just finished up a draft. Comments, criticisms, and corrections are most welcome and recommended. As this is the first time I’ll be speaking this long, I’ll take any help I can get! For the most part, it is simply the OP and then some. So here it is:
Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. I would like to start off by saying thank you for inviting me here tonight. I am humbled and profoundly honored to have this opportunity to speak to all of you. When [NAME] first invited me to speak at this dinner, he let me decide the subject. So I pondered that question for awhile. No doubt, that Homeland Security, Deepwater, or local unit operations would all be an appropriate subject. Truth be told, if those above me had their druthers, I would be speaking of all those things tonight. However, on the day that [name] called me I was still very preoccupied with a funeral that I had attended the day before. The funeral was for a former Seaman First Class in the Coast Guard who had served during World War Two. He had lost his battle with lung cancer and passed away peacefully with his family at his side. He was eighty-seven years old. I learned a lot about him during, and after, his funeral.
The next day, as I wondered what I would talk about tonight, I decided to talk about the Coast Guard’s Core Values - and how one man personified those values long before they came into existence. I decided to tell you about Ray O’Malley.
Ray O’Malley was something of an icon in the Coast Guard. When he learned of Ray’s passing, the Commandant of the Coast Guard, Admiral Thad Allen, immediately sent a message to all hands notifying us of his death. Admiral Allen called the former Seaman First Class a hero and a legend. At Ray’s funeral, people came from everywhere to pay their respects. Among those who attended was the most senior officer in the Ninth District, Admiral John Crowley, and the most senior enlisted sailor, Master Chief Frank Jennings. Also in attendance were crewmembers from a cutter in Boston, Massachusetts, along with that cutter’s commanding officer, Commander Michael Sabellico. Coast Guard personnel from Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan showed up with their Coast Guard Auxiliary counterparts. The Chicago Police Department led the procession alongside members of the Patriot Guard Riders. They all came to honor this man, many having never known him.
I never had the privilege of meeting Ray O’Malley, but I certainly knew of him. Everyone in the Coast Guard knew of Ray O’Malley. If not his name, we knew of his story. We knew of his place in the history of our small service. He was one of our heroes. It was our duty to honor this man and show his family what his life meant to us.
A native of Chicago, Illinois, Ray enlisted in the Coast Guard in 1938. He tried to enlist in the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, but they all told him that their quotas were full. He happened across the Coast Guard recruiting office and, within a week, he was a Coastie.
His first few assignments were at sea in the tumultuous North Atlantic. His first of several harrowing experiences came while stationed aboard the Cutter Hamilton in 1941. With war raging in Europe and throughout the Atlantic Ocean, the Hamilton sailed for a patrol near Greenland. Ray did not make that patrol as he was hospitalized due to illness. As the Hamilton neared the end of her patrol, a German U-Boat torpedoed the cutter causing extensive loss of life and injury. Ray lost many good shipmates aboard the Hamilton. It would not be the last time he suffered such a loss.
His next few assignments were aboard the Cutters Spencer and Frederick Lee, again in the North Atlantic. He tangled with U-Boats, picked up shipwreck survivors, and escorted the ships that the enemy was hunting. He was a sailor fighting in World War 2.
Serving aboard a cutter in the North Atlantic during wartime was perilous duty. Convoy escort duty and fighting with German U-Boats were familiar assignments to the officers and sailors of the U.S. Coast Guard. It was a job they performed in World War 1. In fact, the largest single loss of life aboard any U.S. naval unit in World War 1 occurred when a German submarine sank the Coast Guard Cutter Tampa. There were no survivors. One-hundred and fifteen men lost their lives in the icy North Atlantic Ocean. And now the Coast Guard found itself performing that very same mission, against the same enemy in the same ocean roughly twenty years later.
That bit of knowledge probably did not sit well with Coasties like Ray O’Malley who now found himself aboard the Cutter Escanaba. I would imagine that convoy duty in wartime was a bit like canary duty in a coalmine. The North Atlantic is notoriously cold and the constant heavy seas take their toll on men and ship alike. It was also full of U-Boats looking for targets - the types of targets that O’Malley and his cutter, the Escanaba, were duty bound to protect.
The Escanaba was not built for war. She was built to break ice, conduct search & rescue, and perform law enforcement on the Great Lakes. Home ported in Grand Haven, Michigan, she was only 165 feet in length, roughly the size of a large tugboat. When war broke out in Europe, the Coast Guard was quick to transfer cutters to the Atlantic for convoy duty, anti-submarine warfare, and various support related missions. The Escanaba was one such cutter. Like her sister ships, her time in theater was not without action. She too tangled with U-boats, picked up shipwreck survivors, and escorted the ships that German sailors hunted.
On June 13, 1943, the Escanaba was part of convoy sailing from Greenland to Newfoundland. Along with five other cutters, she was escorting the transport ship Fairfax and the tanker ship Laramie. It was just after 5 a.m. when Ray O’Malley assumed his watch on the helm. He was ordered to commence a turn to starboard as the cutters were zigzagging their way through icebergs and growlers. Not one moment later, an enormous explosion ripped the small ship in half. Unaware of the cause, O’Malley scrambled to the bridge wing with his life jacket as the Executive Officer yelled for the men to man their guns. Whatever their actions at that point, it was all in vain; the ship sank within three minutes.
Ray O’Malley, injured and bleeding, found himself in the freezing cold water. At first, he found himself under the water. He was being dragged down with the ship. As he struggled to reach the surface, a secondary explosion from under the water shot O’Malley to the surface. He quickly met up with a few of his shipmates, which included the cutter’s captain, LCDR Carl Peterson, and fellow crewman, BM2 Melvin Baldwin. As they took stock of their perilous situation, they started to swim for debris. O’Malley happened upon a sailor who was badly injured and barely alive. Without thinking, O’Malley gave the man his life jacket. The water temperature was just 39 degrees Fahrenheit. At 39 degrees, water is not cold. It is painful. It saps the will to live from your heart and mind just as quickly as it saps the heat from your body. As they struggled to survive among the bodies and debris, the Cutter Storis neared. O’Malley and Baldwin must have figured that they would soon be saved. The Storis sailed past them. The Storis was investigating a possible sighting of an enemy U-boat and had no time to stop. Fortunately, O’Malley and Baldwin reached some floating debris and managed to get out of the water. Almost immediately, they lost consciousness. They were hypothermic and most likely in shock.
While Storis searched for an enemy, the Cutter Raritan was tasked with picking up survivors. They found O’Malley and Baldwin. The two men were literally frozen to the debris they were on. They recovered the body of a third man, a lieutenant. They found no one else alive. Of the one hundred and three men aboard the Escanaba that morning, only two survived. Two. The rest died from the explosion, from being trapped within the ship, or hypothermia, which set in almost immediately. In fact, O’Malley and Baldwin had been in the water only for few minutes. They survived because they were frozen to debris; otherwise they surely would have quietly slipped off into a watery grave.
Maybe that selfless act of giving a dying man his life jacket is what earned Ray O’Malley an extra sixty-four years on Earth. Maybe he was just lucky. Whatever the case, he made the best of those sixty-four years and came to personify what would later become the Coast Guard’s Core Values.
When Ray returned stateside he was put to work on a war-bonds selling campaign. In the first week of August, just over a month after the sinking, Ray went to Grand Haven, Michigan to pay tribute to the Escanaba’s lost sailors and to take part in the Coast Guard’s birthday celebration. Grand Haven was cutter Escanaba’s home, her real home, and the local residents came out to mourn the loss of their cutter. Thousands of people came out that day. Thousands of people wondered how such a tragedy could befall a cutter and crew, whose primary missions were peaceful in nature. They pledged to forever remember and honor those who had lost their lives aboard the Escanaba.
When Ray’s war-bond campaign was over, the Coast Guard’s Commandant told Ray that he could transfer to any unit in the Coast Guard. Amazingly, Ray asked to go back to sea. His sense of duty prevailed over any sense of fear or self-preservation he may have had at the time.
Ray left the Coast Guard when the war ended. He continued to serve his community as a Chicago Police Officer. He married a beautiful woman named Dolly, and together they had a son, Peter. As a police officer, Ray rose to the rank of Lieutenant before his retirement. Service was something that Ray obviously embraced. His life was service. Service to his nation in time of terrible war; service to his community as an officer of the law, and service to his family as a loving husband and father. All of these things, he did with tremendous honor.
But Ray did something else in those sixty-four years that went above and beyond all of the aforementioned service to his fellow man. Ray could have easily parted ways with the Coast Guard. Indeed, the mere mention of the words Coast Guard must have stirred terrible images of the horrors he endured in the war torn North Atlantic. He could have walked away at the end of his enlistment and never looked back. And who could have blamed him? Who could have told him to do any different? Who would tell a man to relive that nightmare at every opportunity?
Not only did Ray not walk away, he considered it his duty to honor those 101 shipmates on the Escanaba. He honored their memory in the only way he knew how. Every year, on the anniversary of the sinking, he would light two candles: one for those shipmates he lost in 1943, and one for the crews of subsequent cutters to bear the name ‘Escanaba’.
And every year, during the first week of August, Ray returned to Grand Haven, Michigan. In addition to helping the Coast Guard celebrate its birthday, Ray honored the fallen by laying a wreath at the Escanaba Memorial. Year after year, Ray returned to Grand Haven. In 1964, Ray became the sole survivor of the Escanaba sinking with the passing of Melvin Baldwin. More reason to return to Grand Haven; there is one more man to honor.
He soon became the event’s biggest celebrity. Admirals and Master Chiefs will come and go, but Ray was the one constant at Grand Haven. He was always willing to share his stories with junior enlisted or senior officers. He was a proud man, proud of his ship and of his service. Not even life-threatening illness could keep Ray away. In 1968, he lost a kidney to cancer. He had arranged an early surgery in order to make his annual pilgrimage across the lake. As the years passed, he was always hoping to make ‘just one more.
Sadly, 2006 would be the last year he could make it.
At Ray’s funeral, the Coast Guard honored this man in much the way he honored the Coast Guard – with respect and a sense of duty. As did Ray’s family and friends. His son Peter, now a member of the Coast Guard Auxiliary, spoke eloquently of his father’s life and of his passions. Peter loved his father very much. Now a grown man, he could not hold back his tears as he wished for just one more chance to hug his father. He took that opportunity to hug his own son, Ray’s grandson, Michael. Ray’s wife Dolly was still beautiful after more than 50 years of marriage. She beamed with pride as the Admiral spoke of her late husband, and again when he presented her with the American flag ‘on behalf of a grateful nation’.
Ray served on the first of three cutters to bear the name Escanaba. The current Escanaba, a 270 foot medium endurance cutter, is home ported in Boston, Massachusetts. Her Commanding Officer spoke at the funeral. He spoke about the memorial service they hold every year on June 13. Following that ceremony, the captain would call Ray O’Malley, at his home, and report on the status of the ship.
Think about that for a moment.
In a long-standing tradition, the commanding officer of U.S. naval ship called a former seaman first class, on the phone or by radio, to report on the material condition of the cutter and the health and well being of her crew - every single year. These small gestures of respect are why I appreciate this service as much as I do.
Escanaba’s CO closed his remarks by reading the following poem by Lord Alfred Tennyson:
Sunset and evening star
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.
He was not a hero because he survived the sinking of the Escanaba. He was a hero because of how he lived his life afterwards. He was a hero because, in sixty-four years, he never failed to make the trip to Grand Haven to Honor the memory of those men aboard the Escanaba. It was a tradition of simple Respect. He felt it was his Duty to do so.
Honor, Respect, Devotion to Duty.
Those are the words that would later become the Coast Guard’s Core Values decades after World War Two. Every officer and sailor in our service knows these words well. When the powers that be were deciding on which vales should be termed our ‘core’ values, they needed only to look at the example set by Ray.
Ray got a second chance at life and he made the best of it. He served his family and his fellow man. He personified the values that would become the moral compass to an entire organization dedicated to public service. Admiral Allen was spot on: He was a hero and a legend.
In closing, it is important for us to remember the past and to honor the fallen. History, and those who lived it, can inspire us when we are down; guide us when we are confused; and remind us of the consequences of our actions. While it is important for us to remember men like Ray O’Malley, we must also remember the millions of men and women whose stories will never be told, despite their similar sense of honor, respect, and devotion to their duties.
And finally, Ray’s story is not quite over, but nearly so. Next week, on June 13th, Ray’s remains will be taken back to the North Atlantic. His ashes will be spread on the Atlantic Ocean on the anniversary of the sinking of the original Escanaba. As one member of the Patriot Guard put it:
“People in the area may hear a high-pitched whistle in the wind on that day, the sound of a Boatswain’s pipe signaling that the Coast Guard Cutter Escanaba’s crew, after 65 years, is once again fully accounted for.
Fair winds and following seas, Ray”
Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you.
It’s always inspiring to read about a real hero. Thanks, Scruloose.
at last. 
i’ve been watching for this thread to reactivate.
excellent, scruloose, as expected. 
i don’t have anything to add, other than a few mechanics of speech making.
i assume you’ll have this all on 3x5 cards or something similar? if that’s the case, here are a few tips to make it as easy to read as possible:
choose a plain, easy to read typeface such as [SIZE=3]Ariel [/SIZE] or Century Gothic (do not use Times New Roman)
format your type to All Small Caps
the point size should be at least 12
either double space it or set the line height to 1.5.
if you haven’t already, practice practice practice. and time it.
best of luck and let us know how it goes.
Holy spit!
Awesome, scruloose.
Just ran across this and had to compliment you on a wonderful tribute to one hell of a man.
Semper Paradis, indeed.
Very nice job.
Beautiful. Thank you for posting this.
On the mechanics of the speech, go to a closed room, stand at the front and do your speech out loud. When you stumble, go back over that part until it is natural. If you can lay your hands on a video camera, video your 2nd or 3rd practice.
Awesome, Scruloose. I hope you can present this speech as well as it, and Ray, deserves.