Gene Slover's US Navy Home Page

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As of 8/26/10 this site has 2.9 million indexed and searchable words on 8034 pages.

Welcome to the home page of Gene Slover's US Navy Pages. The purpose of this site is to preserve and make available the rich history and traditions of the US Navy through documents, photos and videos. This is totally non-profit and at my own expense.

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This picture was taken in Japan. At the time the Japanese did not have any color film so the original picture was black and white. The Japanese photographer who took and colored the picture kept asking me what color my hair was and I kept telling him that is was a very dark red.

When I went back to get the picture few days later he explained to me that most Japanese were colorblind and that he could not tell what color my hair was. He kept apologizing for getting the color wrong and was more than willing to try to correct it. He could see all of the other colors when he looked at me. He just could not see the hair color or tint. I told him the picture was fine as we were getting underway the next morning and I might not be back. Read why the crow on my rating badge is backwards.

The head of the crow on the rating badge is supposed to look toward your body. The reason it does not is that the picture is taken right after the USN had everyone put their rate badge on the left arm but the rating badge in the picture is for the right arm. Some ratings in the navy were right arm rated and others were left arm rated. The navy did away with the right arm ratings and from then on everyone wore their rating badges on their left arm as in the picture.

If you were right arm rated then you were also called a line petty officer which put you in a little different class and established the pecking order. The insignia has a rangefinder which designates me as a fire controlman. In the early 1950's the fire control rating was changed to fire control technician. The fire control technician rating badge had a director on it with a rectangular antenna on top of the director.