In November of last year my grandson Chad put our reunion association on the World Wide Web. Since then that page has found eleven of our shipmates, or their families, that fourteen years of mailings never reached. Our list had some of them as "address unknown" since 1985. One of them was living in Suffolk, half an hour from my front door.

I am writing this for the other reunion secretaries, because I have begun to get letters asking how we did it, and because most of us are past seventy-five and don't have time to learn it the slow way. If I can do this, you can. I was a druggist for forty years. I can read a doctor's handwriting. This is easier.

Who I am
I served aboard a destroyer escort from 1943 to 1945 on the convoy runs across the North Atlantic. We carried no doctor. I was the pharmacist's mate, so the men called me Doc, and the ones who are left still do. We hunted submarines, we stood watches in weather that froze the spray on the rails, and the old girl rolled in a heavy sea like nothing you can imagine. Half the crew was seasick the first week of every crossing. I dispensed a great many saltines and a great deal of sympathy.

After the war I went to pharmacy school in Richmond on the GI Bill and ran a drugstore in Norfolk until 1990. I have been secretary of our association since it began, which means I keep the list, write the newsletter twice a year, and lick the stamps.

A word about her name
You will notice I don't give the old girl's name or her hull number on this page. That is on purpose. This page is advice for any secretary, and I don't want our own men landing here when they are looking for the reunion. Our association's page has everything they need. If you served on a DE on the convoy runs in '43 to '45 and want to know whether she was ours, write me and I'll tell you.

Why bother with the Web?
Because our men are in their seventies and eighties, and a good many of them have never touched a computer. But their children and grandchildren have, and they are the ones who find us. Of our eleven, eight were found by a son, a daughter or a grandchild, two by widows, and only one wrote to me himself, from a computer class at his church. The children type in the ship's name to see what Dad did in the war, and there we are.

A fine example
The best reunion page I've seen on GeoCities.us belongs to the USS Kittiwake Shipmates, the men who served aboard her from 1968 to 1972. They're a younger crowd than ours, but their committee has done it right. Their reunion is at the top: Branson, Missouri, in May of 2000, with the registration fee and what it covers, and registration by e-mail with a form mailed back. They list the shipmates they've found by first name, last initial and rating only. They keep the hotel's name off the open page and send it to any shipmate or family member who asks, which is a sensible choice too. (I put ours up because our men won't write and ask. They just won't come.) They have a "Still Looking For" list, and they say right on it that even "I think he moved to Texas" helps. They have a Taps list for the shipmates who have crossed the bar. And they have sea stories, which I envy. Ours are all in the newsletter, and the newsletter isn't on the Web yet.

Getting started
You don't need to buy anything but the computer. GeoCities.us gives you the space free, and Chad says the instructions are as good as any. If you have a grandchild, borrow one for a Saturday. If you don't, the public library in most towns has a class. Type the reunion first, the lost list second, and the history last, because the history is the part you'll want to fuss over, and the reunion won't wait.

The eleven we found, and how, are on this page.