ARMY & NAVY: Officer of the Day

John Husted tried three times to get into the Naval Academy at Annapolis. Best he could manage was a job on a passenger ship as a yeoman, the maritime equivalent of a male stenographer. Then he got a job in a shipyard, a wife, an apartment in Manhattan. When 29 ships and 10,000 officers & men of the U. S. Navy hove in for the World’s Fair last fortnight, ex-Yeoman Husted took out his faded blue uniform, adorned it with new buttons, new stripes. By a kind of wishful magic familiar to more men than would ever admit it, John Husted then became “Lieut. Blish C. Hills, U. S. S. Anderson.” On Riverside Drive by the Hudson, he strolled with others in blue, bandied glances with the passing girls, was casually curt with mere sailors.

One afternoon last week he went by tender to the cruiser Philadelphia, which with other visiting ships was open to the public. He strutted the deck, confidently introduced himself to a real lieutenant, promptly met more naval officers than even he had dreamed of. The real lieutenant noted the bogus buttons, the stripes a little too high on his sleeve, a real Rear Admiral and a real Commander decided he was no spy, whisked him off the ship, plopped him into a city jail. Next day, instead of sending John Husted to jail for impersonating an officer, they condemned him to return to his wife and to the laughter of men who had not been caught at their daydreaming.