Music: Plug

When a general—or an admiral—gets up to make a speech, you never can tell what he may say. To 2,000 diners at Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, welcoming the Admiral back home last week, Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz lapsed into doggerel. The verses, he explained, about a sailor named Patsy McCoy, had been found by a Navy censor, going through the mail:

Me and Halsey and Nimitz

Have sure got the Japs on the run

We’re driving them wacky

In old Nagasaki. . . .

Me and Halsey and Nimitz

Are havin’ a wonderful time.

What we ain’t uprootin’

By bombin’ and shootin’

Would fit on the face of a dime. . . .

Me and Halsey and Nimitz

Are anchored in Tokyo Bay.

The place is just drippin’

With American shippin’. . . ..

We’re warnin’ them never

To start it again.

For we’ve got a country

With millions of men,

Like Nimitz and Halsey and me.

A Navy wife in Washington, listening to the radio, recognized the lyrics. Her Annapolis-trained husband, Captain William Gordon (“Slim”) Beecher, who commands a destroyer squadron in Tokyo Bay, wrote them. Mrs. Beecher remembered that some of her husband’s 116 previous compositions had done well—his Song of Old Hawaii had been a 1938 hit. Passing up no bets, Mrs. Beecher visited the copyright office next day.