Dallas Adult Entertainment: Sailors share memories of time aboard USS Arizona
Hurst recalled testing the guns, playing on the Arizona’s baseball team, being just another sailor.
“I don’t have any great sea stories to tell, but I guess it did for me what needed to be done to me,” he said. “I was just an old farm boy – hell, I had absolutely zero sophistication. All I knew was work.”
“I enjoyed it,” Stratton said . “After all was said and done … after I got squared away and made a few friends aboard, and the routine was settled down, everything was kind of kosher.”
Marshall Trimble, Arizona’s official historian, said scandal shattered the Arizona’s routine in 1924, when news broke that a prostitute named Madeline Blair had stowed away on the ship during a cruise, paying the ship’s cook for meals and doing business with sailors.