Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 28, 1992 TAG: 9202280177
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B3 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Medium
CUTTER HONORS ALL-BLACK LIFESAVING STATION
Robert Matthews remembers the nation's only all-black lifesaving station as "a very isolated place" in World War II, when the nation worried about German submarines landing saboteurs."To get to it back in those days, you had to get the ferry boat at Oregon Inlet," Matthews said of Pea Island, part of North Carolina's Outer Banks.
"When we got there, we had mounted beach patrols. We rode horses up and down the beach every night."
Despite the isolation, the station, founded by the U.S. Livesaving Service in 1879, established a solid reputation for rescuing people from dozens of ships that foundered off the treacherous stretch of coast north of Cape Hatteras.
Saturday, the Coast Guard - the successor of the Lifesaving Service - will honor the men who served at the station by naming its newest cutter the Pea Island.
The 110-foot vessel, to be commissioned in Norfolk, will carry a crew of 14 and be based in Mayport, Fla.
Matthews, 72, a retired journalist from Baltimore, will be among the ceremony's special guests.
"I'm looking forward to this, after having been there and realizing what a place in history the station had," he said.
The Lifesaving Service's first and only all-black crew moved onto Pea Island in 1880, relieving a white crew that missed the grounding of a British vessel in which 17 sailors died.
The incoming captain, Richard Etheridge, was allowed to pick his own crew and established a stiff regimen of exercise and discipline.
The training paid off.
In 1896, the schooner E.S. Newman ran aground in a storm, but Pea Island crew members made 10 trips through fierce breakers to the disabled vessel and saved all nine people on board.
Over the years, the station was credited with saving more than 600 people from dozens of shipwrecks. The station closed in 1947.
Matthews, who was assigned to Pea Island in 1943, said he occasionally could see the distant fire of combat in the Atlantic.
"Lots of times things would float in from ships that were sunk not too far off the coast," he said. "That brought home to you that the war is really going on close by."
Alphonso Howard, who retired from the Coast Guard in 1967 after 26 years, was sent to Pea Island in 1942.
"You figure a 17-year-old kid on that beach at night, it was no picnic," he said.
"Lots of times you'd see something up ahead. You didn't know if it's a body or what, but you had to inquire.
"It was a job I took personally," he said. "You go out and put your life at stake - and there was no brass band waiting for you when you got back."