February 2014 Meeting Notes

We started off the February meeting with Tolling the Boats lost in February, followed by birthday wishes for our members, and officer reports.

Old and New Business 
Our new Base Commander, Dick Gonzales, gave us an overview of the recent Base Officer’s meeting. A number of items were discussed at the meeting, including: how to get more members to attend meetings, more Base activities (such as a picnic), and maintaining Base membership. Several actions items came out of the meeting and we will be hearing more about these and other ideas in the coming months. If you have some ideas for Base activities or other things the Base should be doing, be sure to talk with Dick or any of the Base officers. We are always on the lookout for good ideas.

Ralph Sterley, with a little help from Art Thompson, is taking over as the Base Storekeeper. We want to thank Bill Giese for all his hard work as Storekeeper. Bill will be staying on as the Base Secretary.

The Seattle VA hospital is going to be having some construction work done in and around their parking lot and will be looking for volunteers to help out with directing and transporting patients and their families around the construction and in the hospital. We will provide more information about these opportunities soon.

Base member Don Masoero let us know that the USS Perch (SS/APSS-313) will be September 4 – 6 in the Renton area. Don let us know that while the main focus of the reunion will be Perch’s WWII, Korean War, and Vietnam veterans, all submarine veterans are invited to join in the events. A full event schedule is not set yet and Don will let us know more as the reunion gets closer.

We discussed coordinating with the local VFW chapters for activities, promotional ideas, and membership ideas.

After the business we did normal introductions and a Binnacle List update.
Bob Haslan, who was in the hospital in January was at the meeting and looked well. Chris Opple has entered a hospice and our thoughts are with her and Bob during this difficult time.

February Program 

Our guest speaker for February program was Peter Metzelaar. Peter is an active member of the Museum of Flight, a nationally recognized speaker and a Holocaust historian. He spoke to us about his childhood in occupied Holland and his experiences hiding from the Nazis around his home country. He talked about the ‘Underground’ organization that helped out Jews with clothing, food, and shelter. He told us about immigrating with his mother to the United States after the war and shared some stories about his service in the U.S Army. He also told about his later return to Europe, where he visited Holland (and found out he could still speak and understand Dutch), returned to areas where he hid during the war, and how he was able to connect with the daughter of a family that helped he and his mother. Finally, Peter talked about his visit to the Auschwitz concentration camp. He talked about what happened to the people that were brought to the camp. It was a fascinating presentation and we want to thank Peter for speaking to us.

We will have more interesting speakers in the coming months and we hope to see you at the next meeting.

One last note, I've added a link to Bremerton Base's Gertrude Check web page in the Seattle Base Links section on the right of the page (it is just under the link to the Seattle Base Home page). It is a great page and will help you keep up on USSVI and submarine news for the region.