Family returns instrument to USS New York | By KAREN NELSON
A Coast family made sure a bugle was placed aboard the soon-to-be USS New York before she sailed from a shipyard in Louisiana this week.
Even though Navy ships don’t use buglers anymore, this one was a piece of history. It had been blown to rally crews aboard the battleship USS New York during World Wars I and II and wound up in the care of a mariner from Mississippi, H.R. “Shorty” Reynolds, who died in 2003.
His children — Raymond Jr., Carol and Mickey Reynolds — took the bugle that had hung in their father’s office for more than a decade and delivered it to the captain of the Navy’s newest amphibious assault ship in a ceremony aboard the ship at Northrop Grumman’s Avondale shipyard near New Orleans last week.
The transfer happened in the nick of time, because the ship set sail Tuesday for Virginia and then New York, where it will be commissioned the USS New York on Nov. 7.
The bugle had been removed in 1945 from the old dreadnought before it was sent on its final mission, to be used for atomic bomb testing and then target practice.
The bugle wound up in H.R. Reynolds’ care because he had become the ship’s historian. He had served on the battleship and had come to love the USS New York and his short years of service in the Navy.
When the battleship’s former crew members held their annual reunions, the bugle was there. On its plaque is the story of how a marine “rescued” it from the battleship and passed it on to a man who had been the ship’s bugler, then how that man had passed it in later years to H.R. Reynolds as the ship’s historian.
When Reynolds died in North Mississippi, the bugle went to his son who lives on the Coast, Raymond Reynolds Jr. of Latimer. Raymond began the process of delivering it to a new home. He said his father’s shipmates supported the move.
“Those guys are all in their 80s now and every year there are fewer of them, and they agreed it should go to the newer ship,” Raymond Reynolds said. “It would be displayed on the ship and probably more people would see it there than in a museum.”
Getting it there wasn’t as easy as it might have seemed. It took two years of making phone calls and contacts, even after the Navy had expressed a clear interest in the artifact, Raymond Reynolds’ wife, Joyce, explained. Finally, weeks before the new battle cruiser left the shipyard, the Reynolds family got word that the captain would accept the bugle in a ceremony on Oct. 7.
“Dad let everyone know where the bugle was supposed to go,” said Carol Reynolds of Gulfport.
H.R. Reynolds had lived long enough to see the bombing of the World Trade Center.
“He knew they were building a new ship and wanted to make sure the bugle got to its rightful owner, the new New York,” she said.
The ship also received a plaque made of wood from a shrimp boat destroyed by Katrina and a piece of steel from the World Trade Center.
The gifts represented the hard work and resilience of the people of two terrible disasters, Navy officials said. She also has 7.5 tons of World Trade Center steel built into her bow.
Construction of the battleship USS New York began with a keel laying on Sept. 11, 1911, exactly 90 years before the World Trade Center attack, which gave birth to the new ship.
Men who served on the old battleship with H.R. Reynolds are expected to be at the commissioning of the new ship.
But for the Reynolds family, the big ceremony was last week when Commander Curt Jones and his crew accepted their father’s gift.
“The commander seemed to be really excited to get it, the bugle,” said Raymond Reynolds. “He said it’s almost like having a living piece of history, because we know it was part of that crew and ship, and to bring it on board was an honor.”
