Gold! Now that’s a word that gets attention, especially when you have tons of the stuff. It certainly got mine 60-plus years ago when I was a young sailor on the heavy cruiser USS Louisville .

Scuttlebutt had it that we were homeward bound when we weighed anchor at Bahia (now Salvador), Brazil, on the day after Christmas, 1939. The crew was more than ready to get back to the U.S.A., but we were in for a surprise.

“Now hear this, now hear this.” Capt. H. J. Nelson’s voice boomed over the ship’s loudspeakers after we were well under way. He told us that we were not headed home at all. We were on our way to Simonstown, South Africa, to pick up $148 million in gold for delivery to the United States. My astonishment at the captain’s bombshell still remains sharp in my mind.

I wasn’t exactly an old salt, having been in the Navy for only eight months. After boot camp in Norfolk, I reported to an old World War I destroyer, the USS Chew , at San Diego, where my main duty was scraping rust. Had I stayed on that ship, I’d have a different brush with history to relate; the Chew achieved fame by firing some of the first American shots in World War II during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. But in the late summer of 1939 I left her rusty hull without regrets.

A whaleboat delivered me to the Louisville at San Pedro, California, on the night of September 10, and the next day we weighed anchor. With war in Europe heating up, the Louisville ’s assignment was to show the flag in Central and South America and make goodwill calls in that part of the world. We visited Colon, Panama; Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande, and Santos, Brazil; Montevideo, Uruguay; Buenos Aires, Argentina; then back to Rio de Janeiro and thence to Bahia, Brazil.

The ship and crew looked their best for the crowds gathered on the docks to greet us in every port. Our Marines put on a good show during colors, and we held Open House for the citizens. Thousands toured the ship’s decks, passageways, and compartments. It was a fine time to be a young sailor, and the war in Europe seemed far away.

As the “Lady Lou” eased up to the dock in Simonstown, our eyes bugged at a stack of gold bars ricked up like cordwood. I don’t recall any special security measures around the gold when we arrived, but our ship’s Marines quickly took up guard duty. Before starting to load, we rigged a net under the gangway in case of a slip.

All hands started work at 10:30 A.M. on Sunday, January 7, 1940. A man could carry only one of the heavy bars at a time.