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Memories of Jack Bowman Gibb (Sailor, rest your oars!)

Jack was an MoMM3 and a plank owner on the USS Bergall and headed to the Panama Canal on it's way to war.   He was transferred off her, because of stomach problems, on July 27, 1944 just as the Bergall left Balboa, in the Canal Zone, on her way to Pearl Harbor.  He had stomach problem for the rest of his life.  Here's Jack from the Commissioning party in 1944. 
  

Having joined the service one year earlier from Kansas City, Kansas, Jack was to receive duty on the Galapagos Islands.   Here are two pictures from those islands in the '44-'45 era with Jack and a couple of the "natives".

After getting out of the service, Jack returned to Miami, Ok. where his dad lived.   His mother had died while Jack was still in the service.   Shortly thereafter Jack married and fathered three girls and a boy.   He divorced his first wife after 28 years.  

In 1974 he met me, a widow (Etta Bell) at a ballroom in Wichita.   I was a retired school teacher with three sons and we were soon married.   The oldest boy went on to join the Navy and served on the submarine USS John Adams.  Here's Jack in '74.

Jack had worked at as a sales engineer for Bendix and retired after 32 years with them in 1984 when I also retired.   We had 12 years of retirement together spending the winter months in southern Texas and the summer at our home in Derby, Ks.

Jack died on October 17, 1996 of food poisoning.   He would have been 73 in another month, we had been married 22 1/2 years.  

Jack was a wonderful husband and father to my three boys, who called him "pop".

Etta Bell Gibbs
210 Williams St.
Derby, Ks. 67037

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