Taking a walk down memory lane, a former sailor retraces his steps after 60 years

The sailors have been replaced by tourists, the bomb elevator replaced by one that now carries only families, but for Allan Eisenecker much of the USS YORKTOWN remains as it was more than 62 years ago, when he walked aboard the ship while serving in the U.S. Navy in the 1950’s.

“I was a Machinist’s Mate, responsible for the throttle and feed pumps,” Eisenecker said while waiting to retrace his steps.

As he carefully navigated the many ladders on the way down to the USS YORKTOWN’s engine room four, the memories instantly began flooding back.

“Yea I got it,” he said. “Not as hot now as it was when the steam was going.”

Eisenecker has been trying to visit his former ship for years, but until this week hasn’t been able to make the trip down from New Jersey.

“Tremendous feeling, this is the first time we’ve been back,” Eisenecker said as he stood in the ship’s engine room. “This is really something to see what it was then, and what it is now.”

More than six decades after he served on the USS YORKTOWN, the machinist’s mate made sure to bring his son, so that the younger man could finally put images to the stories he had been hearing from his father for years.

When asked how hard it was to climb down the many ladders to the engine room, Eisenecker shrugged and said, “It’s still the same. The only difference is I’m not as spry as I was then.”

In the 50s, the normal shift for an engine room operator on board the USS YORKTOWN was four hours. At the end of each shift, the men would normally leave, looking forward to a meal in the crew’s galley.

“The food was desirable; you never knew what you would get,” he said. “You took the good with the bad.”

With a smile, and a memory, Eisnecker looked around the room and said, “You can’t complain.”