PRIDE OF THE SEVENTH FLEET

Ar 6:30 o'clock one morning last week, Vice Admiral Alfred Melville Pride arose in his cabin aboard the cruiser Helena, had toast and coffee, and turned to the papers stacked on his ash-blond desk. He worked silently, sending out blue memo slips with terse messages, e.g., "O.K., I'll go along with this," or simply. "Let's talk." He finished his correspondence by 9 o'clock. Then, one by one through his brown Fiberglas door curtain came the top officers of Pride's Seventh Fleet for a conference. Pride greeted them quietly. These were men who measured up to his half-joking credo: "If you find the right man for the right job, you don't have to work nearly so hard yourself."After the conference, followed by a business lunch, Pride took a 30-minute nap, then returned to his work in the same calm, unhurried way. He ended the day at a ship's movie (Susan Slept Here).

Since arising, he had turned in a maximum amount of work with a minimum of fuss and bother. The U.S. Seventh Fleet reflected the relaxed efficiency of Mel Pride, who, despite a distinguished record, is a stranger to the public.

THE COD & POLLACK DAYS

Pride was born in Somerville, Mass., to a family that had numbered at least five ship captains. His father, after a try at the sea, turned to building houses. Mel had an early taste of salt water; he often went to Ipswich to fish from a dory for cod and pollack, and there were excursions in the family's home-built power launch, the Emmie Lou. Mel spent his 17th summer as a deckhand on a cousin's steamer, serving Bras d'Or Lake in Nova Scotia.

At Tufts College, in Medford, Mass., Pride was a B-plus engineering student when World War I came. There was no family discussion; Mel simply showed up at home one day in a sailor suit. He had enlisted in the Reserve as a machinist's mate second class, with the specific intention of becoming an aviator. After ground training at M.I.T. he went to Pensacola and learned to fly the Navy's N-9--an old Jenny dressed up with a pontoon and wing floats. Commissioned a Reserve ensign, Pride was designated Naval Aviator No. 1119. At the end of the war he was in Europe.

THE TIME OF THE CAMELS

Pride's early promise was such that he was among the handful of Reserve officers accepted in the postwar Navy. He was assigned to the battleship Arizona, in charge of a small air unit. His first planes were French Nieuports--war relics with the reliability of dime-store watches. They took off from a short runway built over the Arizona's forward gun turret; it was a good way to end up in the drink, and at least once, Pride did. There was little improvement when Pride's outfit got British Sopwith Camels. Recalls Pride: "When they landed, they humped." Of the rickety old planes, Pride now says: "Very simple. Not so many gauges to read."

In 1922 an old collier, the Jupiter, was renamed the Langley and refitted as the world's first aircraft carrier. Among the first three pilots to touch down on the Langley's flight deck was Mel Pride. Besides Pride, the young seagoing airmen of that time included Arthur Radford, Forrest Sherman, John Dale Price and "Jocko" Clark. They were to participate in the carrier revolution of the 1930s and become famed as the "flying admirals."

Mel Pride helped bring on that revolution. His Langley service, followed by tours aboard the Saratoga and the Lexington, established Pride as a top Navy flyer (he has logged some 5,000 air hours and today, at 57, is still flying, part of the time in jets). He also knew engineering. He was a natural choice to head the Navy's Norfolk test station in 1930. At Norfolk he developed the hydraulic arresting gear for carrier landings; he helped devise sturdier seaplane hulls, special tires to absorb landing impact, landing lights and releasing hooks.

At Anacostia in 1934, his career nearly came to a sudden end. He was testing a plane when the main fuel line broke, gasoline flooded the cockpit and caught fire. Pride held his breath, so as not to inhale flames, and crashed in the Potomac River. His jaw and left leg were broken. Doctors decided to amputate the leg, but by sheer chance, a new chief surgeon reported for duty and agreed to delay the operation. The leg was saved, but Pride still walks with a limp. Says he: "I have to carry a little left rudder all the time."

IN THERE FIGHTING

A year after Pearl Harbor Day, Pride got his first seagoing command: the carrier Belleau Wood, which joined with the Wasp, Enterprise, Saratoga and Essex as the first big carrier strike force. Some of the names entered on the Belleau Wood's log: Tarawa, Wake Island, Makin, Kwajalein, Truk, Saipan, Tinian.

Pride worked, as always, calmly. One day an overexcited deck officer gave a command: "Full speed ahead!"--instead of "All engines ahead full." Pride did not bawl out the officer for using unnautical, storybook language. The admiral made his point by adopting the same tone. "Yes, and damn the torpedoes!" he cried melodramatically.

By 1947 the Navy had found out enough about Pride to name him chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics--the first non-Annapolis man ever to head a bureau. He kept out of public participation in the unification and B-36 battles, but Admiral Robert Hickey, now chief of staff to the Navy's Far East commander, says: "He was in there fighting, you can bet on that, but nobody would even have known it."

PICCOLOS & NOSE FLUTES

Fourteen months ago Admiral Pride was given command of the Seventh Fleet. When he transferred his flag to the Helena, his cabin was one that had once been prepared for President Truman. The walls were painted robin's-egg blue, there was a television set and a spinet. Said Pride: "Goodness gracious, what's going on in this boudoir?" Actually, the spinet was not a bad idea: Pride likes to make music, plays the piccolo, flute, harmonica and ocarina.

During World War II he picked up a "nose flute," used by South Pacific islanders who like to make music and chew betel nut at the same time. He was recently heard to play Abdul, the Bulbul Ameer on this odd instrument. At nights aboard the Helena, Pride's staff gathers in the wardroom for informal musical sessions, with the ship's paymaster banging out tunes on the spinet in the key of C (which is the only one he knows) while other musical officers toot away on harmonicas.

In Hong Kong last week, while the Seventh Fleet patrolled the Formosa Strait, was Helen Burrell Pride, a comfortable, gracious woman who met Pride when they were youngsters in the same Sunday-school class, back in Somerville. They were married in 1921 and have two children--their daughter is the wife of a Navy flyer, Lieut. Andrew Lemeshewsky, their son is a Navy lieutenant and an Annapolis man. When Pride took over the Seventh Fleet, his wife followed him to the Far East and stayed in a Japanese ryokan at Yokohama, sleeping on floor mats (so did the admiral when ashore). On visits to Hong Kong, they like to shop along Cat Street, which swarms with peddlers selling everything under the Oriental sun. Looking out her window at Hong Kong's sunlit harbor last week, Helen Pride said: "If there is one word for him, it is 'kindly.' He is a kind man." He is more than that. If Pride's career bears true witness, the Seventh Fleet is in good hands on its delicate and dangerous mission.

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