Joy Ride

BRITISH COLUMBIA Joy Ride Raising the dust in barracks and powder rooms last week was a whispered warning: U.S. Coast Guard SPARS are unsafe on Canadian Navy tugs. Behind the warning was a somewhat Rabelaisian, Sunday-afternoon rowdedow in Vancouver Harbor.

For a week a Coast Guard troupe of 67 enlisted men & women played a four-a-day musical show called Tars and Spars in Vancouver's Beacon Theater. On Sunday the cast, including its bright particular star, Chief Boatswain's Mate Victor Mature,* lunched at the swank Capitano Country Club. Later a new, 85-ft. Canadian Navy tug stood by to take everybody for a joy ride. Chief Mature and most of the troupe pleaded other engagements. Sixteen SPARS and five tars accepted.

The cruise, scheduled to last three hours, was over in 40 minutes. Last week the Americans gasped out the reason, in reports whose most sensational sins were those of omission. Impressed, apparently, by the fact that the SPARS were in show business, the Canadian crew had readied themselves for a mild saturnalia. When the SPARS and tars boarded the tug,_ a keg of rum was close at hand. The tug crew, said the witnesses, was already so far in its cups that only two were fit for duty. The others were good-natured but persistent. They began to "molest" the SPARS. What the U.S. sailors did about it was not reported. But a civilian forcibly restrained a Canadian sailor from "molesting" a SPAR. At last the tug's skipper turned around and raced for shore.

Promptly a Canadian Naval officer rushed to the U.S. commander to apologize. Furiously, the Navy Minister at Ottawa, Angus Macdonald, ordered his Pacific Command to get to the bottom of the trouble. A board of inquiry sailed into the case at top speed, pausing only long enough to mutter that the first reports were "greatly exaggerated."

Tut-tutted the Vancouver Sun: "If there is an explanation we can only hope that it will be announced quickly because the longer mud is allowed to stick, even on a uniform, the harder it is to remove. ..."

The only people who did not seem distressed were the SPARS (see cut).

-Better known as cinema's "beautiful hunk of man."

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