Coast Guard vets on board for friendship
<p>Vernon Green, left, and Gene Ostlund look at photos of crew members Friday that served on coal burning Coast Guard ship in the early 1950's in the Pacific Northwest. Despite both men serving on the same four ships between the late '40s and early '50s, they never served on the same ship at the same time, and met for the first time Friday in Post Falls.</p>
<p>Gene Ostlund joined the Coast Guard at the age of 14 after securing a fake ID card. He retired in 1977 after serving 29 years.</p>
POST FALLS - In the U.S. Coast Guard, Vernon Green and Eugene Ostlund were like two ships in the night.
They served on four of the same ships stationed in Seattle, including the last coal-burning lightship on the West Coast, the 135-foot Lightship 92, which was built in 1908 and decommissioned in June 1951.
But they never crossed paths.
That changed Friday.
Before they met, all they knew about each other was they had both served aboard the Lightship 92. They didn't know they had both served on three other common ships.
Green, 81, a resident of Kootenai County, and Ostlund, 78, of Coeur d'Alene, met for the first time at GW Hunters Steakhouse in Post Falls.
They were glad to have found each other, spotting each other's names in a Lightship veteran newsletter. They wanted to meet because they are the last of the coal-burning Lightship seamen they could find. Lightships are used in waters where a lighthouse can't be built, acting as a lighthouse.
"There can't be a lot of real Lightship sailors still around," Ostlund said.
They planned to meet at the steakhouse at noon, but they almost missed each other again.
They had both been waiting in different parts of the restaurant for an hour before they finally found each other.
They laughed about old pals they both knew in the Coast Guard in the late 1940s early 1950s. They sipped coffee. They laughed some more.
They shared stories about lost teeth, running aground in the fog, and getting drunk on liberty.
It's remarkable they never ran into each other.
"You've got to remember, the Coast Guard was a small outfit" back then, Green said.
Their fondest memories were of Lightship 92, which operated during their service in and around the mouth of the Columbia River.
The ship had two large boilers for making steam, and 90 ton coal bunkers and coal ports on both sides.
"The stoking was done by hand," Ostlund said.
The washing machine was a 10-gallon milk can, with salt water, salt-water soap and a toilet plunger as the agitator.
Ostlund also said Lightship 92 had "a million cockroaches."
While on station, the ship burned one ton of coal a day. While moving at a rate of six to eight knots Lightship 92 burned a ton of the black fuel an hour. Many of the Lightships then were becoming diesel burners.
About a dozen men were assigned to Lightship 92 at a time, and usually had about eight men on board.
Green, originally from Sioux City, Iowa, said his best memory being in the Coast Guard was meeting his late wife in Seattle.
"Those were the fun days," Green said.
They were married for 53 years. Green served from 1949 to 1952.
Ostlund, originally from Noxon, Mont., joined the Coast Guard in 1948 at the tender age of 14, using a fake identification to convince Coast Guard officials he was 17.
Ostlund would stay in the Coast Guard until 1977.