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80-year-old veteran gets honorary diploma
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BELATED HONOR: Robert Shuttleworth, 80, is a Navy veteran. he was recently awarded an honorary high school diploma by Weathersfield schools, where he attended until he joined the Navy at age 16.
Navy veteran Robert Shuttleworth said travel was a highlight of his tour of duty.
By Mary Smith
LORDSTOWN — “Join the Navy, See the World” is a Navy recruiting catch-phrase that veteran 80-year-old Robert Shuttleworth found to be true.
What was it like to leave school at 16 and join the Navy?
“I thought it was a lot of fun,” said Shuttleworth, who was a radarman second class and a petty officer second class.
The veteran was recently awarded an honorary high school diploma by Weathersfield schools.
His family lived in Mineral Ridge at the time, and he was in the ninth grade. He came home one day and told his parents he wasn’t going back to school. School was hard, he recalled, and they were mean — “not like today,” he said.
So his father, Bob Shuttleworth, told his oldest son, one of five children, he had to do something and suggested that he join the Army. Young Bob opted for the Navy. He said his mother, Elizabeth, never said a word, despite the fact the country was still in the midst of World War II.
“Where else can you go all over the world for nothing?” Shuttleworth said. “I had a lot of fun while I was in there.”
The war ended nine months after Shuttleworth enlisted.
His basic training was in Bainbridge, Md., which was closed after his group went through.
He advanced his rank by taking tests and became a radarman with on-the-job training. Basic training, he recalled, wasn’t hard: “When you were a kid, it was like playing around.”
He was assigned to the USS Johnson after basic training and traveled around the Mediterranean Sea and the North Atlantic.
The ships he served on included the Johnson, a destroyer; USS Spokane, a light anti- aircraft cruiser; and USS William D. Lawe, a destroyer. All were part of the Navy’s Sixth Fleet.
He joined in 1946 and was discharged in 1951.
The Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean is the major operational component of Naval Forces Europe. Shuttleworth recalls the fleet had 10 or 12 destroyers at the time.
Shuttleworth’s Navy memories are twisted around the map he drew himself of the voyages of his ships through the Mediterranean Sea and the numerous ports of call where they docked. If you were not on duty, you were allowed to go ashore, and that he did.
He was disappointed in Italy, for example, because he tried spaghetti at four dinner places, and none of them lived up to his expectations. French pastries, however, were very good.
He visited the Rock of Gibraltar and Monte Carlo; Nice, France; Venice and Rome in Italy; Athens, Greece; the IsIand of Crete; and Istanbul in Turkey.
He recalled that just outside France, the airplane bringing in cash payroll for the sailors crashed in the water, and the payroll was lost.
In 1945, while his ship was cruising the Mediterranean, Germany surrendered.
Although he expected his fleet would be shipped off to the Pacific, that didn’t happen. The assignment remained the same.
Shuttleworth was awarded the World War II Victory Ribbon and received a certificate to honor all of the branches of the service that were involved in the Amphibious Airborne Division Invasion of the small island of Vieques, located off the eastern shore of Puerto Rico, in a training exercise by the Army, Navy and Air Force on March 8, 1950.
Shuttleworth resides with his wife of 59 years, Ethel Alderman Shuttleworth, at 4320 Palmyra Road, Lordstown.
The couple married stateside when he expected to get discharged, but the Korean War broke out, and his tour was extended for another year.
They have two sons, seven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
He built his own home on Palmyra Road with the help of his brothers and is retired from Republic Steel (LTV) after working there from 1951 to 1985.
Mineral Ridge VFW Post 4192 sent representatives to the Weathersfield school board meeting to honor Shuttleworth, and his family also attended the meeting for the presentation of the diploma.
The Veterans Affairs office in Warren applied for the diploma for Shuttleworth. He found out through the VA he could get a diploma and signed up for it right away.
Schools Superintendent Damon Dohar said a veterans group applies for a diploma, and the school board confers it.