Navy Pomp Yields Hints Of Dad’s Life

On Lori Cullen’s third birthday, Sept. 30, 1943, U.S. Navy officials decided her father had gone down near the Philippines with the submarine he’d commanded.

Lori doesn’t remember the sadness at home or the handsome, dark-haired man who died a hero at age 32. She can’t recall his laugh or the comfort of his lap. Her earliest memory is of the day the bells rang to signify the war’s end in 1945.

“That’s when I asked my mother if that meant Daddy was coming home,” she says. Four years later, Lori’s mother died.

Lori could have slipped into obscurity, just another war orphan absorbed by relatives. But the Navy needed her. She symbolized the war’s silent victims and the great sacrifice men such as her father had paid for their country.

The Navy invitations began shortly after she reached adulthood. A memorial. A ship christening. A commissioning. Lori was awed by the Navy’s pomp and fanfare and her introduction to her father’s world. But she learned little at the ceremonies about the man himself.

The Navy’s most recent invitation came last week. Lori leaves her Hayden Lake home Monday to help retire a submarine in Groton, Conn. Two seamen who worked with her father are scheduled to be at the ceremony.

“I’m hoping to find out what my father was really like,” Lori says. “I want to know his personality traits. I was so young when my parents died that I’ve always thought they were saints.”

Lori’s father, Lt. Cmdr. Robert Brinker, graduated from the Naval Academy. He took command of the submarine, Grayling, shortly after he survived the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Under his command, the submarine sank four Japanese ships in 1942. It was delivering supplies to guerrilla forces in the Philippines when it disappeared in September 1943.

Lori stores in a worn cardboard box the condolence letters her father’s friends wrote to her family. They praised his bravery and wisdom. They wrote that he died the way he’d wanted to.

“I used to read them and just cry,” she says.

Her godfather, a career Navy man, arranged for her to place a wreath at a memorial ceremony in Chicago in 1963 for the submarines lost in World War II. She wasn’t prepared for the magnitude of grief that surrounded her.

“The audience was packed with these big men with pockmarked faces who were absolutely crying,” she says.

Four years later, the Navy invited her to crack a bottle of champagne on the newest Grayling, a nuclear submarine. She swung a silver bottle in which the champagne bottle was encased. The inscribed bottle with a dent near its base still sits on Lori’s mantle.

“It was just like getting married,” she says. “I don’t think I really understood the full significance.”

In 1969, Lori helped send the new Grayling into service. She rushed to Portsmouth, N.H., from her home in Chicago for the ceremony and returned without attending any of the accompanying social events. She’s regretted that hasty retreat ever since.

“It was so shortsighted. I should have stayed and honored the whole thing,” she says.

She won’t repeat that mistake. The Navy will retire this week the Grayling she christened 29 years ago and Lori will be there for everything.

She has combed through her father’s letters for meaningful words to put in her speech. It’s hard for her to speak about a man she never knew. But she can tell the Navy that she cherishes its traditions for bringing her close to something dear to her father.

And she can ask for its help.

“I always hope I’ll run into someone who knew dad and will talk about him,” she says. “He’s never been a real person to me, just a very romantic story.”

, DataTimes