POWERGRAMS

16-inch shells fired from American battleships up to 20 miles offshore zinging over his head on the beach. "They sounded like a baby crying when they go over you. But it didn't bother me. I knew they were doing some good." The remainder of the war for Olsen was anticlimactic. He was sent to Honolulu, then Manila in the Philippines, where he manned a 20 mm gun on a destroyer. "I never did have to fire it, thank goodness," he said. After the war, Olsen joined Alabama Power working in a substation, but soon transferred to maintenance and repair of electric cable beneath the streets of downtown Mobile. "I loved my job, although it wasn't exactly a clean job as far as the manholes go," Olsen said. "It was better than being on a line crew. My feet didn't fit those poles." He met his wife, Ann, who worked in commercial sales with Alabama Power from 1953 to 1962, they married in 1960, and are still together. By Gilbert Nicholson 4 Olsen with wife, Ann. 'The Forgotten War' GLOVER SERVED IN KOREAN WAR ONBOARD DESTROYER PATROLLING OFF THE COASTS OF CHINA, TAIWAN, KOREA He was born on the Fourth of July, the grandson of a Civil War veteran and younger brother of three World War II soldiers. Yet, it wasn't pure patriotism that led 16-year-old Billy Glover to forge his birth certificate so he could join the Navy in 1947. The youngest of 11 children left behind when their father was killed in the early 1930s, Glover was just looking for a way to survive. "If I wanted to eat, I needed to do something," said the 85-year-old retiree. "My mother was raising us on the farm and her only income was from the cotton we grew." Glover signed up for four years. His home away from home was the USS Richard B. Anderson, a 390-foot-long, 40-foot-wide destroyer that guarded bigger ships as it traveled around the world at speeds up to 40 mph. He rose to the rank of gunners mate 3rd class, in charge of a quad of 40-millimeter antiaircraft guns. Glover was among the first sailors to board the Anderson as it left San Diego for fleet exercises off Hawaii, then was transitioned to search and rescue and coast guard duties off California. By 1948, they had sailed to Tsingtao (now Quingdao) and Shanghai, China, Japan, Okinawa, Hong Kong and Manila. "We were in China before the communists took over," Glover said. "Talking about poor, people really having it bad, there were people sleeping on the streets as far as you could see. Some had straw mats, some had nothing." They went back to California in 1949 and returned to the Philippines later that year. The USS Anderson patrolled the straits between Formosa (now Taiwan) and China as the first line of defense for the 2 million soldiers and other Chinese who fled the mainland during the Chinese Civil War. During this time, Glover saw a top- secret test at sea of the long-range guided missiles the U.S. seized from Germany at the end of World War II. "I think I witnessed the first two V-2 rockets launched from a U.S. ship," he said. "They had built a launch rack on a seaplane tender. The rockets weren't fired at anything, they were just shot into the air." In 1950, Glover and the Anderson crew visited Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). "We went there to show force when the French were still there," he said. "One night someone lobbed a mortar next to us and we decided to leave. That was a long time before we got involved in Vietnam (when the U.S. began USS Richard B. Anderson on patrol in 1949. continued on 5 Photo by Dan Anderson

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