A month later Ensign Middlebrook launched the Veteran Association down well-greased ways, and on May 23 the battalion had its first field day, assembling at Savin Rock. It was reserved for Gunner’s Mate Chapin to make known to Hartford a new method of celebrating the Fourth of July. He navigated a picked gun crew at the close of the midwatch from the armory to the City Hall and at sunrise pumped out a salute of twenty-one shots from the lean throat of a Hotchkiss one-pounder. Irate sleepers admitted that Chapin’s method was convincing. They were justly incensed when he marched the crew under the Asylum Street bridge and fired a like salute, and still more so when he took it to the Park Terrace and discharged a fourteen-shot salute. Chapin proposed to fire a salute in Wethersfield, but ammunition ran low.
COURSE FIVE
THE PRAIRIE AGAIN
That summer’s cruise was on the Prairie and led to Penobscot Bay. The division sent in a whaleboat crew to race against one from the First Division on that water, and its crew defeated that from the Elm City by a quarter of a length, one of the New Haven officers marveling at this result and asserting that it was a mystery of the deep. It also captured two other boat races.
Later in the summer camping parties spent week-ends in Paradise, the narrow strip between Bodkin Rock and the river a short distance below Middletown. The division’s steamboat and the pulling boats which had come a season or two before were in popular favor. They gave silent lessons to the boys in boat engine work and in the stowing of dunnage, thereby adding variety to the oarsmen’s drill of the early spring.
December 22, Lieutenant Parker died at his home in South Lancaster, Mass. mourned by all who knew him. A patriotic officer, a loyal friend, he had won the affection of the command.
One minute prior to midnight December 31, two gun crews unlimbered in the rear of the City Hall and on the dot of midnight, the opening of the new century, Gunner’s Mate Chapin fired the first shot in a salute of twenty-one guns, a welcome to the newborn heir of time.
Century No. Twenty’s first gift to the division was an indoor baseball team. The sport was new to the armory and it jumped (or slid) into instant favor. The first game was with a team from Company A and to the astonishment of everybody and most of all themselves the sailors won, by a score of 17 to 12. They contended with a hurricane of batting in the second inning and dragged anchor, but they weathered the storm and won with an inning to spare. One of the division advocated a diamond of this kind: