YORK COUNTY, S.C. (CN2 NEWS) – One York County man made a post on social media asking the community if anyone would be interested in spending some time with his dad. His father is an 87 y/o Navy veteran and his son wanted him to have a friend to pass his stories on to. Well so many people in the community responded.
71 years ago at the age of 17, Charles Parshall joined the U.S. Navy right out of high school.
Charles Parshall says, “I went in in 1950 and I ended up serving on five diesel powered submarines.
Now, at the age of 87, Charles share his memories of how he made history as one of the first Americans to voyage on the USS Nautilus — the first American Nuclear submarine.
“Just before we went on a mission, the Captain one day got on the internet and he called everyone into the mess hall and he says that we have been assigned a Secret Service mission, it could be dangerous and we’ll transfer anyone who wants to be transferred off the boat. And to my knowledge I don’t think anybody transferred,” says Charles.
Charles says the vessel traveled from the Pacific to the Atlantic and up under the North pole. Charles’s son Bruce recently moved his father to the Carolinas from out west. He wanted to find his father a companion in the area — so he turned to social media.
Charles’s son Bruce Parshall, says, “I was sitting about 8 o’clock one night and put a Facebook Nextdoor.com, Nextdoor app out and just said ‘hey, if there’s any submariner navy vets, if you’ll come sit with my dad for an hour I’ll by you lunch.”
Taken back by the number of responses he got from people wanting to spend time with his father, he says, showed him just how much people care.
“And, I didn’t think anything of it and went to bed that night, because it was like a Thursday night, I woke up that morning on Friday morning and I had over 100 emails. Then I still had to go to work, so I went to work. I worked all day and my phone is beeping all day long and my boss is sort of like what’s going on. I came home that evening and I had over 300 emails — and it just blew up,” says Bruce.
A fellow Navy veteran, Brendan Caputo, is the first to meet up with Charles. He says in his retirement he’s spent his time connecting vets in the community. He and a few other veterans even gift vets they meet with walking sticks. Brendan says getting together means everything.
Brendan says, “I enjoy what I’m doing, I enjoy meeting the other vets. And I always say that you can walk into a room of vets and you don’t have to know any of them at all as a stranger, and within a short period of time you’re friends with everybody. You’re all friends because you have something in common. You’re all vets and that’s what it’s all about I think.”
Now, a new friendship is born.
In the video above, CN2’s Rachel Richardson is sitting in on one meeting and learning more about this amazing piece of history.
