Tales of Trade Winds, Beaches, and Blue Waters (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781662430589)

In this semi-biographical work, R. D. McCord uses fifty-two loosely connected stories that document leaving a 1957 Northeast Alabama sharecropper farm for duty with the US Naval Security Group on the island of Oahu. The coming-of-age vignettes center on Hawaii's last year as a territory and first as a state. Passing through the pages is a hodgepodge of twenty-odd characters that manned Bravo watch at radio station Wahiawa. For the better part of four years, the young sailors brought humor, camaraderie, romance, and adventure to the island, making the Navy and Hawaii a better place. The publication coincides closely with the sixty-second statehood anniversary of the paradisiacal islands.