WHERE I GOT MY PASSION FOR TRAVEL

Born December 8, 1918, in Bauxite, Arkansas, my father, Morgan Livemore Knight, has been the most decisive influence on my passion for travel.

When Morgan was sixteen, he convinced a Navy recruiter that he was eighteen and joined the Navy. After basic training, Morgan was selected for further training as a hard-hat diver. His first stationing was on a ship sent to the Philippines to clear Manila Bay of the ships sunk by the U.S. Navy during the Spanish-American war. The sunken vessels had silted over and began to impede traffic into the harbor. Since the U.S. Navy had created the problem in 1898, they assumed responsibility for solving it.

Morgan and other divers were sent down with air hoses to tunnel under the ships so slings could be placed to raise them and transport the vessels to deeper water. There they would sink them again. This work stirred the mud and silt from the bottom, making it nearly impossible for the divers to see. My father mentioned several incidents where he felt sharks brush his diving suit as they passed. The sharks were probably searching for the remains of dead Spanish sailors.

My sister tells a story he recounted about how he saved another diver's life. They always worked in pairs. Some debris severed the other diver's air hose. Because of the depth and length of time they had been underwater, he couldn’t surface immediately without suffering the bends. Morgan had him remove his helmet with an intact air hose and shared his air, passing the helmet back and forth until they could decompress and safely surface.

Imagine a 16- year-old from Arkansas transported, almost Wizard of Oz-like, to the orient. Like many young sailors’, his stories are peppered with tales of drunken nights and bar fights. He carried evidence of these all his life, in the form of a large scar on one calf from walking through a plate-glass window in a bar in Manila. He was also a Golden Gloves boxer, which meant he didn’t lose many fights. Another souvenir of this time was the required tattoo of a naked lady on his right forearm. I remember she would wiggle provocatively when he flexed his forearm.

After clearing Manila harbor of the wrecks from the Spanish-American war, Morgan was reassigned to a minesweeper vessel in Shanghai, China. This assignment was during an interlude in the Chinese civil war. The government of the Republic of China requested American help in clearing the important Yangtze River of mines planted by the communists during the first part of the civil war. My father was on the minesweeper that ran up and down the Yangtze clearing mines.

One of the stories he tells is of being able to ride a horse on the Great Wall of China. This would be unheard of today, but at that time was allowed. The young sailor trotted his horse for nearly half a day back and forth on the Great Wall.

The most dramatic and fantastic story he told of his time in China is an episode later written in a book and depicted in a movie entitled “the Sand Pebbles” starring Steve McQueen.

Once in 1936, in Shanghai, the ship’s crew was given leave to go ashore for some R&R. My father and some of his sailor friends found themselves in a bar/brothel having a great time. Morgan and one friend escorted two of the bar ladies to rooms upstairs, where they ended up falling asleep and spending the entire night. The next day as they stumbled downstairs, they found an angry mob waiting for them since they had broken some Chinese tradition of doing your business and leaving. The crowd of Chinese men hoisted them up on a table with their hands tied behind their backs. They tied nooses around their necks and threw the ropes over rafters in the bar. Screaming violently in Chinese, they were about to be hung when two shore patrol jeeps from the Navy screeched to a halt outside the bar. A group of armed US Navy shore patrolmen barged into the bar to rescue them.

I heard my father tell this story many times in the 1940s and after. The book "The Sand Pebbles" by John Hersey was written in 1956. The movie with Steve McQueen in my father's role was released in 1966. My father claims he never met John Hersey, but obviously, someone who knew this story told the author about it. Whatever the case, it’s a great story. When I saw the movie, I almost jumped out of my seat, screaming, “I know that story! That’s my father!!”

Morgan Knight spent the rest of his time in the Navy in and around the South China Sea.

Fast forward to 1947. I was four years old. We lived in St. Louis, Missouri. It was October and beginning to get cold. Morgan’s twin brother, Stormy Knight (not his given name, but that’s a whole other story), lived in Puerto Rico, only two blocks from the ocean. He kept tempting Dad with how warm it is in Puerto Rico and how the beach was practically his backyard. One day my parents quit their jobs, packed up everything, and moved to Puerto Rico. We arrived with no house, no job, nothing. For a while, we lived with Uncle Stormy and Aunt Wilda until my dad got a job and a place to live.

Within a little more than a year of settling in Puerto Rico, my father saw an ad saying that the government of Brazil was giving away large tracts of land in Rio Grande do Sur to anyone willing to come and develop the land for farming or ranching. Morgan’s wanderlust kicked in, and he was eager to go to Brazil and be a cattle rancher. My mother, on the other hand, had grown up on a farm in Arkansas and knew something about what was involved in that scheme. She put her foot down and said, “No way are we going to be ranchers in Brazil.” In a nutshell, that’s why I grew up in Puerto Rico instead of Brazil.

Growing up in Puerto Rico, I acquired a second language, a second culture, and more than a little of my father’s wanderlust. As this Father’s Day approaches, I reflect on how the stories of my father’s adventures and travels have influenced me and my passion for travel.

I have lived in six different countries for more than a year. I have traveled extensively in forty-six others. During all this, I have learned to speak three different languages. Thirty-six years ago, I worked as a freelance travel writer and photographer. Recently during the COVID lockdown, I returned to travel writing.

My father died in 2002 after eighty-four years on this earth. He was the last of his siblings to pass. He lived up to his middle name, "Livemore," in every way.

The spirit of Morgan Livemore Knight lives on in me.