Shipyard Legacies: The Divers family

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SHIPYARDlegacies: Story and photos by Anna Taylor • Public Affairs Specialist

the Divers family They say you can’t outrun your past, but in the case of Claud R. Divers III and his son, Will, apparently you can’t outrun your family traditions, either. The two Divers men ended up at Norfolk Naval Shipyard (NNSY), even though they say they never planned to make their careers here. It all started in the early 1920s when Ross “Bobby” Askins, the elder Divers’ great uncle, worked as a welder on the USS Langley (CV 1) conversion. The family still has a piece of welding slag and the hand-written note Bobby brought home to commemorate his work on the project. “I don’t know how long he stayed at the yard, but I suspect he stayed until the late 1940s when he retired,” said Divers. “His sister was my grandmother, so he wasn’t technically a Divers.” Another great uncle, Henry Divers, completed his apprenticeship at Southern Railroad and then served in the Navy as an aviation machinist mate during World War I. When the war was over, he bought some instruments, including a marimba and drum set the family still has to this day, and performed in New York City’s vaudeville circuit for several years. As the popularity of vaudeville waned, he 20 • SERVICE TO THE FLEET • APRIL 2017

began producing sound effects for silent films in Norfolk. When “talkies” gained popularity in the late 1920s and forced Henry out of the silent film industry, he took a job at the shipyard, where he worked as an inside machinist for the Mechanical Group (Code 930) Machine Shop (Shop 31). Before retiring as a shop planner in the 1960s, Henry was the director of the Shop 31 orchestra and vaudeville troop that performed in the shipyard and across Hampton Roads during World War II. “All these machinists happened to have a lot of entertainment experience, so they put together the orchestra and did a lot of bond rallies and things like that,” said Divers. Claud R. Divers Jr., the elder Divers’ father, was also a Shop 31 inside machinist. He came onboard in 1940 as a class of 1944 apprentice and graduated a year early in 1943 thanks to the extra hours he worked during the war effort. He served with the Merchant Marines for three years during World War II before returning to NNSY in 1946. Divers Jr. retired in 1971 as a lead engineering technician in the Engineering and Planning Department. Nearly catching us up to present day, Claud Divers III began


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