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TROY TODAY
P E R S PE CT I V E S
‘IT CAME FROM THE ARCHIVES’ — DOTHAN MAN AMONG FASTEST ON OPEN SEA WRITTEN BY: DR. MARTY OLLIFF
People in the Wiregrass have known about Bishop Cleaners since it opened in Dothan, Alabama, in 1947. But few know that in November 1945, its founder, Eustace E. Bishop, was one of the fastest men on the open sea. A lieutenant in the U.S. Naval Reserve, Bishop served on the aircraft carrier/troopship USS Lake Champlain (CV 39) when it made the fastest run to date across the Atlantic Ocean — a record it held until 1952. Born in 1912 in Ashburn, Georgia, Bishop attended the University of Georgia for a year, then graduated from Georgia Tech in 1933, where he had been president of the student body. His family moved to Decatur, Georgia, in the 1930s, where he met and, in 1937, married Agnes Scott College student and Dothan resident Mary Alice Newton. Bishop worked as an insurance agent in Decatur until he entered the U.S. Naval Reserve during World War II. Bishop served as a lieutenant during Operation Magic Carpet to bring 3 million servicemen and women home from Europe. The Army and Merchant Marine led the operation but soon realized they needed resources from the Navy to avoid the problem of slow removal that troops had faced in World War I. The first ship the Navy dedicated to Operation Magic Carpet was the USS Lake Champlain, a Ticonderoga class aircraft carrier commissioned at Norfolk in June 1945, then refitted to
carry 3,300 troops in place of its usual complement of 90-100 aircraft. The Champlain entered service in October 1945. It was 888 feet long; its beam measured 93 feet; it weighed 27,100 tons; and it carried a combat crew of 3,448. Having set a west-to-east speed record from Norfolk to Bishop Rock off the coast of England on an earlier voyage, The Champlain broke the Queen Mary’s east-to-west record on its third voyage in November 1945. It took 4 days, 8 hours, 15 minutes to ply the Atlantic Ocean’s 3360.3 nautical miles from Gibraltar to Norfolk, an average of 32.048 knots (almost 37 miles per hour). Bishop wrote a long letter home during the voyage that explained the captain’s motivation “to bring the boys into the states in a hurry.” Provisioning 5,000 hungry passengers was, as Bishop wrote, “quite a problem.” He gave an example — the officers’ mess he ran usually fed 350 men per day, but he had to feed 550 ravenous soldiers. Even the 505 pounds of turkey he prepared for Thanksgiving dinner didn’t suffice. It was gone so quickly that his 96 stewards had to eat something else. He warned, “You civilians had better be prepared for these people … get plenty of food ready.” The Navy mothballed the Champlain in 1947, but it returned to action in the Korean War and was part of the Cuban Missile
