When the Navy goes, so will he

BRUNSWICK — Brunswick Naval Air Station reopened after a five-year hiatus in 1951 as relations between the United States and the Soviet Union chilled into decades of Cold War. Just more than a decade later, in 1962, Denny Barrett arrived for duty with Patrol Squadron 26. 

Both will head into retirement together. When the base is decommissioned as a military installation a week from today, Barrett will work his last day there.

The Springfield, Ill.-born Barrett spent 20 years as a Navy sailor stationed in Brunswick. Since retiring from the Navy, he stayed at the air station in civilian jobs, with the exception of a brief stint working for a driving school during the early 1980s.

Barrett has been working in one capacity or another at Brunswick Naval Air Station for nearly 50 years of the base’s 60-year Cold War life.

 

“There was no question I was going to stay here,” Barrett, now 68, recalled of his first impression of the Brunswick base. “It was small. There weren’t a whole lot of people around, and I just felt very, very comfortable.

“Everybody seemed to know what everybody else in the community was doing,” he continued with a laugh. “They only read the papers to see who got caught.”

When the time would come, every three years or so, for Barrett to get new orders and potentially be relocated somewhere new, he would finagle ways to stay at Brunswick Naval Air Station. He went from shore duties assigned to the base to sea duties assigned to squadrons located at the base, trading billets as necessary to remain at his beloved Brunswick site.

Once, when his squadron prepared for deployment, he broke his leg skiing and was grounded back at the base while the surveillance planes took off without him.

Though he did log thousands of flight hours in the old P-2 Neptune reconnaissance planes and then the base’s signature P-3 Orions, Barrett’s wife, Mary Jo, said fellow sailors joked that her husband had “never set his big toe in the water” in all of his years in the Navy.

“They’d say, ‘With Denny, the only time he got sea duty was when he crossed the bridge over to Topsham,’” Barrett acknowledged with a laugh.

 

During his almost half-century associated with the base, he said he’s seen a lot change.

“The barracks that I lived in are gone,” he said. “Three hangars are gone. A new fuel farm was built to replace one that had been there for more than 40 years.”

The base’s fuel farm, which supplied fuel for planes using the airfield, is where Barrett spent most of his civilian work life. From 1989 until last year, he worked at the site, most recently overseeing the subcontractors who managed the operation.

In that capacity, he had a unique view of regular air shows, as well as the government VIPs who would use the Navy landing strips in Brunswick, including three former U.S. presidents during the past two decades: George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

The elder Bush, he recalled, was particularly low-key. The Bush family keeps a vacation home in Kennebunkport.

“He wasn’t pushy,” Barrett said. “He didn’t say, ‘I want this’ or ‘I want that.’ He just liked coming in, going on his fishing trips and leaving.”

Barrett said he never met one of the visiting presidents in person, but oversaw their refueling needs, and said their Secret Service details were professional and courteous.

Looking back on his days as an active-duty sailor, Barrett said the tragedies have stuck with him all these years. During the war in Vietnam, in separate incidents over the Gulf of Thailand in February and in April of 1968, two Patrol Squadron 26 aircraft were shot down. The entire crew of each plane perished.

Barrett said he was picked to lead the prayers during the memorial services held for his lost squadron mates.

“That was an emotional moment for me,” he said. “It was a privilege to be able to stand up there in front of the squadron and do that.”

Like many sailors and Navy retirees living in the Mid-coast, Barrett has become a fixture in the community — in his case, through decades of officiating high school sporting events, and memberships with American Legion Post 202 and the Knights of Columbus. Barrett said the closure of the base saddens him, in part, because that pipeline to diverse and volunteer-oriented Navy personnel will close as well.

Barrett has two sons and a daughter living in the Mid-coast region — Denny Jr., Jonathan and Kelly — and another son, Michael, living in Virginia.

“I’ve been very happy here, and I’m sad to see the base go,” he said. “I’m sad about it because it’s been my home away from home. I’m sad for the people in town, who will lose that relationship between the Navy and the community. There were a lot of Navy people who did a lot for the community, and there were a lot of people from the community who did a lot for the Navy.”

He said he enjoyed his job at the fuel farm and would have been happy to continue working there if the federal Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) commission didn’t choose in 2005 to close the Brunswick base.

“What am I going to do in retirement? I’m just going to say, ‘I don’t have to get up in the morning,’” Barrett said. “I may do that for a month, or I may do that for a week. I’m kind of looking forward to it.

“But I really don’t think I worked with a bad person at the base,” he continued. “I got along with all of them. If it hadn’t been picked to close, I could’ve gone forever.”

skoenig@timesrecord.com