When Jim Bartley grew up in the Alaculsy Valley of northeast Murray County, his family made their living picking cotton. When he was 5 they moved into town — Eton — and began “sharecropping” on another farm.
“I left home at 17 and went to live with my first cousin and her family in Dalton,” Bartley recalled recently at the Oaks of Dalton Senior Living facility. “Right before I turned 18, I joined the Navy.”
Even the trip to boot camp was an adventure for a boy raised in the shadow of the Cohutta Mountains.
“We took a train from Chattanooga to San Diego, California, and rode in Pullman cars,” he said. “We had a comfortable place to sleep and a car where we could go to get meals; it took us five days to get there.”
After basic training, Bartley was transferred north to Bremerton, Washington, on the Puget Sound, where ships were coming in to be taken out of service — but also kept ready in case another war or conflict broke out. It was, after all, the time of the post-World War II Cold War between East and West. The vessels were so “ship shape” the Navy only had to “get a crew and get ‘em going” back out to sea if they were activated.
The headquarters and barracks for his company were aboard the USS Missouri, a battleship with distinctive World War II history. It was on board the Missouri where Gen. Douglas MacArthur met Japanese military and civilian officers to accept their surrender on Aug. 14, 1945. Therefore, one of Bartley’s duties on weekends was to guide visitors around the historic ship.
“I was just 9 years old back in Eton then when the war ended,” he pointed out.
Some of the other ships that were put in mothballs — the battleships USS Wisconsin, USS Indiana and USS New Jersey — President Ronald Reagan put back into service after his inauguration in 1981 as part of a military buildup, Bartley said.
“One of the things we did was keep silica in all these compartments so it would keep the guns dry and be ready to fire,” Bartley said of their efforts to resist corrosion.
Bartley also noted the USS Missouri “fired its guns for the last time in Desert Storm,” the 1990 operation in Iraq by U.S. forces and a coalition that included dozens of other nations. The Missouri, or “Big Mo,” now resides at Pearl Harbor and can again be visited by tourists.
In post-war Japan
Bartley’s next deployment was to Japan aboard the USS Grainger, a supply ship.
“It was 10 years after World War II and the Japanese had still not built back, and they were living hand to mouth,” he said of the devastation. “I remember thinking ‘If we’d lost the war, that would be us.’ We helped both Japan and Germany rebuild.”
Bartley worked in the engine room while the ship was out on patrol in the waters around Japan.
“We would transfer supplies from one ship to another,” he said of the precise maneuvering while underway at sea. “We called it ‘high-lining’ stuff from one ship to another. One time when we were docked, a couple of Japanese men were allowed on board ship; they could do laundry, shine shoes and do other jobs for us for a price. When we let them eat on the mess deck, they were a sight. They ate as if they were starving, as fast as they could eat.”
Bartley also served aboard the USS Salisbury Sound, a submarine tender. It had two propeller-driven aircraft with four engines, two on each wing, that were kept in a hangar until lifted by a crane to the flight deck for launch and recovery. The Salisbury Sound spent its last active days before retirement during the Vietnam War, he said.
Bartley spent his 20th birthday “somewhere in the Pacific Ocean between Japan and Hawaii,” he said. “We had orders to bring the Grainger back to the states to take it out of commission.”
Eventually the ship was taken back to San Diego, where he received orders to the Philippines to re-deploy on the Salisbury Sound. He also saw the World War II devastation of Okinawa on his tour of the West Pacific before going back to Alameda Air Station in California, his last stop before exiting the Navy.
“Before I got out, we went up the West Coast and into the Olympic River in Oregon to the Portland Rose Festival,” said Bartley. “It was quite different seeing mountains and trees rather than just sea and sky. I joined the Navy after the Korean War, and what we did was pretty much Cold War duty.”
Back in Georgia
On the last leave before his four-year hitch was up, Bartley married his sweetheart, Jennie, from Polk County, Tennessee. Her brother got him a job at the stove foundry in nearby Cleveland. From there he worked at Choate’s Truck Stop on Highway 411 around a mile north of downtown Chatsworth.
“After they got I-75 finished, all the big trucks started taking it instead of (Highway) 411,” he said. “No more trucks, no more truck stop.”
Bartley’s next career move was with Art Rich Bedspreads in Dalton, then it was on to Katherine Rug Mill. His last stop was Star Finishing, which then became part of Shaw Industries where he worked 37 years before retirement.
One of Jim and Jennie’s sons, Lawrence, became paralyzed after a diving accident at Holly Creek. The couple decided to keep him at home instead of sending him to a facility.
“Despite all of our trials, we’re still here,” Bartley said, explaining that Lawrence has passed and Jennie is now on hospice care. “I didn’t think my wife would make it this long, but she’s strong. One of the reasons I retired early was to help her out more; she just couldn’t do much more of the physical work needed for our son.”
Recently, Bartley, 88, was invited to a cookout at Eton City Hall, where he had served as a councilman from 2008-23. His daughter, Janice, and her husband, Anthony Ridley, picked him up and took him to the grilling affair. After going inside and enjoying hot dogs and hamburgers, some of the council members and city workers surprised Bartley and presented him with a plaque denoting his 15 years of service.
The plaque states, “Congratulations on your retirement … in sincere appreciation for your dedicated years of service with (the) city of Eton. We hope that you enjoy your well-deserved retirement.”
“I had no idea they were going to do that,” Bartley said with a smile. “It was quite touching. Like I said, we’ve had our trials but we’ve been blessed with a good life.”
Jean Manning, a friend and former co-worker, called Bartley “such a gentleman.”
“He was my supervisor at Shaw for 13 years,” she said. “We worked hard, but just had a ball. He is very committed and dedicated, a good Christian man who loves the Lord dearly. He’s always the same, upbeat and working on his health. He’s superb to me, a man of integrity and discipline; he has friends by the thousands, and has never met a stranger.”
The Bartleys have another son, Craig, and a granddaughter, Amanda, who is a registered nurse.