Regarding last week’s story on the USS Thresher disaster, there was another local family impacted by the USS Thresher being lost at sea.  My father, James G. Rooney, worked his entire civilian career of over 30 years working on torpedoes, starting in the 1930s at the Torpedo Station on Goat Island in Newport and retiring from what is now named the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Middletown.

After starting as a machinist making torpedoes, including during WWII, he became expert in torpedo development. He could not talk about the specifics of what he did at work because it was secret. But the whole family knew he had been on every nuclear submarine built, beginning with the Nautilus and including the Thresher.

I was approaching high school graduation on the day he learned the Thresher was lost. I could see he was visibly shaken, so I asked him what was bothering him. He had been down on the Thresher the trip before the one from which it did not return.

"What were you doing? I asked.

"Deep water torpedo testing," he answered.

Then I asked, "How deep were you?"

He reacted physically to the question, sort of stiffing-up, and said, "I can't tell you that." 

He never went down on a submarine again. If his presence was necessary for a submarine firing, my dad stayed on one of the surface vessels also on the torpedo testing trip. I will never forget the conversation I had with my father on the day he learned the Thresher was lost.

David A Rooney

Portsmouth