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Strattons of Massachusetts Bay
Running Through the Sands of Time
William Eugene Rhinehart — Gunner's Mate Third Class, United States Navy
Service Number 291 83 26 — USS Cleveland (CL-55) · USS Conner (DD-582)
23 December 1941 – 13 December 1945
by Wm F. Stratton, May 2026
"The sea never changes and its works, for all the talk of men, are wrapped in mystery." —Joseph Conrad
I did not meet Bill Rhinehart until 1969, when my mother Lucille married him. By then I was thirty-two years old, a career Navy man myself, and Bill was forty-four—a slight, quiet Hoosier with good manners, a Navy past he didn't talk about much, and an Irish tenor voice that could stop a room. He was her fourth husband and her last, and in seven years he gave her something she had rarely had in all the marriages before: a home that felt safe.
I've pieced together what I know of Bill's Navy service from the muster rolls, from what little he let slip when we talked, and from the kind of comfortable silence that passes between two men who have both spent years at sea. He wasn't a man who needed credit for what he'd done. But the record is there, and it's worth reading.
"In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot." —Mark Twain
Bill Rhinehart was born September 22, 1924, in Whitley County, Indiana—the same county that gave my grandmother Bertha her birth certificate, which is one of the small threads connecting him to our family before he ever knew us.
He was seventeen years old on December 7th when the radio brought the news about Pearl Harbor. It took him sixteen days to make up his mind, or perhaps he didn't need sixteen days at all and just waited for the right moment. On December 23rd, 1941—two days before Christmas—he walked into the Navy recruiting office and put his name on the line.
"Son, do your folks know you're here?"
"Yes sir," Bill said. Whether that was entirely true was between him and his mother.
Service number 291 83 26. He was slight—a hundred and fifty pounds soaking wet, the kind of young man the wind off Lake Michigan might push sideways—but the Navy was not in the business of turning away boys who showed up two days before Christmas ready to fight.
His father, William Lewis Rhinehart, was not far behind him. The elder Rhinehart volunteered and spent the war years stateside at Fort Lewis in Tacoma, Washington, with the 1907th Service Command Unit—not the Pacific, not the shooting war, but in uniform nonetheless. Father and son were both serving, at opposite ends of the country, through the same years. I have always thought that said something about the family.
"A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are for." —John A. Shedd
The New York Shipbuilding Corporation yard at Camden, New Jersey, was loud with hammers and ceremony on June 15th, 1942. Seaman Second Class William E. Rhinehart stood in his dress whites in the June heat and watched the commission pennant break at the masthead of hull number CL-55—USS Cleveland—a Cleveland-class light cruiser, 610 feet of steel and firepower.
When the executive officer called the first muster, Bill answered up.
"Rhinehart!"
"Here, sir."
His name went into the log on the very first day she belonged to the Navy. He was a plank owner—one of her originals, one of the men who had never known her any other way. She was new. He was new. They would grow up together.
Cleveland's complement ran to 1,255 officers and enlisted men. She carried twelve 6-inch guns in four triple turrets, twelve 5-inch anti-aircraft guns, and rows of 40mm and 20mm cannon along her rails. For a seventeen-year-old boy from Whitley County with an aptitude for machinery, she was a school unlike any he had imagined.
I know something about what it means to stand on a new ship's deck on commissioning day and hear your name called for the first time in a ship's log. It is not a small thing. I believe Bill understood that.
"In war, there are no unwounded soldiers." —José Narosky
Cleveland's first test came not in the Pacific but off the Atlantic coast of Africa. On November 8th, 1942, she stood in and fired on Vichy French shore installations at Fedhala, French Morocco, covering the Allied invasion transports of Operation Torch. Bill worked his station and learned what the 6-inch guns felt like in full salvo—a concussion through the chest like a fist from the inside out.
"So that's what it sounds like," said the man next to him at the gun—said it quietly, the way men state things they've been wondering about.
"Get used to it," said the gun captain. "Where we're going, there'll be plenty more."
Where they were going was the Pacific. Cleveland cleared Norfolk on December 5th, 1942. Bill Rhinehart was eighteen years old. He would not see Indiana again for three years.
"It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it." —General Douglas MacArthur
They arrived at Efate Island in the New Hebrides in January 1943 and joined the grinding campaign to push the Japanese back through the Solomons—island by island, atoll by atoll, up the channel the men called "the Slot."
On the night of March 6th, Cleveland steamed up that corridor at speed as part of Task Force 68, her wake phosphorescent in the dark water, to bombard Japanese airfields at Vila on Kolombangara Island. When Japanese destroyers—Minegumo and Murasame—came out to contest the night, Cleveland and her sisters sank them both. The Navy recorded it as the Battle of Blackett Strait.
By June 1943, Seaman Rhinehart had become Gunner's Mate Third Class Rhinehart. The rating was earned in smoke and concussion. He knew the 6-inch turret mechanisms the way a farmer knows his equipment—by feel, by sound, by the particular groan of a gear about to cause trouble.
"Rhinehart," his gun captain told him one afternoon in the turret, watching him work, "you were born for this."
Bill wiped grease from his hands and went back to the mechanism without a word. He told me that story once, quietly, at the kitchen table. He didn't seem especially proud of it. He said it the way a man states a fact about his younger self that he is no longer sure how to feel about.
"Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage and the soul." —Michel de Montaigne
Nothing in the Solomons campaign compared to what came in the early hours of November 2nd, 1943.
Cleveland's task force had been running hard. On November 1st they bombarded Buka Island and Bonis in support of the Bougainville invasion, then dashed south the same day to hit Shortlands bases. The men were tired. Then the word came: a Japanese surface force intercepted. Four cruisers and their escorts.
The ship went to general quarters in the dark.
GM3C Rhinehart was at his station before General Quarters finished sounding. The turret smelled of oil and men. Someone cracked a joke—someone always does, just before—and then the radar had the enemy and the order came to open fire.
Cleveland poured her radar-controlled fire into the Japanese formation for over an hour. This was not the distant impersonal work of shore bombardment. This was ship-to-ship, in the night, at close range by cruiser standards—load, ram, fire—load, ram, fire—while the gun captain called corrections and the fire control data came down from the plot above.
The Japanese cruiser Sendai took hit after hit. She burned, and then she was gone. The surviving Japanese ships turned and ran.
Then the aircraft came. Japanese bombers found the task force in the early morning gray. A stick of bombs walked across the water and severely rocked Cleveland—the ship shuddered, men grabbed for handholds, loose gear went flying. But she held together. Her anti-aircraft guns answered.
In the turret afterward, in the ringing silence, someone asked if everyone was all right.
"All present," said GM3C Rhinehart.
For her action that night at Empress Augusta Bay, USS Cleveland was awarded the Navy Unit Commendation—the ship's highest collective honor. Bill's name was in the log that night. He was nineteen years old.
"Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory." —William Barclay
Cleveland never stopped moving. Emirau Island in March 1944. Repairs in Sydney, Australia. Then back north—the Marianas through the summer, Saipan, Tinian, Guam, softening-up bombardments and fire support for the Marines going ashore. The Battle of the Philippine Sea in June. Off Tinian in July, Cleveland maneuvered her bulk between the damaged destroyer Norman Scott and the shore batteries that were hammering her, interposing herself, and silenced the guns.
By September 1944, Cleveland had earned twelve battle stars. She had been in commission barely two years.
On October 5th, 1944, she sailed from Manus Island for the United States. Overhaul. The men were going home.
"There is a particular loneliness in watching a ship sail without you. It has no name. It does not need one." —Anonymous
They gave the crew liberty during the overhaul. Bill got to Indiana, to Muncie, to his mother's house. People asked what it had been like. He gave the answers men give—"fine," "not so bad," "you get used to it"—and drank his coffee and said nothing more. He was twenty years old and had been in the Pacific for two years, and there was no way to explain that to someone who had spent those two years at home in Indiana.
When his leave was up he made his way back to California.
And on the morning of January 3rd, 1945, USS Cleveland cleared the harbor at San Pedro on her way back to the war.
Without him.
The muster report is plain: Straggler status. Missed ship. Whatever happened—a delayed train from Indiana, a mix-up, a night that ran longer than it should have—GM3C William E. Rhinehart was not at the gangway when they singled up the lines. The ship he had served since commissioning day, the ship where he had earned his rating, the ship whose guns he knew better than his own hands—she sailed without him.
He stood on the pier and watched her go.
I never asked him about that morning directly. Some things you don't ask. But I thought about it when I was young and newly in the Navy myself—the feeling of missing your ship, of standing on a pier watching her lines go slack and her hull begin to move—and I thought: that is a particular kind of loneliness that has no name.
"What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight—it's the size of the fight in the dog." —Dwight D. Eisenhower
His new ship was USS Conner, a Fletcher-class destroyer—smaller than Cleveland by half, faster, rougher in a seaway. Where Cleveland was a small city of 1,255 men, Conner was a village of 300. Everyone knew everyone within a week. Bill reported aboard during her overhaul at Puget Sound Navy Yard, and when she cleared for the Philippines in May 1945 he was on her gun crews. He was still GM3c. The 5-inch mounts were familiar enough. The rhythm was the same—load, ram, fire—just a different ship under his feet.
Conner did not sit out the end of the war quietly.
In early June 1945, she sailed from Leyte for Brunei Bay, Borneo, guarding minesweepers and Underwater Demolition Teams clearing the way for invasion. From June 10th to 17th, Bill stood his gun station while Conner ran close inshore providing pinpoint fire support on call from the Australian troops going ashore. They were in range of shore batteries for most of it. The 5-inch guns fired in direct support—not the long-range naval salvos of Cleveland's campaigns, but up-close, precision work, call-for-fire from Army men on the beach who needed a specific building or trench line taken out now.
Then came Balikpapan—July 1st to 9th, 1945, the oil port of Borneo, the last major amphibious landing of the Pacific war. The Australians went ashore again, and Conner was there again, her guns working the same close-in fire support. It was ugly, grinding work in summer heat, with a beach full of men depending on the accuracy of the rounds coming over their heads. Bill Rhinehart, twenty years old, stood his gun mount on a Fletcher-class destroyer off the coast of Borneo and fired in support of an Australian infantry assault, ten thousand miles from Muncie, Indiana.
On August 2nd, Conner and the destroyer Charrette intercepted a Japanese vessel identified as the hospital ship Tachibana Maru. They stopped her for inspection and found what they were looking for: contraband, and a large number of troops. The Japanese had been using hospital ship designations as cover. Conner and Charrette took her as a prize of war and escorted her into Morotai.
Four days later, the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima.
By the time Japan announced surrender on August 15th, Conner was making for Okinawa. When the formal ceremony was signed aboard USS Missouri on September 2nd, she was already underway for Korea. On September 8th, she arrived at Jinsen, Korea, for occupation duty—cruising between Korean and Chinese ports as the machinery of surrender ground through its procedures.
On October 10th–11th, 1945, GM3C William Eugene Rhinehart transferred off USS Conner and boarded USS Hampton for transport to the nearest West Coast Separation Center.
On December 13th, 1945—nearly four years after he had walked into that recruiting office in Muncie two days before Christmas—the United States Navy discharged him.
He had enlisted at seventeen. He came home at twenty-one. He had been a plank owner on a cruiser that earned twelve battle stars and the Navy Unit Commendation. He had been a GM3c—a man who knew his guns—before most of the boys in his hometown had finished high school.
And now he had to figure out how to live in Indiana.
"Sometimes even to live is an act of courage." —Seneca
That's the part I know less about. There is a gap in the record between 1945 and 1969—twenty-four years—that the muster rolls don't cover. I know he was what his generation called a damaged man, though they rarely used that word directly. The war had left its mark in ways that didn't show up on the discharge papers. He drank. That was the shape the damage took.
By the time my mother found him, or he found her, the drinking had been going on long enough to be part of who he was. My mother, being my mother, read it as "needs me" rather than "danger ahead." She had always believed she could redeem a damaged man through loyalty and steadiness. She was not always wrong about that. With Bill, she was right enough to matter.
"Love is not something you feel. It is something you do." —David Wilkerson
My mother's full name by the time she met Bill was Lucille Dee King Hendrickson Stratton Hunter—four last names from four marriages, including the one to my father, Dr. Frederick Nelson Stratton, who died in 1940 when I was three years old. She had seen enough of the world to know exactly what she was getting into.
She was sixty-seven years old. Bill was forty-four. He was her fourth husband, twenty-two years her junior, and she chose him with the deliberateness of a woman who had no more patience for pretending.
They married on October 4th, 1969, in Brimfield, Noble County, Indiana.
Those seven years were some of the best of her life. I say that from having watched it. Bill was kind to her, kind to my grandmother Bertha, kind to Karen Ann—the girl my mother and Bertha had raised as their own. He brought his veteran's disability income into the household and took his responsibilities seriously. He was not Jake Hunter. He was not a man who broke things and burned photographs and made the air in a room feel dangerous. He was a damaged man, yes, but damage doesn't always go in the direction of cruelty.
"Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything." —Plato
What no one expected—what you could not have predicted from the muster rolls and the battle stars and the straggler report at San Pedro—was that Bill Rhinehart had a beautiful Irish tenor voice.
By the time he and my mother married, my grandmother Bertha was in her nineties and failing. Bertha Lena McConnell King had been born in 1878 in Leipsic, Putnam County, Ohio, and had raised nine children on a farm in Indiana and outlived most of her generation. She died on January 17th, 1972, in Ligonier, of a stroke, at the age of ninety-three.
In the months before she died, Bill would come and sit with her.
And he would sing.
An Irish tenor, in a house in Noble County, Indiana, singing to a dying old woman who had been born in Ohio before the turn of the century. Nobody wrote down what songs he chose. I don't know whether he chose them consciously or whether on some evenings the song simply came the way songs come for men who carry them the way other men carry grief. Bertha would lie still and listen. Whatever the Pacific had cost him, the voice was untouched.
"He had a beautiful voice," everyone who remembered him said. They said it the way people say the one undeniable good thing about a complicated man—as a kind of summary, a final word.
I believe it was more than that. I believe it was Bill Rhinehart's way of giving something to a woman who was going, at the only time she needed it. I think he knew exactly what he was doing when he sat down and sang.
"When someone you love becomes a memory, the memory becomes a treasure." —Anonymous
On August 26th, 1976, William Eugene Rhinehart died in Allen County, Indiana. The cause was cirrhosis of the liver. He was fifty-one years old. He was buried at Kimmell, Noble County—the same cemetery where Bertha King had been laid to rest four years earlier, the same cemetery where my mother would eventually join him in the year 2000.
My mother was seventy-four when she lost him. In the end, she buried all four of her husbands. My father Doc had died in 1940. Fred Hendrickson—the teacher she eloped with at sixteen, the first husband—died of a heart attack in 1951 in Ligonier. And Jake Hunter—the violent drunk, the man who had made her life a misery—he died in 1971, while she was married to Bill, and she cared for him in those final months the way she had always cared for people who needed it, because that was who she was and she could not stop being that even for a man who had given her good reasons. Bill knew about it. He let her do it without complaint.
And then Bill. This one brought genuine grief—not the complicated kind, not the relief-mixed-with-sorrow kind, just plain grief for a man she had loved and who had loved her back.
He was seven years married to her. That is not a long time in any accounting. But it was long enough.
"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it." —Winston Churchill
His muster rolls survive. His name is on Cleveland's papers from the very first day she belonged to the Navy—15 June 1942—and on Conner's records through the last months of the war. He answered up every muster but one.
What the muster rolls do not record is a man with an Irish tenor voice sitting beside a dying woman in Noble County, Indiana, and singing to her until she was ready to go. They do not record the seven years he gave my mother, or the simple fact that he was kind to her grandmother in a way that those who loved her did not forget.
I am glad the records survive. The records are how we keep faith with the men who served. But the man I knew was the one at the kitchen table, the one with the quiet voice and the careful way he had with my mother, the one who sat with Bertha when no one asked him to.
History keeps the records it knows how to keep. The rest passes from mouth to mouth, and then it is gone, and then someone writes it down.
William Eugene Rhinehart (1924–1976) was born in Whitley County, Indiana, the son of William Lewis Rhinehart. He enlisted in the United States Navy on December 23, 1941, at age seventeen, and served as a plank owner and Gunner's Mate Third Class aboard USS Cleveland (CL-55) from commissioning day, June 15, 1942, through January 1945, participating in Operation Torch, the Solomons campaign, Empress Augusta Bay, and the Marianas. He subsequently served aboard USS Conner (DD-582) at Brunei Bay and Balikpapan, Borneo, in 1945, and was discharged December 13, 1945. He married Lucille Dee King on October 4, 1969, in Brimfield, Noble County, Indiana. He is buried at Kimmell Cemetery, Noble County.
Sources: USS Cleveland (CL-55) Muster Rolls, 1942–1944; Report of Changes, USS Cleveland, December 1942 and January 1945; Report of Changes, USS Conner (DD-582), 1945; Indiana death certificate; GEDCOM record @I628, Stratton-McConnell-Bell genealogical database. Ship history: Naval History and Heritage Command, DANFS; USS Cleveland Legacy Foundation.
—Wm. F. Stratton, May 2026
Over 50 years of research into the Stratton, Schneider, King, and allied families—from colonial Massachusetts to Indiana and beyond. Built by Bill & Karen Stratton.
If you are tracing a Stratton line, start here. Harriet Russell Stratton's two-volume Book of Strattons is the most comprehensive Stratton genealogy ever compiled—both volumes are free and fully searchable online.