CBS C Q D

Dark, erect, dashing Captain Byron C. Brown, 48, U. S. Army retired, ran a machine-gun company in World War I until he was badly shot up, in later years prospected for gold in British Guiana mine fields. Nowadays, he and Mrs. Brown live quietly on the island of Martha's Vineyard, where summer boarders and the radio provide the chief excitement. One night last winter, tuning around on his all-wave radio, Captain Brown picked up a sure-enough distress call from a tanker aground off Newport, called the U. S. Coast Guard, brought about the rescue of 57 men.

One blustery night last week Captain Brown called the Coast Guard again. He said he had heard fragments of a distress call from a steamer somewhere between Cross Rip Light and Nantucket. From Captain Brown, that was all the Coast Guard needed. Gay Head launched its surf boats. The destroyer Breckinridge steamed in from neutrality patrol, the cut ters General Greene, Algonquin, George W. Campbell plunged for the scene. Crews from Coskata and Maddaket stations joined Gay Head's in the search. Soon reporters from all over the North Atlantic coast were calling Captain Brown on the telephone. Captain Brown's story got better & better. Not only the stricken ship's radio operator but its captain had called for help. "They just shrieked there were 164 men aboard. . . . They said: 'Send assist ance immediately. We are sinking.' "

All night long and into the morning, the rescue craft searched Nantucket Sound, but no ship could they find in distress. At 5 a. m. two Massachusetts State Troopers visited Captain Brown with a warrant, locked him up for drunkenness, despite his stout assertion that he was stone sober, that there wasn't a drop in the house. Later that morning, at Edgartown District Court, a magistrate believed the cops, convicted Captain Brown. The captain took the rap like a good soldier, but he shook his head soberly. "I tell you, I heard it," he insisted. "I would do it again if I felt passengers aboard any ship were endangered, al though I was apparently 100% wrong in this case."

What Captain Brown might have heard, reported in good faith, and perhaps expanded on later, was a snatch of a CBS broadcast that night by Newscaster Edwin C. Hill, a lurid, present-tense yarn of the long-past sinking of the Republic in 1909 -- first major sea disaster in which radio was used as a distress signal: "Fog is all about . . . impenetrable murk . . . hysterical shriek . . . crash and grinding . . . frightening darkness . . . shouts and screams . . . women and children aboard ... C Q D ... C Q D*. ..." As Captain Brown recalled whatever he did hear, "they seemed terribly excited. . . . It made me sick to my stomach."

*Now SOS.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.