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A High Note for Bugle: Family returns instrument to USS New York
By Karen Nelson

A Coast family made sure a bugle was placed aboard the soon-to-be 
USS New York before she sailed from a shipyard in Louisiana this week.

Even though Navy ships don’t use buglers anymore, this one was a piece 
of history. It had been blown to rally crews aboard the battleship 
USS New York during World Wars I and II and wound up in the care of 
a mariner from Mississippi, H.R. “Shorty” Reynolds, who died in 2003.

His children — Raymond Jr., Carol and Mickey Reynolds — took the bugle 
that had hung in their father’s office for more than a decade and 
delivered it to the captain of the Navy’s newest amphibious assault ship 
in a ceremony aboard the ship at Northrop Grumman’s Avondale shipyard 
near New Orleans last week.

The transfer happened in the nick of time, because the ship set sail 
Tuesday for Virginia and then New York, where it will be commissioned 
the USS New York on Nov. 7.

The bugle had been removed in 1945 from the old dreadnought before it 
was sent on its final mission, to be used for atomic bomb testing and 
then target practice.

The bugle wound up in H.R. Reynolds’ care because he had become the 
ship’s historian. He had served on the battleship and had come to love 
the USS New York and his short years of service in the Navy.

When the battleship’s former crew members held their annual reunions, 
the bugle was there. On its plaque is the story of how a marine 
“rescued” it from the battleship and passed it on to a man who had been 
the ship’s bugler, then how that man had passed it in later years to 
H.R. Reynolds as the ship’s historian.

When Reynolds died in North Mississippi, the bugle went to his son who 
lives on the Coast, Raymond Reynolds Jr. of Latimer. Raymond began 
the process of delivering it to a new home. He said his father’s 
shipmates supported the move.

“Those guys are all in their 80s now and every year there are fewer of 
them, and they agreed it should go to the newer ship,” Raymond 
Reynolds said. “It would be displayed on the ship and probably more 
people would see it there than in a museum.

”Getting it there wasn’t as easy as it might have seemed. It took two 
years of making phone calls and contacts, even after the Navy had 
expressed a clear interest in the artifact, Raymond Reynolds’ wife, Joyce, 
explained. Finally, weeks before the new battle cruiser left the shipyard, 
the Reynolds family got word that the captain would accept the bugle 
in a ceremony on Oct. 7.

“Dad let everyone know where the bugle was supposed to go,” said 
Carol Reynolds of Gulfport.

H.R. Reynolds had lived long enough to see the attack on the World 
Trade Center.

“He knew they were building a new ship and wanted to make sure the 
bugle got to its rightful owner, the new New York,” she said.

The ship also received a plaque made of wood from a shrimp boat 
destroyed by Katrina and a piece of steel from the World Trade Center.

The gifts represented the hard work and resilience of the people of two 
terrible disasters, Navy officials said. She also has 7.5 tons of World Trade 
Center steel built into her bow.

Construction of the battleship USS New York began with a keel laying on 
Sept. 11, 1911, exactly 90 years before the World Trade Center attack, 
which gave birth to the new ship.

Men who served on the old battleship with H.R. Reynolds are expected 
to be at the commissioning of the new ship.

But for the Reynolds family, the big ceremony was last week when 
Commander Curt Jones and his crew accepted their father’s gift.

“The commander seemed to be really excited to get it, the bugle,” said 
Raymond Reynolds. “He said it’s almost like having a living piece of 
history, because we know it was part of that crew and ship, and to bring 
it on board was an honor.”

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

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