“The Navy really straightened me out,” said Kim Dapkus to start our interview. “As a kid, I was a mess. Our family was quite poor. Our apartment on Fletcher Street in Nashua (one of the oldest streets in the city) didn’t even have hot water. There were many days that I would get into a fight with other kids, for no other reason than to fight.”

In his later years, in college, Dapkus compared his younger life to the trials and tribulations experienced by the Loman family, made famous in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”, most specifically the relationship between son, Bif Loman, to his father, Willie Loman. Willie was always hoping that Bif would make something of himself, and Bif was always falling short. Dapkus and his father had a similar relationship. Making his childhood the focus of a college paper written for a literature class, Dapkus professes that “We are all diamonds in the rough awaiting sculpting to become a fine-tuned piece of art.” 

Being in the north end of the city, Dapkus attended Mount Pleasant grade school, then Spring Street Junior High and Nashua High School on Elm St., graduating in 1972. Of his senior year in high school, Dapkus noted, “I knew I wasn’t ready for college. I didn’t want to stay in Nashua and just work some dead-end job. For me, the only answer was military service. I joined the Navy in January 1972 while I was still in high school on a delayed-entry program.”

Dapkus joined the Navy on July 6, 1972. His first choice for a military occupational specialty was to become a male nurse. Dapkus continues, “As part of my preparation to join the Navy, they sent me to the recruiting station in Manchester to take an aptitude test. It turned out that I had an aptitude score considered too high for nursing. What I did have was an aptitude for working with nuclear power.” 

About two weeks after graduation, Dapkus was on his way to the Great Lakes for Navy basic training. He was then placed in a relatively short mathematics training program for his introduction to nuclear power. Dapkus remarked, “I was first in my class!”

In between the end of that class and the start of the next class he was to attend, Dapkus ended up on the USS Shenandoah AD26, an older destroyer-tender placed in service right at the end of WWII. Dapkus said wryly, “They just needed a place to park me for a few months.” He served on that ship from March to October 1973.

He was then placed in what Dapkus called “Nuclear Power School” for six months. Dapkus explained, “They showed us the basics of nuclear energy, how to operate the nuclear systems on the ships, how the systems work, and how the system generates electricity. It was pretty intense.”

From there, Dapkus was sent to an actual, operating nuclear plant in Windsor Locks, CT. “The plant was operated by General Electric,” said Dapkus. “This was the real deal. Now we had to really use what we learned in class. A mistake made here would mean bad things could happen. We worked 12-hour shifts. It was pretty demanding. I was there from May 1974 to October 1974. And interestingly enough, I had no idea where the power that we generated was going!”

Dapkus, again, found himself between assignments. He noted, “This time they parked me on the USS Fulton AS11, a submarine tender, while waiting for a nuclear job to open up on another ship.” The Fulton was another older vessel, commissioned in September 1941. Interestingly, the Fulton was on her shake-down cruise out of San Diego on December 7, 1941. In light of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, she was ordered to Panama and then set up seaplane bases off Nicaragua.

Finally, the Navy found a job for Dapkus. He went from one of the older ships afloat to a ship that wasn’t even commissioned yet, the USS Nimitz, CVN68, one of the largest and most powerful ships afloat at the time. Dapkus spent two months on the ship maintaining documentation for the new nuclear systems. 

His next assignment was the USS California, CGN36. This was a newly commissioned, nuclear-powered, guided missile cruiser. Dapkus was assigned as a machinist’s mate for the power plant and worked primarily in the engine room.

Despite all his time he spent training and learning about nuclear power, the more disenchanted he became with it. He noted, “In the civilian world, there was a lot of negativity about nuclear power and its dangers. This was about the time the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant was being built in NH, which was drawing a lot of flak and negative publicity. I hated going to work each shift. I was torn about what to do.”

He was able to stay on the same ship, and change his MOS to Machinist Mate, Auxiliary Division, which meant more conventional maintenance, including air conditioning systems, ventilation systems and auxiliary steam systems. “This was more to my liking,” said Dapkus. “So much so that I became the lead man for the department.”

Asked about interesting places he went while in the Navy, Dapkus replied, “We did two tours of the Mediterranean Sea. I got to see Giza in Egypt, saw some ruins in Greece, did some diving off the coast of Italy.” Dapkus was one of the ship’s scuba divers.

“About the most exciting thing we did,” continued Dapkus, “…was to go looking for survivors from a Liberian freighter that sunk in the Mediterranean. It seems a fork-truck operator on the freighter managed to poke the lift forks through the skin of the Liberian ship below the water line. It took only four minutes for the ship to go down.  We were the closest ship so we pulled search and rescue duty. Do you know how difficult it is to find a single person in an ocean full of white caps?”

On the day that Dapkus was to be discharged, the ship happened to be docked in Portsmouth… England. He had to catch a flight from there to Spain and Spain to the US to end his Navy career.

When I got out,” said Dapkus, “I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I figured I would goof off for a month and try to figure out what to do. I hadn’t been home more than a day or so, and a friend told me that Sanders Associates in Nashua was looking for a refrigeration technician. I knew refrigeration was something I was good at. So I went and applied for the job, and the next day, I was a Sanders employee.”

Oddly enough, the refrigeration technician job led to a job as a buyer/expediter. He did so well at that job, Lockheed, of which Sanders was a part, had a facility in Tennessee that needed someone to reorganize and oversee that procurement department, so… it was off to Tennessee. That led to operating a warehouse in Greenville, SC. This led to Dapkus’ final position of procurement compliance and governance, and maintaining responsibility for the procurement process worldwide for Lockheed.

Dapkus got married after leaving the Navy in July 1980. His wife had a son and a daughter from a previous marriage: Simon Straub and Allison Howard. The couple had one son together, Kyle Dapkus, who would go on to join the Air Force.

Machinist Mate Kim Dapkus had traveled a long way, from brawling on Nashua’s Fletcher Street to being responsible for the nuclear power of a Navy ship, to managing procurement and warehousing for a major American company. In Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”. Bif Loman never does redeem himself. But the US Navy “sculpted the rough diamond” that was a young Kim Dapkus, and he emerged a “fine-tuned piece of art.” Willie Loman would have been proud!