Posted by John Wynn on Monday, May 12, 2003 at 08:51:41:

Spy Who Came Back From The Deep Gives His Last Performance
Submarine Crooner Decides To Retire From His Singing Career
Singer/songwriter Tommy Cox performs for submarine veterans in Groton Friday.
By ROBERT A. HAMILTON - Day Staff Writer - Published on 5/10/2003

     He's the Sinatra of submarines, the crooner cryptologist, the singing spook. At least through this weekend. Tommy Cox of Caribou, Maine, sang his second-to-last concert Friday night at a U.S. Submarine Veterans Inc. reunion, where the $4 admission went to the group's scholarship fund.
    If you want to hear Brothers of the Dolphin, Ballad of Whitey Mack, Scorpion, or Big Black Submarine performed live, his last public appearance will be at Boomer's Café on Sunday night, where $7 will buy you a spot in the 7 p.m. show.
    As we say in the submarine service, I just want to go deep and regroup for a while, Cox said in an interview before his Friday night show. We decided this is a good time, at 60 years old, to give up the music.
    Cox is probably the best known singer-songwriter-submariner, if for no other reason than that nobody knows of another one. Seriously, though, most people who have served on submarines locally seem to have at least heard about some of his hits, such as Seawolf, Diesel Boats Forever, or Torpedo in the Water.
    Each of them came out of his career as a cryptological technician, doing spy work in the 1960s and '70s, spending as much as nine months a year at sea, sometimes on several submarines.
    Torpedo in the Water, for instance, hails from a trip he made on the Lapon, when they were in front of a Soviet submarine, which fired a test shot that acquired their boat what you would call a high-stress situation in the business.
    One of the sailors stuck his thumb in his mouth and curled up in a fetal position as they tried to outmaneuver the fish. But most people just did their jobs and they survived.
    Ballad of Whitey Mack refers to the skipper who signed his qualification card, the legendary Capt. Chester M. "Whitey Mack", who holds the record for covertly trailing a Soviet submarine.
    At the time Cox's ride was listed only as USS Classified, because the Navy wasn't ready to admit that it has intelligence gatherers on the boats. In fact, once he got liberty in Scotland, and had to wear the dress whites of a torpedoman so no one would see his real rating badge.
    Cox is not really retiring. He just passed the test to be a Maine guide, and is going to work for a buddy, a retired Navy Seal, who runs a hunting camp Down East. He says he wants me as security for his clients that way they don't have to outrun the bear, they just have to outrun me, he said with a chuckle.
    Cox was born and raised in Caribou, and was singing at local talent shows by the time he was 15. A year later he got a job singing six nights a week with a group at a bar outside Loring Air Force Base, where he made $10 a night. I looked big enough to be 21, and no one asked, Cox recalls. That was pretty good money for the time, and I said to myself, What do I need to go to school for, I'm going to be a teenage idol.
    Those hopes were dashed when he went to New York to audition for the Ted Mack Original Amateur Hour, and was turned down, though, he's quick to point out, so was Elvis Presley. He returned to Maine and found out his buddy had joined the Army. He headed to Presque Isle to join, but the Army recruiter was closed, so I walked across the street and joined the Navy.
    He'd done so well on the screening test he was recruited for electronics, and later for foreign language school, learning Russian at the U.S. Naval Intelligence School in Washington, D.C., and later the National Security Agency school for special language instruction.
    His first job was at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 1962 just in time for the Cuban missile crisis. In December 1963, he transferred to the USS Oxford, an intelligence-gathering ship, and made a trip around South America and the Caribbean, singing at gigs in Chile, Nicaragua, the Dutch West Indies, and Peru.
    He got out of the Navy in 1964, worked for a while at a car dealership back in Maine, and then re-enlisted. Turns out, there weren't a lot of jobs back in Caribou for Russian intercept operators, Cox said. While waiting for his security clearance to be reinstated in 1967, he talked to a few guys who were heading to submarines, and volunteered for that duty himself. Ten months later he was on the USS Barbel, a diesel boat, making a 56-day patrol in the Pacific. That first year he served nine months on the Barbel and the nuclear submarines Scamp and Guardfish.
    The submarine qualification process is rigorous, requiring a detailed knowledge of every system on the boat, so most CTs or spooks don't bother to earn their dolphins. But Cox said he was so fascinated by the whole culture, he asked for and received permission to study for his own fish. He would serve on nine other nuclear submarines during his 20-year career the USS Lapon, USS Sea Devil, USS Hammerhead, USS Greenling, USS Bergall, USS Trepang, USS Parche, and USS Seawolf (SSN 575, not the newer SSN 21).
    His wife, Sandra, quickly learned that he would be gone for months at a time. He couldn't tell her where he was going, or talk about what he had done when he returned. She raised their three children, often on her own.
    That keeps you busy, and makes the absences bearable, she said.
    He started writing submarine music in 1968, when the Navy suffered its second submarine loss in five years. Scorpion was originally written as a prayer when that boat was lost May 22, 1968. He put it to music later and it made it onto his Take Her Deep compact disk.
    It was about that time I got the idea for an album of theme music, Cox said. Nobody else had ever done it. By 1978, he had cut Take Her Deep, with 13 songs he wrote and sang. He got out of the Navy in 1979, went to work for Analysis &Technology for a few years, then moved back to Maine.
    One of their sons became a nuclear-trained electronics technician on submarines, and today works at a nuclear plant in Moline, Ill. Their daughter is a certified beautician who's done a number of jobs, and works now for an oil company.
    The submarine community grieved with them when, last year, their older son went in for what should have been routine surgery, but went into a coma because of a problem with the anesthesia, and died a few weeks later.
    Cox has returned to Groton the last two summers for the Subvets Reunion, and decided that this year, newly retired from a Maine state job, he would call it quits as a professional musician. He called up Gerry Rucker, another retired CT and base player; Don Ward, guitarist; and Hank Shaffer, a drummer and a civilian but still a good guy; Cox said, to accompany him. He brought the Gibson he's had since 1963, and which came with him on more than one secret mission, to twang out his last public notes.
    The submarine CD business has never been particularly lucrative, though he's covered his costs with 7,000 copies of Take Her Deep and 1,100 of his 2001 album with Bobby Reed, Brothers of the Dolphin. But it's been a heck of a ride, he said, first in the boats, and since then with the veterans who want to hear him sing about the boats.
    And best of all, it allowed someone who was in the quietest profession of the Silent Service to make a little noise once in a while.