Editor’s note: This article was written and submitted by Montagne Powers, whose clients include The Commons in Lincoln.
Dan Chamberlin during his Navy career.
Dan Chamberlin and his wife — affectionately known as Salli — live at The Commons in Lincoln. Their path to their current home bucolic home, however, extends around the world.
Dan was 22 years old and had recently graduated from Denison University when he decided to enlist in the Navy. He entered Officer Candidate School in Newport, R.I., in June 1952. “After graduating, I had a little bit of leave time and I went home and saw my college sweetheart [Salli] and then got shipped over to Japan, where I was stationed happily with my best friend from Officer Candidate School,” he said. “We were stationed in a cryptography unit that served the commander of the Naval Forces of the Far East, so we were a very large radio station with a cryptography or code adjunct to it.”
As a cryptographer, Dan handled sensitive communications. “I was dealing with those Navy messages which were coded, and I was responsible for encoding anything the admiral wanted to send out, and for decoding anything that came in for his attention,” Dan recalled. One notable moment during Dan’s naval career happened when “I was on duty overnight on the 23rd of June in 1954, and that was the precise moment of the signing of the armistice in Panmunjom, which effectively ended the shooting in the Korean War. That message came in and I decoded it.”
Dan arrived in Japan as a bachelor but his fiancee joined him in August 1953 and they were married soon after her arrival. He had a house built for the two of them to live in a nearby Japanese town because he didn’t have the required priority points to secure married housing on the naval base. “I commuted to work on the train and she stayed home, and that lasted until October of 1954, at which point I received orders to a ship,” he recalled.
Salli returned home to the States, newly pregnant, as Dan boarded the flagship for the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. “She delivered our firstborn and I was meanwhile floating around the Mediterranean with the admiral on board and hitting all the best liberty ports,” he said.
Dan had been accepted to Harvard Business School but wasn’t able to delay enrollment until the end of his military service. However, he asked the Navy for early separation, which was granted. Once he landed, Dan and Salli met in Massachusetts at an apartment neither had seen, with a child he had not yet met.
Dan and Salli Chamberlin today.
Salli and Dan have been married for 70 years and are enjoying life at their home at The Commons. Dan’s service has inspired patriotism and call to duty in his own family — his granddaughter is currently a captain in the Marines.
Reflecting on the value that serving in the military added to his life, Dan said, “I was a small-town boy and Salli and I went to a small college and I think the lesson I learned was independence. We both had loving parents who gave us everything we wanted. That first night, I was trying to fall asleep in a barracks surrounded by a barbed wire fence with a Marine guard with a .45 automatic and for the first time in 21 years, I couldn’t go where I wanted to go when I wanted to go. I was just like ‘son of a gun, this is what it’s like being out on your own, and you can do this,’ and I was able to apply that in other severe changes of environment, like going to graduate school or going into a strange city for my first job or having a child. With any major change in life, I know I can do this.”