Advocate staff photo by EMILY SCHWARZE H.D. Kallam and Penny Nelson Robichaux reunited this year during a reunion for the crew of the USS Mispillion at the Sheraton Baton Rouge, more than 50 years after Kallam and others of the Mispillion crew helped raise money for her during the Korean War when they found out she had polio.

Advocate staff photo by EMILY SCHWARZE
H.D. Kallam and Penny Nelson Robichaux reunited this year during a reunion for the crew of the USS Mispillion at the Sheraton Baton Rouge, more than 50 years after Kallam and others of the Mispillion crew helped raise money for her during the Korean War when they found out she had polio.

When Penny Nelson Robichaux was a teenager in the 1960s, she’d often take out pictures that had been taken of her aboard the USS Mispillion with the crew when she was 3 and crowned “Queen of the Mispillion.”
Diagnosed with polio when she was 3, Robichaux spent most of her childhood undergoing treatment.
“There were a lot of things I couldn’t do as a teenager, but I’d take out those pictures of all those sailors and think, ‘look at all my boyfriends,” she said Saturday after a memorial service at the USS Kidd in downtown Baton Rouge.
After 50 years, Robichaux was reunited for the first time with about 20 of her “boyfriends” during an annual reunion of the USS Mispillion AO-105.
There were lots of hugs, smiles and teary eyes as those connected with the USS Mispillion and Robichaux pieced together a story that starts in August 1953.
Three days after Robichaux was diagnosed with bulbar polio myelitis, caused by a virus that invades the nervous system and results in paralysis, her father, U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Forest Nelson, was reported missing in action during the Korean War. In 1954, it was reported that Lt. Nelson had been taken prisoner and died in captivity.
Chris Munson, son of the late Capt. Henry Munson who was captain of the Mispillion in the early 1950s, picks up the story here.
The USS Mispillion was commissioned in 1945 and decommissioned in 1974.
It was stationed in San Francisco. The men aboard the ship heard about the young girl’s plight.
“All naval units do community service to build ties with the community,” Munson said.
It was arranged for young Penny Nelson to come aboard the ship where she was named “Queen of the Mispillion.” Munson, who was 5 at the time, says he remembers their meeting vividly.
“We were the ship’s children. I was the ship’s boy and she was the queen,” he said.
But the shipmates’ service didn’t end with that ceremony. Later, when they heard she needed a special treatment, they raised $600 and bought an electroencephalograph — a machine that measured muscular weakness.
“I never had to go into an iron lung,” Robichaux said, referring to a machine that mimics the physiologic action of breathing that was often used to treat polio patients in the mid-1900s.
Robichaux grew up in Long Beach, Calif., and then moved to Rosenberg, Texas, as an adult. She lost touch with her sailors but she never forgot them.
They never forgot her, either.
For several years, various people who had either served in the crew or who were connected to the ship tried to locate her but with no success.
Henry Stephens of Baton Rouge said he and his wife had looked for Penny Nelson in 2004 but couldn’t find her.
There were several Louisianans aboard the Mispillion in the early 1950s, Stephens said.
“All country boys,” he said Saturday after the memorial service.
The ship’s mission was dangerous; it transported fuel.
“Basically, it was a floating gas station,” he said.
Munson picked up the search for Robichaux after reading a letter written by his father that said the crew’s connection with her personified the spirit of the Mispillion.
He found her through a DNA registry that every branch of the service maintains.
Robichaux — whose late husband was a Robichaux of Patterson — couldn’t believe it when Munson contacted her.
“It’s just an amazing story,” she said.
When she walked into the Sheraton Hotel on Friday where the five-day reunion was held, the first person she saw was H.D. Kallum of Ridgeway, Va.
“I recognized him by his eyes,” she told the group gathered around to hear her story.
There’s a photograph in the ship’s cruise book that shows Kallum holding Robichaux aboard the Mispillion.
“You set a standard for me,” she said to the men gathered around her.
She runs a children’s shelter in Branson, Mo. and believes that the kindness she was shown instilled a legacy of service.
Down through the years, there were other military men who corresponded with her and her mother.
“They would sign letters ‘daddy.’ There were so many who stepped up to fill my father’s shoes. I’ve never taken that for granted,” Robichaux said.
Both Munson and Robichaux said that their memories of the Mispillion are so strong is no surprise.
“We were the kids,” Munson said.
Robichaux agreed.
“But these were 18- and 19-year-old boys. I had no idea that they remembered me. They said, ‘We’re so glad you’re not a drug addict or an idiot. We always wondered how you turned out,” Robichaux said.
For Robichaux, though, the gift they gave her was more than just a donation, she said.
“I believe that goodness and service they showed me was a legacy. And it still feels good to be the queen of the Mispillion,” she said.

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