WWII veteran merchant marine group disbands

WWII veteran merchant marine group disbands    The Hoffman Island Radio Association (HIRA), a group of World War II sea-going Merchant Marine radio operators, announced it has voted to disband because of deaths and increasing incapacitating illnesses of its aging members.
   Hoffman Island is a small island at the mouth of the New York City harbor, where the U.S. Maritime Service Radio Academy was established to train radio operators for the merchant marine in radio theory, practice and the Morse code during the war.
   Founded in 1991, by Richard Waechter, its first president, HIRA soon admitted veteran radio operators trained at the Gallups Island Radio Academy, in Boston Harbor, the only other radio academy, and then members of the U.S. Navy’s Armed Guard, who manned the cannon put on merchant ships in the latter stages of the war.
   In a press release announcing its disbandment, HIRA President Gilbert V. Levin called attention to the failure of U.S. Senate bill S. 663, the “Belated Thank You to the Merchant Mariners of World War II Act of 2009,” to win passage. The bill would establish a Merchant Mariner Equity Compensation Fund to provide benefits to certain individuals who served in the U.S. merchant marine.
   He attached a letter written last year urging Sen. Daniel K. Akaka, chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, to support the measure. The House passed a similar bill, H.R. 23.