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By Norm Cukras | Highlands Today

Published: August 14, 2009

She may not be, as she claims, the typical sailor's wife, but being married to one certainly led to a lifetime of adventure.

Her name is Sybil Kissner. Her husband Eugene (Gene) is a retired Navy Master Chief who spent his 22 year military career in communications. Yet as a navy family the Kissners lucked out: Gene spent all of his duty-time on dry land so he was able to come "home" each day after work.

Of course "home" is a rather relative term when you are in the service. It may be in Guam. It may be in Scotland. It may even be in Washington, DC. The only thing predictable in the life of a sailor's wife is change. Still Sybil maintains, as she relaxes in her bright shipshape kitchen overlooking the placid Dinner Lake, is that, "I've had a good life and I'd do it again."

Sybil Hamman was born in Iowa and grew up in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wis. After graduating from high school she convinced her reluctant Marine veteran father to let her join the Navy.

"I wanted to see the world," she gave as her reason for volunteering for the military.

After joining she was trained as a yeoman and assigned to Naval Security Station (now home to Homeland Security) in Washington, D.C. It was here that a young he-sailor from Pennsylvania came to see her boss. As the weeks went by the sailor's visits to her office became more frequent until her boss intimated that he would have to arrange a reassignment for the "visitor" in order to get some work done.

Within three months the two were married. "I knew he was the one," she said coyly.

A new life begins

Sybil, an E4, was married to Gene, an E6, in 1961. Under the then existing regulations, Sybil accepted a voluntary early discharge. For the first two years of their married life they remained in the Washington area, where Gene, Jr. the first if their two sons, was born. In 1963 the not so newlyweds were off to what would become their first move – the Philippines where Jerry, son number two, was born.

"Because Gene was in communications our quarters were about 20 miles from the hospital at Cubi Point - the main base. The ambulance ride over chuck holes was a real experience," she recalls.

From the Philippines the growing family was off to Taiwan where the citizens professed to speak less English than they knew. "We communicated in charades," Sybil said with a chuckle.

But it was good duty. Here they lived in local housing rather than on a military base. While it had "indoor plumbing" it was necessary to build a fire under the outdoors tank to get hot water. When not building fires the young Navy wife was able to pass the time by teaching university students conversational English in her home.

From Taiwan it was back to Washington again, this time for three years. Then the family was off to Guam – a speck of land in the South Pacific that measures less that 1/5 the size of Highlands County. That assignment lasted two years. Then it was back stateside. This time at Bremerton, Wash., where both Sybil and Gene were able to pick up college associate degrees.

After graduation it was on the road again to what was to become the Kissners favorite tour – Edzell, Scotland, even though their house there had no central heat and the main rooms were warmed by fireplaces and the beds by hot water bottles.

It's a given

Gene's Navy career ended in 1979 at Jacksonville. And for the next 20-plus years both Sybil and he found work in Jacksonville and in the Washington, D.C. area where the retired Master Chief was close enough to the Pentagon on 9/11 to feel the heat from the burning building. Soon after they retired for good they followed a high school friend of Sybil's to Sebring where Sybil pursues her hobby in genealogy while Gene is involved in the continuing development of the Sea Services Museum.

"Our life was an adventure," Sybil says with a smile reflecting unspoken memories, "and it was a given that after we left one duty station we'd be going to another. And we looked forward to it.

"It was just a different lifestyle. Our friends were our relatives. And the boys knew that if we didn't move the friends that they made would."

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