Fry says other changes between his first tour and when he took command was the removal of the after 3-inch gun to make room for TASS; an updated radio shack; an additional fire pump, a collection, holding and transfer tank (CHT) system for waste, and the executive officer (XO) had moved up from officers country into the former embarked Destroyer Division commander’s cabin. “Even with the XO moved out of officer’s country it was still pretty tight living,” he says.

Only two were built. The Bronsteins were followed by the 10 ships of the Garcia-class and Brooke-class guided missile escorts, along with the USS Glover, all of which had a 1200-psi pressure-fired propulsion plant; and the 46 ships of the Knox-class. These new ships would also have a “mack.” These ships were the first to combine the stack and mast arrangement to a single “mack.”

According to Wright, “TASS worked great for long range cueing when the host platform was operating far away from the Battle Group.”

The ship had a single 3″/50 gun mount aft that was removed to support the large equipment reel. When operating, the towed array could be streamed in excess of one mile from the ship.

“The AN/SQR-15 proved to be an extremely effective passive narrowband ASW system,” Callas says.

While optimized for ASW, the 1037s had a twin 3-inch/50 cal. MK33 dual-purpose gun with a MK56 fire control system forward, as well as the single 3-inch mount aft of the DASH deck that was later removed to make room for the TASS. The dual purpose gun could be used against aircraft, ships or targets ashore. Later classes of DEs and DEGs would get the 5-inch/38 or 5-inch/54 gun. The next generation of escort ships, the Oliver Hazard Perry-class, would have a single 76mm gun.

“We had Soviet Bear and Badger overflights, and Kresta cruisers coming out to look at us. Here I am, an ensign on the bridge wing, staring at a Kresta II cruiser, and here’s McCloy with our twin 3-inch mount forward and single 3-inch gun aft.”

Callas was a gun mount officer during general quarters. “The dual gun 3″/50 mount was a fairly simple and reliable gun system. Each gun had a loader that held five rounds, after that, each round had to be hand loaded. The rate of fire was dependent on the proficiency of the gunnery team. In addition to the mount captain, who sat between the two guns, the surface gunner (port side) and air gunner (starboard side), there were two loaders who pulled rounds out of a temporary rotary service container in the mount and slapped them into the gun breech, plus a team of a dozen personnel that pulled rounds out of the ready service lockers on the foc’sle and placed them in the rotary service containers. From experience, the old 3-inch/50 could put out as many (if not more) rounds as the automated 5-inch/54 Mk 45 gun mount system. We could pump out 40 to 50 rounds a minute on a good day.”

The large bow-mounted sonar dome necessitated an unusual anchor configuration. One anchor was mounted on the bow, and a portside anchor was mounted back by the gun mount.

These ships also were the operational test and evaluation platform for the extremely high frequency satellite communications system (EHF SATCOM). “We got our EHF SATCOM in 1973,” Fry recalls. “It wasn’t a regular piece of comm gear. It had a huge dome antenna upon a lattice structure, installed on our DASH deck. Even though I was the communications officer, only the CO and a few people who came on board to operate it knew what it was for.”

When Fry arrived on McCloy for his first tour, the DASH system had been taken off the ship. The deck and hangar were not big enough for a manned helicopter. But the 1037s would frequently be used to refuel ASW helicopters from other ships using the helicopter in-flight refueling (HIFR) method.

Even though these ships were basically experimental platforms, with one stationed on each coast, they remained in service into the early 1990s. Both were reclassified as frigates (FF) on June 30, 1975. They were relatively inexpensive to operate, and Wright notes that in his 24-months in command he was an opposing force “Orange” player in five different Third Fleet exercises off the West Coast of the United States and in Hawaiian waters. Bronstein also was a platform of choice to conduct the nascent counter-drug patrols just beginning off the coast of Baja and Central America. In the autumn of 1987, Bronstein served as flagship for the first significant joint Navy/Coast Guard anti-drug patrol in the Pacific termed “Blue Pennant Six.”

McCloy participated in operations north of the Arctic Circle during the summer and fall of 1972, along with the ASW carrier USS Intrepid (CVS 11). “Our ASW team combined our SQS-26AXR sonar and the Intrepid’s SH-3 Sea King ASW helicopters. We operated north of Murmansk and attracted a lot of attention,” Fry says. “We had Soviet Bear and Badger overflights, and Kresta cruisers coming out to look at us. Here I am, an ensign on the bridge wing, staring at a Kresta II cruiser, and here’s McCloy with our twin 3-inch mount forward and single 3-inch gun aft.”

The forward gun was in an enclosed mount, which was necessary because the ship took so much water over the bow. The after mount was not enclosed, and because the ship rolled so much it was almost as wet in the back as it was up forward.

“I took her through a storm coming through the Denmark Straits in March of 1984, returning from an ASW exercise called Arctic SHAREM,” Fry recalls. “We sailed into the marginal ice zone in company with the Coast Guard icebreaker USCGC Northwind (W 282) to see if we could track submarines under the ice. We watched small ice bergs go by us with TASS in the water. We took a 62-degree roll during the storm and snapped right back. Other ships in company with us had people get injured, but we had nobody get hurt.”

“Every time we got underway we rigged for heavy weather even when none was forecast,” says Fry, who added the introduction of the scopolamine patch made a big difference for Sailors who encountered motion sickness on the small combatants.