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Packing the ukulele that a Hawaiian bunkmate had taught him to play, he was off to Constantinople. For the next two years the flotilla plied the Aegean and Black Seas. On every shore leave, Godfrey and his fellow musicians of "Admiral Bristol's Bobo Six" beat out their rhythms in Levantine dives and were paid off in free drinks and applause.
When he finished his Navy hitch in 1924, Godfrey no longer dreamed of the Naval Academy or the priesthood. Eager to elbow himself a place in the bustling business world of the '20s, he brought $2,000 in Navy "winnings" back home to Hasbrouck Heights. But his father had died and the fat roll of bills disappeared in settling family debts. Soon he was in a familiar position—on his uppers in a strange city. The city was Detroit where, desperately answering a blind ad, he found himself a door-to-door salesman of cemetery lots. By drawing heavily on his peculiar assets—the husky Godfrey voice-with-a-personality and the honest-Injun Godfrey face—he made $10,000 in five months. Three months later he had lost it all as the star and backer of a vaudeville troupe that careened from Chicago to Los Angeles and expired among the orange groves.
In his travels, he ran across an old shipmate who had become a commissioned officer in the Coast Guard. He told Arthur: "Any Navy petty officer can make a commission in this hooligan Navy." Godfrey joined up.
Birdseed & Bandages. Radio Technician Godfrey was sent to a Coast Guard Depot outside Baltimore. Searching for some more interesting avocation than drinking needled beer, he turned up on an amateur hour at station WFBR. With his banjo and one-octave voice, he landed a birdseed company as a $5-a-show sponsor. He also picked up another chore—introducing the speeches of Maryland's late, belligerently anti-dry Governor Albert Ritchie. When Godfrey was offered a full-time job on WFBR, the governor helped him get his separation from the Coast Guard.
He soon moved from the radio bush league of Baltimore to an NBC staff announcer's job in Washington. One morning, speeding along Riggs Road to the Congressional Airport for practice at flying a glider, Godfrey had a head-on collision with a truck. He lay in a strait-jacket of bandages and casts for five months. For two years he could not bend his knees. He still walks with a slight limp.
During his long hospitalization, Godfrey spent hours listening to the radio. "Those days we were all talking to the 'ladies and gentlemen of the radio audience.' I decided there wasn't any such audience. There was just one guy or one girl off somewhere listening by themselves. Hell, if they were together, they'd have something better to do than listen to the radio."