Glass stared as if Victor had just announced the explosion of the moon. “Let me understand this, son. Are you saying you ran into a German submarine out there in our little bay? A Nazi submarine?”

Victor ran his hand through his hair. “Listen, mister. I hit it. It sank my boat. I climbed onto the thing. I heard them. It didn’t sound like any talking I ever heard.”

Glass got up and went to the door. “Come here. Show me where.”

— V for Victor by Mark Childress

FAIRHOPE, Ala. — By the end of that 1988 novel, Victor, the 16-year-old hero of the story, had convinced Roy Glass and other skeptical Magnolia Springs residents of the truth of his unfathomable encounter in May 1942 with a German U-boat in Mobile Bay.

Set in Baldwin County, the novel weaves a wild tale of spies, espionage and collisions with an enemy submarine during a time when the war was on people’s minds everywhere.

But that was fiction, you say.

No way in the world that a real German sub would ever enter the bay, not only because it was too shallow, but also because that’s just not how U-boats operated in World War II.

While historians agree that U-boats sank dozens of American ships in the Gulf of Mexico that first spring after Pearl Harbor, they also say those attacks happened well out in the Gulf, the subs rarely venturing close to shore, except for a couple of highly publicized incidents on the Atlantic coastline.

That, at least, is the conventional wisdom, according to exhaustive research on the subject, and to Mark Childress himself, who said he fictionalized those popular legends of U-boats in Mobile Bay and spies in South Alabama for the novel he wrote while living in Fairhope.

But Lila Pennington Ryals, 77, who grew up and still lives in Fairhope part of the year, says it did happen, that a small German submarine did surface a few hundreds yards off a Fairhope beach in 1942.

She knows it happened because she saw it with her own eyes, she says. And so did her brother, Joseph “Buddy” Pennington Jr., and her sister, Wilma Pennington Andress.

Lila was 10 years old that summer; her brother, Buddy, was 8, and sister, Wilma, was 12. Their lives revolved around the beach at the bottom of a gully on Grand Avenue in Fairhope where they lived. It was there on many days and nights that they played, fished and slept under the stars on pallets made of driftwood, piled-up sand, Spanish moss and blankets. They’d also built a small hut of pine poles, limbs and branches, for shade.

“We lived a Robinson Crusoe life on that beach,” Ryals said last week, with a smile in her voice, stopping in a car at the top of the high bluff at the corner of Grand Avenue and North Mobile Street, looking down the kudzu-covered gully toward the hidden beach far below and thinking back on those times. “We used to go along the side of the gully. We had a path all the way to the beach.”

As fascinating as Ryals’ story is about her encounter with a German submarine, so are the details she remembers of growing up in Fairhope during the late 1930s through the ’40s. She has vivid memories of the bowling alley where she worked, the long road she walked to school on Church Street, and of the scrap metal and rubber she and her siblings collected for the war effort and sold at the filling station on North Section Street.

She also has meticulous scrapbooks filled with hundreds of pictures from those years that help her tell the story of her father, Joseph R. Pennington Sr., who was a commercial fisherman with a seafood shop on Fairhope Avenue.

Her father was drafted into a civilian service in 1942, she said, and lived at Brookley Field, returning home by bus from across the bay to the Grand Avenue house one weekend a month. That service may have been the national Office of Civilian Defense or part of the State Defense Council, which had a large presence at Brookley Field, according to a number of sources, including Forth to the Mighty Conflict: Alabama and World War II by Allen Cronenberg.

It was during one of those trips home that Capt. Penny, as he was called, heard a fantastic story from his three children. Lila said he tested them on whether the story was true, but he finally came to believe after he saw it with his own eyes later that Friday night when he went down to the beach and waited with them.

Here’s the start of that story that he first heard from his three children on the screened porch of their house two doors up from North Mobile Street on the south side of Grand Avenue, where only a vacant lot exists now.

“Before we went to sleep one night, my brother saw something coming up out of the water,” Ryals said recently at her small Fairhope house on North Summit Street. “It was clearly visible. It was a big round-shaped bell thing coming to the surface out near what we called the Two Stakes. It came up and a top opened up and a man stood up in it, and he had either a mirror or some type of light that he used to flash signals up in the direction of Fly Creek or Sea Cliff.”

Her brother, who now lives in Loxley, told a story with very similar details during two telephone conversations this month.

“It looked like a one-man submarine to me,” Pennington said. “It looked like it had a little conning tower on it.”

When told that two historians, who have written extensively about that time and place, don’t believe it could have happened, neither Pennington nor his sister was dissuaded.

“No, it happened,” he said. “It absolutely happened.”

Neither Ryals nor her brother would budge from their memories of what they saw; what they told their father; and what happened after. Ryals’ sister was not contacted for this story because of illness, but Lila said her sister remembers it the same way.

“We saw it four or five different nights for a couple weeks until it was time for dad to come back,” she said. “I remember Buddy said, ‘We’ve got to tell daddy about this.’”

Be sure and get a copy of next week’s edition of this newspaper. There, in the second and final installment, we will tell the rest of three Fairhope children’s unlikely encounter with a German submarine in 1942.