A Summer in the Minor League, Part One

Sometimes it’s fun to just reminisce. During the summer of 1978 I had the opportunity to work for a tug and barge company called Interstate and Ocean Transport, colloquially known as Interstate or sometimes as IOT. Compared to the big-ship, deep-sea operations which were my primary interest, Interstate was a minor league fleet that operated small vessels mostly on inland waterways. But it was both fun and educational, and a great way to spend July and August before going back to school.

I had returned to the United States from Europe aboard the State of Maine on Thursday, June 29. The job with Interstate was set to begin shortly after the Fourth of July holiday. During a few days’ interval at home, I received instructions from the operations office in Philadelphia to report aboard the tug Charger in New Haven, Connecticut, on Thursday morning, July 6. The Chargerwas scheduled to sail at 6:00am, so I needed to get there early.

My parents were somewhat less than thrilled when I told them I needed to get a train at the Mineola station at two o’clock in the morning. But it had to be. In Penn Station I boarded the trusty Night Owl. That left Manhattan at 3:00am and after several stops delivered me to New Haven about 5:00am. A taxi then took me to the Charger at the Arco docks across the water from downtown New Haven.

Reporting aboard the Charger, I found that I was unexpected but welcome nonetheless. Most of the crew of seven were Southerners, and they extended their Southern hospitality toward me generously. Promptly at 6:00am, the Chargergot underway, made herself fast to the barge Interstate 35, and departed for Newark, New Jersey.

I was in seventh heaven as the Charger and Interstate 35 sailed through Long Island Sound, into the East River, across the Upper Bay, and then through the Kill van Kull and Newark Bay to Newark itself. I was cruising “home waters,” the waterways that make New York a seaport and Long Island an island. These waterways delineated my home area, yet even with a childhood of sailboating on the Great South Bay and numerous voyages aboard the Staten Island Ferry behind me, I had never ventured upon the local waters as much as I would aboard the Charger. Plowing through these waterways aboard a fairly small craft combined two normally disparate elements, being home and going to sea. Besides, the size of the Charger yielded a different experience of the sea. Being closer to the surface of the water made everything look, sound, and feel different. The motion of the vessel and the rush of the water past the hull became more intimate than they could be aboard a big ship. Because of this I also felt closer to the sea metaphysically.

The Charger arrived at the oil docks in Newark at 2:00pm. A relief crew of more Southerners was waiting to take over the vessel, and the men I had just met were leaving for home. The new group expected me. I introduced myself to Captain Alford Wilkins of North Carolina, and he outlined my duties for me. That first day I spent mostly familiarizing myself with everything. It was all very different from the State of Maine and the New Jersey Sun!

The Charger carried a crew of seven, plus me. There were the Captain, a mate, two deck seamen, two engineers, and a cook. The crew stood six-hour watches, both in port and underway. The Captain, one engineer, and one deck seaman had the 6 to 12 watch, and the mate and the other engineer and seaman took the 12 to 6 watch. Meals were served at the change of the watch. Rooming space was cramped. The Captain enjoyed the privilege of a private room. Otherwise, the engineers shared a room, the deck seamen shared a room, and the mate shared a room with me. Despite the crowding and tight scheduling, an informal and congenial atmosphere prevailed. The food was superb. The cook, a crusty old codger of the old school named Ira D. Sawyer with political opinions ranging from violently vituperative to the mildly vitriolic, took a liking to me. Fond of my adolescent appetite for good food, he piled my plate higher than everyone else’s. When I finished one serving, he would whisk away the empty plate and replace it with a full one before I could even think about asking for more. Once a week inch-thick steak was on the dinner menu. I understood that each crewman was allotted one such steak. Without asking for anything extra, though, I found myself being served steak after steak after steak until our cook would finally bark out, “Ain’t you full yet?!”

My duties aboard the Chargerconsisted principally of painting and cleaning. This was officially billed as work, but as it had a year ago aboard the New Jersey Sun, it seemed more like fun than labor. I started promptly after breakfast, about 6:15am, and with a few breaks worked until dinner time. The hours and the break times were flexible as long as the job got done, which it did. In three weeks I painted almost all the outside decks, bulkheads, and superstructure of the Charger. I got some help from the two seamen, but they had other duties to perform, such as linehandling and housecleaning. I helped with the lines sometimes, too, once I’d seen how everything was done with the barge. I enjoyed that, too, of course, but my main job was painting.

What the Charger did for a living was haul the barge Interstate 35 from the loading docks in the Newark area to different ports in the Northeast. The barge carried gasoline, and it was sent where it was needed. In my time on board, the Chargerand the Interstate 35 made four voyages to New Haven, three to Providence, Rhode Island, and three to Albany and Rensselaer, New York. While the barge was being unloaded in these ports, the tug would tie up nearby and wait. When the barge was being loaded in Newark, the tug often waited close by, but just as often was sent on errands to nearby points.

When the new crew came aboard in Newark on Thursday afternoon, they settled into their places quickly. At 12:30 that night, the Charger was lashed up to the stern of the fully loaded Interstate 35 and the duo set out again for New Haven, arriving there fourteen hours later at 2:30 Friday afternoon. I spent the day painting the upper deck and occasionally looking in on the bridge. Late in the afternoon I went ashore again in New Haven. At 10:00 that evening, the Charger took the now-empty Interstate 35 in tow astern and started back toward Newark.

Once underway the Charger’s instructions were changed. Bypassing Newark, she made for Gulfport, Staten Island, instead, and left the Interstate 35 at the big Gulf refinery there for partial loading at 6:00am Saturday. Then the Charger moored across the Arthur Kill at Tremley Point, New Jersey. Later in the day she retrieved the barge from Gulfport and delivered it to Newark. Finally, at 7:00pm and with a full load of gasoline, the Charger and the Interstate 35 set out together for Albany and Rensselaer. I spent the initial part of this voyage on the barge as the Charger pushed it through Newark Bay and past Bayonne. Looking around, asking questions, and taking notes, I considered this exploration part of my overall professional training. The two tankermen were glad of my company, and they told me everything I wanted to know about their work and more. They had a lonely job and were interested in anyone who was interested in them.

The Chargerand the Interstate 35 arrived in Albany and Rensselaer at 2:30pm Sunday. I wasn’t required to paint on Sundays, so I spent the day sightseeing on the bridge of the tug as she pushed the barge up the Hudson River. This was always a beautiful ride. The two vessels passed along the West Side of Manhattan with its famous finger piers, in the shadow of the New Jersey Palisades, through the widest part of the Hudson that the Dutch had named the Tappan Zee, past my father’s home town of Nyack by the Tappan Zee Bridge, through the twisting channels amid the Catskill Mountains, past the dramatic Catskill landmarks of Bear Mountain and Anthony’s Nose, and around West Point and the United States Military Academy. It was all truly breathtaking scenery! North of West Point the river widened and straightened again. The remainder of the route northward was less intense but still beautiful. On arrival the Charger nudged the barge alongside the oil docks in Rensselaer for unloading. Then she tied up alongside a wharf in the south end of Albany and waited.

At midnight on Sunday the Charger took the Interstate 35 in tow astern for the downstream voyage back to Newark and Tremley Point. After spending the next night in New Jersey, the two vessels were bound for Providence on Tuesday, and they arrived there at 7:00am Wednesday. After unloading the gasoline, the two vessels got underway again at 2:00pm Wednesday, arriving back in Newark at 7:30am Thursday. The return voyages with an empty barge always went faster than the outbound voyages with a full barge.

On these voyages I spent most of my daytime hours painting and watching the world pass by. On the New Haven and Providence runs, the Charger and the Interstate 35 transited the East River between Brooklyn and Queens and Manhattan and then between the Bronx and Queens before reaching the more open waters of Long Island Sound. This great inland sea carried both commercial and recreational traffic in considerable quantities—sailboats, motor boats, ferries, freighters, tankers, and tugs and barges. At the Sound’s western end lay the land formations of Great Neck and Manhasset Neck, the famous West Egg and East Egg of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Offshore of West Egg stood the diminutive lighthouse on the rocks called the Stepping Stones. Offshore of East Egg lay the Execution Rocks. The site of another lighthouse in the Charger’s day, this tiny island was the place where condemned criminals had been brought to be executed during the Colonial era. Farther along, the Cable and Anchor Reef and the Stratford Shoal interrupted the otherwise deep water of the middle Sound. At the eastern end lay the Race, a naturally narrow and very deep channel with strong tidal currents, tricky to navigate at maximum flood and ebb, and delineated by the well-situated Race Rock Lighthouse and Valiant Rock bell buoy.

On a typical day at sea, after dinner when my work was finished and while it was still daylight, I would go up to the bridge. I studied the charts and the radar, watched the maneuvering, learned the routings, and chatted with the Captain. Like the cook, Captain Wilkins was a man of strong convictions. His lively discourses covered a wide range of topics, including why the Civil War should never have been fought. He asserted that the North should have minded its own business and left the South alone in the 1860s. Both the North and the South would have been better off that way, and hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved, he argued. Since this discussion I’ve heard more Southerners, and a few Northerners as well, make similar remarks.

Such was life aboard the Charger, a succession of voyages along the inland waterways of New Jersey, New York, and New England. I loved this vagabond life! I was always going somewhere. I had a great outdoor job in good weather. I had a good crew, good food, minimal dress code, no haircut regulations, and an office with magnificent views of everything.

One of my favorite aspects of these voyages was passing under all the New York City and Hudson River bridges. If as Fitzgerald wrote, “The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time,”¹ then the city seen from beneath the Queensboro Bridge must carry even more weight. A unique way of seeing the town, there’s a certain thrill in sailing under a bridge that driving over one just doesn’t have. I had passed beneath bridges before, but never as many or as frequently as I did aboard the Charger. Besides the famous ones like the Brooklyn Bridge or the George Washington Bridge, the one that intrigued me the most was the Hell Gate Bridge. This is the railroad bridge that crosses the East River and connects the Bronx and Queens. It is used every day and night by the Amtrak trains that run between New York and Boston. As often as the Charger sailed beneath it, though, I never did witness the passing of a train over it.

But I did witness—and wait for—several freight trains crossing the Arthur Kill and Newark Bay. Long trains routinely crossed Newark Bay between Newark and Jersey City on the Lehigh Valley span, and the Charger waited patiently until the trains had passed and the bridge was raised. Occasionally a passenger train crossed Newark Bay between Bayonne and Elizabeth on the old Central Railroad of New Jersey span. The lives of both this bridge and its trains were drawing to a close. A year later the trains were discontinued, and the bridge itself has since been dismantled. Not far from this crossing stood the old Baltimore and Ohio Railroad bridge between Staten Island and New Jersey. This structure delayed the Charger only once, but for what seemed an eternity as the longest freight train imaginable rumbled across it going west.

As blissful as my time aboard the Charger was, it almost seemed too good too last. And it was going by very quickly. On Thursday, July 20, the crew changed again, this time in Albany. The first group which I had met two weeks previously in New Haven returned, and Captain Wilkins and his crew went home. Two weeks on and two weeks off—that was their schedule. Once aboard again, the returning crew brought the Charger and the Interstate 35 to Port Socony, Staten Island, for tank cleaning, arriving there early Friday morning.

Jaunts to Newark, Gulfport, Tremley Point, and into Sandy Hook Bay followed as the Interstate 35 was cleaned and loaded and as the Charger was fitted with a new radar. These were fascinating voyages along the back shore of Staten Island with its oil refineries, dumping grounds, and the ship graveyard at Smoking Point. There lay the beached and half-sunk remains of tugboats, barges, scows, and ferries that years ago had proudly plied the waters of New York Harbor. One tug, bearing its emblematic dignity even in its demise, still sported the insignia of the New York Central Railroad on its tall, slender funnel. A sad sight, these abandoned hulks, but an historically accurate one that reflected the decline of the port, the railroads, the passenger ferries, and the Merchant Marine’s role in American civilization.

Happily, though, the coastwise tanker fleet was still doing a brisk business. Taking my cue from my experiences aboard the New Jersey Sun the previous summer, I noted all the oil tankers I saw in the various oil ports that the Charger and Interstate 35 visited. Where there were refineries and tank farms, there were tank ships delivering the product. Texaco had a big facility in Bayonne. Gulf and Mobil had even larger establishments on Staten Island. And scattered along the shore line from Perth Amboy to Newark were several oil terminals of lesser renown. Tankers belonging to the major American oil companies were docked at these facilities, and I relished the sight of them. Their names read like a roll call: Gulfpride, Gulfoil, Exxon Bangor, Exxon Chester, Texas Connecticut, Texas Montana, Louisiana Getty, and my favorite, the Pennsylvania Sun. This ship in particular brought back many pleasant memories of my time the previous year aboard her fleet mate, the New Jersey Sun.

As with many things that seem too good to last, my sojourn aboard the Charger came to an abrupt and unexpected end on Thursday, July 27.

It was the proverbial bad end to a good day. The Charger and the Interstate 35 had left Albany and Rensselaer at 1:30am. After a busy but peaceful voyage down the Hudson River, I had the singular honor of seeing the passenger ships America and Queen Elizabeth 2 moored on the West Side of Manhattan. My grandparents had sailed on the America from Le Havre to New York in 1955. Back then she belonged to the United States Lines fleet. Since then, however, she had been sold to a foreign company and had fallen on hard times. I was elated at seeing these two grandes dames of the Atlantic, and my spirits remained buoyant as the Charger delivered the Interstate 35 first to Port Socony and then to Gulfport. As the barge was filled with gasoline, the tug went to Tremley Point to wait.

After dinner, while the Charger was still tied up there, I slipped and fell as I was stepping through a hatchway from a ladder onto the upper deck. My right leg came down hard on the steel hatch combing. This impact cut the skin open and left a bad bruise. Fortunately, though, the bone was not broken. With some assistance from the cook and the engineer, I applied some goo to the wound and taped it shut. The bleeding eventually stopped, but we all thought the injury would require stitches. In a consultation with the Captain, we decided that I should go home and have it professionally examined and treated. When I was able at a later date, I would rejoin the Charger.

Leaving most of my belongings on board, I took a taxi from Tremley Point to the Pennsylvania Railroad Station in downtown Newark. I caught a train into New York, called my parents to explain the situation, and then boarded the next train for home. My parents met me on the platform at Mineola. They were very worried, and they wasted no time getting me to the emergency room at the nearby Nassau Hospital.

The most painful thing about this accident was the fact that it happened. It was an extremely inconvenient and even stupid occurrence. Everything had been going splendidly for me aboard the Charger up to this point. I was having so much fun, merrily painting the tugboat and vagabonding along the various waterways of the Northeast. I was expecting to remain aboard the Charger and sail with her through the rest of the summer until it became time to return to school in Maine. I was sorely disappointed to have to leave the tug because of an accident. But I had no choice.

The emergency room at the hospital was not very busy.. The Doctor on duty examined the wound and decided that stitches were in order. My parents waited and worried as he sewed me up with seven stitches. Afterwards, he instructed me to rest with the leg elevated for the next several days.

Well, I rested on Friday and passed the time chatting with my grandfather about my recent travels. That morning the Captain of the Charger called the house via the radiotelephone. He was hoping that I would come back on board soon. Unfortunately, I had to tell him otherwise. On Saturday, I felt better and went out. After this, my parents insisted that I follow the Doctor’s instructions to the letter; consequently, I remained quite idle for the next several days. By the first week I August, I was getting really tired of resting!

On Thursday, August 3, I went to Doctor Lemonides, our family physician, to have the stitches removed. He took some out, but left some in, and he called for more rest while the laceration continued healing. I had other ideas, though, and I called the Interstate offices in Philadelphia and said that I would be ready to return to the Charger very soon. On Saturday the 5th, Doctor Lemonides removed the remaining stitches. That evening my parents went away on vacation, something they had planned and paid for in advance. This left me more or less on my own.

After a few telephone calls with the folks in the Interstate offices, I received my instructions for returning to work. I would go to Philadelphia on Wednesday, August 9, and meet the Charger there. I would collect my belongings and then begin a new assignment aboard the barge Interstate 50 operating on the Delaware River and Bay. And that is another story!

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¹ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925, p. 63. This was one of my favorite books when I was young. I read it and reread it more times than I can count!

The Pier Head Jump

Once in a while, there is a great, big, mad rush to join a ship. Someone on a ship thousands of miles away gets sick, or he quits, or he dies, or something else happens. Then, the powers that be back in the home office must scramble to find a replacement and somehow get him to the ship. Usually this rush job comes after too many months of shore leave—in other words, unemployment—and the guy receiving the phone call accepts the assignment because he’s desperate to go back to sea. So on ten seconds’ notice, he packs his bags, leaves his family, joins a ship, and spends innumerable months traipsing across the world’s oceans because he’s deathly afraid that if he dares to take another vacation he won’t be able to get another ship again afterwards. So much for job security!

In the old days, a pier head jump was just that. A seaman would be recruited from a union hall, a park bench, or even from his own home, and sent by taxi to join a ship locally. If the ship was still at the pier, he just walked up the gangway. If the ship had already left, the new guy could jump off the pier onto a waiting tugboat, or possibly the pilot boat, and be delivered to the ship before it got too far away. Since the advent of the jet aircraft, however, the phrase has taken on a more figurative meaning.

Loosely speaking, I made something of a pier head jump many years ago. Overall, it fit this description pretty well, except that I did have some advance notice. That gave it the added measure of the hurry-up-and-wait syndrome. In the shipping business this is also known as the I-can’t-believe-they’re-doing-this-to-me situation. Among the seamen’s families it’s called the time-for-these-guys-to-take-up-different-work-ashore.

I picked up my new license as second mate at the Coast Guard office in Boston on Monday, March 29, 1982. That was such a happy occasion! Two days later, I called the crewing office in Bayonne, New Jersey, and told Mr. W. that I had passed the exams and gotten the license and was ready to return to sea. I had been home for three months since leaving the Victoria, and it was now time to go. When I had left the Victoria, it was with the understanding that I would spend two to three months working on the next license and then ship out again right after that was finished. Mr. W. remembered, took everything down, and promised to get back to me.

The following week I called Mr. W. again. Things were really slow, he told me. Wouldn’t I like to spend some more time at home? Well, I did have some work to do on the house, painting and carpentry and related items. So I stayed put a little longer, and then a little longer, and still a little longer. By the beginning of May, I was starting to feel desperate. Then the word came. Mr. W. had five ships that would soon need second mates. In the meantime, I could come into the office, get my medical checkup done, go to small arms school and refresher firefighting training, and then get ready to ship out. That sounded good, so I accepted the offer.

It felt great to get back on the payroll again. Unfortunately, it lasted only two weeks. Towards the end of May the five ships that needed second mates had somehow disappeared. With no realistic prospects for shipping out anytime soon, I returned to Nashua and took a janitorial job with General Floor Service, Incorporated, for the purely practical purpose of acquiring an income. Anything to fend off destitution, I thought. In retrospect, I wonder if this is what Isaiah meant by “the bread of adversity” (Isa. 30:20).

My new job started on June 1, the day after the Memorial Day weekend. I had a brand new license as second mate of steam and motor vessels of any gross tonnage on any ocean which I was very anxious to use, and there I was vacuuming carpets, waxing floors, and dumping garbage for a living! But it paid good hard cash which I desperately needed. And sure enough, a week after I started this new career, I received a phone call from the office in Bayonne.

This time it was Mr. A. The Waccamaw needed a new third mate. Was I interested? Of course I was! Then the stalling started. Mr. A. wasn’t sure about just when or where the other guy wanted to leave the ship, and the ship’s schedule was constantly changing, and he wanted to give me the job, but I might have to go on really short notice, and he didn’t know if I could do that because I lived so far away in New Hampshire, but he would keep in touch and let me know what developed, etc., etc., etc. I didn’t tell Mr. A. this, but I didn’t believe a single word of what he said. Remembering the five ships that needed second mates and then mysteriously disappeared, I told Mr. A. about my new job. I explained that my finances were such that I could not quit and go into Bayonne on a lark. I wanted to ship out again, yes, but I simply could not give up even a menial job unless he really and truly had a ship for me. Until that became absolutely certain, I needed to continue cleaning floors and emptying trash. In other words, Mr. A. needed to face reality and treat this situation seriously.

While Mr. A. thought about this, I continued working for General Floor Service. I did the after-hours shift, from 5:30pm to 1:30am five nights a week at the Digital Equipment Corporation’s two big buildings in Merrimack, New Hampshire. In all fairness, this job was enjoyable, at least up to a point. I did not have any serious responsibility; I simply did as I was told. I did not supervise anyone, so I did not need to deal with personnel problems. If someone came to work drunk, or didn’t come to work at all, or came to work and didn’t work, well, it wasn’t my problem! At the same time, though, I had no desire to make a career of the janitorial business. I really wanted to go back to sea. After all, that was my chosen profession.

After a couple of weeks, Mr. A. called back. He needed me to come into the office. When did he need me? “Well, you really should have been here yesterday,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I replied, “but I can’t help you with that.” Privately I wondered, what is going on here? Why would anyone call and tell me today that he needs me yesterday? In the discussion that followed it came out that I had a choice of flying to Greece yesterday and joining the Waccamaw in Soudha Bay on the north coast of Crete, or flying to Italy and joining the ship in Augusta Bay on the east coast of Sicily a few days from now. The third possibility was that I would go to Soudha or maybe another location not yet known and join the ship there, either before or after she went to Augusta. Whatever the logistics, it started to seem definite that I would finally ship out soon. Given these choices, I opted for Augusta. I had been there before on the Rigel. I knew the place, and it was easier to get to than Soudha.

I gave my notice—very short notice, too—at General Floor Service. Not fully believing that I would soon return to sea, I stayed on the new job until the last minute. On Monday afternoon, June 21, I reported for my final shift. I finished at 1:30am Tuesday, the 22nd. After a few hours’ sleep, Miss Patty and I left Manchester, New Hampshire, at 6:45am on Bar Harbor Airlines. We arrived at New York LaGuardia at 8:25am. My parents met us there with a car.

Without any delay, I drove to Bayonne and checked in at the company offices. Miss Patty accompanied me. She had grown accustomed to having me home, and after six months she felt reluctant to see me go away again. But the Waccamaw would arrive in Augusta tomorrow morning, and I absolutely needed to leave tonight in order to join her. I spent my time in the office taking care of paperwork, airline tickets, and a brief interview with the Port Captain. The atmosphere there was of a rush job being done at a snail’s pace. A hurried phone call from the supervisor got the snails going: “This mate’s gotta fly out tonight to meet a ship!! We gotta get him processed right away!! He’s gonna need airline tickets!! Tell those guys in the travel section they can’t take a two-hour lunch today!!!”

Afterwards, we went back home to the family headquarters on Long Island. I was booked on a TWA flight that was scheduled to leave JFK for Rome at about 7:00pm. Happily, then, the family, including my grandfather, had part of the afternoon together before it became time to leave for the airport.

My father drove me into JFK along with my mother and Miss Patty. I had not thought of this before, but June 22 was the tourist season and everyone was traveling. The TWA building was a madhouse. I joined the mob to check in for my flight. Then a security agent approached me and asked where I was going. When I told him “Rome,” he said “Oh, you’re okay, then.” And he moved on to the next passenger. Looking around out of curiosity, I saw that this mob of people was really two check-in lines for two flights merged together. The other flight was bound for Israel. All the passengers going there were having their suitcases opened and searched right in the middle of the concourse. The floor of the terminal building was covered with opened and spilled luggage being sifted through by travellers and security guards on their hands and knees. The place was a mess!

With my check-in complete and a boarding pass in my hand, the four of us went upstairs to the waiting area by the gate through which I would soon leave. This spot was much calmer and quieter than the concourse downstairs. In those days, family members and friends could accompany travellers right up to the gate. Also, there were still large windows of clear glass in the waiting areas, so we could see the airplane when it arrived and parked at the gate. When the time came, we said our good-byes. My wife and parents watched as I walked down the corridor to the waiting 747. Then they went their way as I went mine. None of us had any idea when we would see each other again.

Once aboard the aircraft I found my way to my assigned seat, on the aisle but in the interior cluster of seats, not next to a window, and in the smoking section. I had been hoping to sleep as the plane crossed the Atlantic. As the other passengers came aboard, though, I began to realize that sleep would be unlikely. The level of jovial conversation and raucous laughter among all these people who were obviously going away on vacation rose to a dull roar and remained there except for during taxiing and takeoff. A carnival atmosphere prevailed. Dinner and duty-free shopping only added to the festivity. I became convinced that I was the only passenger who was there for work and not frivolity! Somehow I did doze off for a little while, but by the time the aircraft landed in Rome, I felt exhausted.

In the early daylight hours of Wednesday, June 23, the 747 landed at the big airport near Rome. On disembarking I felt very disconcerted. I was accustomed to crossing the Atlantic in ten days, not in less than ten hours! To be in another country with a different language, culture, monetary system, and time zone after a mere overnight journey was just too much! In a daze, then, I walked through the airport, fully able to read all the directional signs in Italian. I needed first to present my passport to a customs official, and then find my connecting flight to Catania on Alitalia. It seemed simple enough, and as I awakened more it became even simpler. I realized then that there were directional signs in English as well as Italian!

In the Alitalia terminal I met three unlicensed seamen who were also going to the Waccamaw. One was an engine room mechanic, loud and outspoken about everything; another was a steward’s utilityman from Puerto Rico who spoke little English; the third was an able seaman, Glenn Best, an older black gentleman who would turn out to be one of the finest men I ever sailed with. He was intelligent and industrious, and also calm and level-headed in all situations. We had all been on the TWA 747 from New York but did not know it. No one in Bayonne had said anything about traveling companions. In mid-morning we boarded an Alitalia DC-9 for the 45-minute flight to Sicily. This time I had a window seat, and the scenic highlight of the journey was circling the famous Monte Etna before landing on the plains of Catania.

At the small airfield near Catania we collected our luggage, went through an informal customs inspection, and engaged a taxi driver to bring us to Augusta. This was an exciting ride, dodging the chaotic Sicilian traffic amid the Sicilian hills. We anticipated that our taxi driver would deliver us directly to the Waccamaw at the oil docks across the bay from the medieval city of Augusta. Cresting the last hill on the outskirts of town at about 1:30pm, we beheld a panoramic view of the city and the entire bay before us. As the taxi started rushing downhill, our driver, in a moment of exhilaration, took both his hands off the steering wheel, spread his arms wide, and exclaimed, “Ahghooostah!!!” It was indeed a beautiful view, but one thing was missing. The Waccamaw was not in port.

We looked vainly in every direction including out to sea, but the Waccamaw simply was not there. We had come all this way for nothing! On arrival at the oil docks the taxi driver asked the dock workers about the ship. Some animated discussion in rude Sicilian followed. Finally, he said he would bring us to the harbor master’s office in the city. There were people there who could fix things up.

We rode along the shoreline around the north side of the bay, through the old city gate and winding narrow streets to the harbor master’s office on the waterfront. Making inquires in bad Italian and not much better English, we were asked to wait a few minutes while the man in charge looked into things. The outspoken engine room mechanic in our group had become quite agitated, perhaps almost panic-stricken, by the Waccamaw’s absence, and it showed in this interval. Glenn and I tried to calm him down, but to little avail. After what seemed like a long wait, someone came out and spoke with us. He explained that the Waccamaw had indeed been due in port that morning, but some unscheduled operational requirements had delayed her. Instead, the ship would arrive at the pilot station at 9:00am tomorrow. This man seemed puzzled and surprised that we had been sent so early to meet the ship. Didn’t the support staff in Bayonne know where the ship was? Wasn’t the home office was in daily communication with the fleet?

With little to do but wait for our ship to come in, we retired to a nearby waterfront café. The other three fellows went indoors. I lounged outside in the warm Mediterranean sunshine with all our luggage, including my sextant in its mahogany box. As the lone licensed officer in the group, I felt responsible for handling this situation wisely, and I did not want any luggage to disappear while everyone was eating and drinking. After a while Glenn Best came outside and relieved me. After some refreshment, three of us took a walk around the town while the engine room fellow minded the luggage. It was siesta time and the city was fairly quiet. Most of the shops were closed, but we found a money changer who was open. When we told him we were waiting for the Waccamaw, he jumped up from his table, danced gleefully around the room in circles, and shouted excitedly, “Wacaamaw!! Waccamaw!! Waccamaw!!” It was quite a sight.

Back at the café, someone from the harbor master’s office met us with a taxi. We were to be lodged in a fancy hotel on one of the hills just north of the city, and the taxi would deliver us. The next day, the taxi would return for us and bring us to the ship. What great service! And even better, it was free! The taxi, the hotel, and the meals would all be billed to our employer through the harbor master’s office.

So away we went in an air-conditioned Mercedes-Benz taxi—an unprecedented luxury—out through the old medieval gate and into the Sicilian hills. I felt quite relaxed about everything by now. Someone else had taken responsibility for our plight, and we were being housed and fed instead of being left to languish on a wharf. Then the one embarrassing and unpleasant moment of the day took place. Our steward’s utilityman from Puerto Rico who spoke little English started antagonizing the taxi driver in Spanish, which he understood, although he replied in Italian, which our crewmate understood. The rest of us didn’t know enough of either language to follow the conversation, but the tones of voice became increasingly obnoxious. Finally, the driver had enough. Banging his fists against the steering wheel, he shouted in fairly good English, “Dat’s enough!! No more!! I no wanta understand no more!! You got it?!” At this outburst our crewmate had the good sense to sit back and shut up, for which the rest of us were grateful.

At the hotel the steward’s utilityman and the engine room mechanic shared one room while Glenn Best and I shared another. They went their way and we went ours. Glenn and I took dinner together, a big buffet in the hotel dining room. This was very pleasant. He was good company and we got along very well. He was old enough to be my father, yet with my license I could be his boss. These social disparities evaporated in an atmosphere of mutual respect and courtesy, though. If only life could always be this way!

Being by this time overtired but well-fed, I slept very soundly that night. Promptly at six o’clock the next morning, I awoke to racket of a cat fight outside our hotel room window. These were not women, but real cats viciously screeching and howling at each other. It was Thursday, June 24, and the new day was announcing itself. At breakfast, a hotel clerk informed us that our taxi driver would come for us at 10:30am. He took us directly from the hotel to the oil docks. We watched as the Waccamaw arrived, behind schedule again, at 12:00 noon. It felt really good to finally see her! At 6:00pm the Rigel, also behind schedule, arrived and tied up directly across the pier from the Waccamaw.

I relieved the outgoing third mate and got to work promptly that afternoon. At ten o’clock the next morning, Friday the 25th, the Waccamaw sailed from Augusta bound initially for Port Said, Egypt. While this itinerary would change within 24 hours, the impressions made by my recent experiences would not.

The scriptures tell us, “We have learned by sad experience” (D&C 121:39). Three months of delays, empty promises, stalling, should-have-been-here-yesterday, and hurry-up-and-wait before finally getting a ship are not readily forgotten. I initially agreed to stay on the Waccamaw for six months, but I remained for thirteen, three as third mate and ten as second mate, until July 22, 1983. During this time she sailed the Mediterranean, transatlantic, coastwise, and the Caribbean, and underwent a shipyard overhaul in Norfolk. Like many mates before me, I feared never shipping out again if I took a vacation. After more than a year, though, I really needed a break. I could have returned to the Mediterranean with the Waccamaw, but having had enough for a while, I opted to finally go on vacation instead. This time vacation worked out much better. After three months ashore and no delays, I shipped out again aboard the Comet on October 28.

Flying High

Lest anyone get the idea that I dislike air travel, I don’t. But I do need to clarify a few points.

In the early days, I often travelled by air between my home in New York and school in Maine. Afterwards, most of my airplane rides have taken place because of ships, usually either going away to join a ship or returning home from a ship. The science of flight—airmanship, navigation, and the principle of physics that makes it all possible—I find fascinating. The idea of holding a heavier-than-air object aloft by a difference in air pressure on the upper and lower wing surfaces is intriguing, a wonderful example of a highly abstract concept yielding very tangible and practical results. Aeronavigation, similar by nature and in practice to shipboard navigation, is also very interesting, as are the mechanical means by which a solid object is maneuvered through a fluid medium, whether air or water. The laws of physics and mathematics govern it all, hence both ship and airplane operations are rigorously logical disciplines.

What I dislike about air travel is not the travel itself but some of the human factors that have become part of it. I don’t like mob scenes at airports. I don’t appreciate being treated like a criminal by megalomaniacal security personnel. I don’t like the cattle car atmosphere of some airlines. And I don’t enjoy the company of seat mates who talk incessantly about nothing or who can’t keep their elbows out of my ribs. Otherwise, I really do enjoy flying, and I always have. With a window seat in the non-smoking section and fellow passengers who behave themselves, an aerial journey can be very pleasant indeed.

Some of my favorite flights took place with Bar Harbor Airlines in the 1970s. This company, now long gone, operated a fleet of small commuter airplanes between Boston and various points in Maine and Quebec. The mainstay of the fleet was the Beechcraft 99, an unpressurized, low-altitude, dual-propeller aircraft. It carried perhaps fifteen passengers in small single seats on each side of a narrow central aisle. It also had big windows and a cockpit open to the passenger cabin. Visibility was thus excellent. On takeoffs and landings, I could look out the front and share the pilots’ view of the approaches and navigational lights and runways ahead. Bar Harbor also named all its aircraft, which I thought was a nice personal touch. I travelled aboard airplanes with locally exotic names such as State of Maine, City of Bangor, The Portlander, Aroostook Flyer, La Ville de Quebec, and La Ville de Sherbrooke proudly emblazoned on their tails

I rode on these aircraft several times between Bangor and Boston, usually but not always with a stop in Augusta. My most memorable of these journeys took place on Friday, December 16, 1977, aboard The Portlander. This flight ran nonstop from Bangor to Boston in an hour and five minutes. After flying overland from Bangor to the coast, The Portlander then flew over the ocean parallel to and only a short distance from the shoreline. I had a seat on the starboard side, and with a clear sky and excellent visibility enjoyed a truly magnificent view of the coast line from about Wiscasset all the way to Boston. All the harbors, beaches, and rocky outcroppings of Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts were visible in detail. As the plane flew past Bath, I could with ease pick out my brother’s old house on Wesley Street in back of the Methodist church. He had lived there a few years previously when stationed at the nearby Brunswick Naval Air Station, and it had been the site of several family gatherings. As I contemplated these memories, The Portlander flew on and finally landed at Boston Logan Airport, a tiny speck of an aircraft amid a sea of sprawling concrete runways and taxiways.

Less scenically interesting but more ambitious were a few long flights over the Atlantic Ocean. I’ve made a total of two and a half transatlantic flights. The two were commercial runs aboard 747s operated by Trans World Airlines, the old TWA, which is now long gone. On the first of these I was returning to New York from London after leaving the Wilkes in Southampton, England, on Friday evening, January 23, 1981. On the second, I was going overnight from New York to Italy to join the Waccamaw. This one left JFK on Tuesday, June 22, 1982, and arrived in Rome early the next morning. On both occasions it felt quite disconcerting to get across an ocean so quickly—too quickly, really—and be suddenly disgorged onto another continent with a different language, culture, monetary system, time zone, etc. But that’s another story.

The half transatlantic flight was really just that; it went halfway across the Atlantic. Enroute to join the General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, I travelled aboard a Air Force C-5 cargo airplane with four or five other new crewmen. This flight was operated by the Military Airlift Command from Patrick Air Force Base in Florida to Ascension Island with an intermediate stop in Antigua. The pilots, navigator, and engineer were commissioned Air Force officers. The passenger and cargo attendants were enlisted men.

I arrived at Patrick in mid-morning on Wednesday, September 12, 1979, many hours in advance of the flight’s departure time. No one would tell me when the plane was scheduled to leave, just “Be back here around 3:00 o’clock.” With about six hours to kill, I went to the beach, went to the base library, and went out to lunch, all of which were within walking distance of the air terminal. At 3:00pm I returned to the check-in spot for the flight and met the other fellows who were going to the Vandenberg. We got in line, turned in our paperwork, emptied our pockets, and put our suitcases up on tables where they were opened and inspected thoroughly. When they were repacked, we were led outside and across the tarmac to the waiting aircraft. The flight crew then directed us up the steps and aboard the airplane.

I realized quickly that I was not travelling first class. The passengers’ seats were situated just behind the cockpit. They did not recline. They faced backwards. There were no windows. The only view was of containers of cargo lashed to the deck and the fuselage. I had known that passenger airplanes were often referred to as cattle cars in the sky, but this was a baggage car! I discovered that if I turned around in my seat I could with difficulty see up the small aisle and out the windows in the front of the airplane. At least the pilots have windows, I thought. But even this small luxury did not last. At departure time they closed the cockpit door. The next daylight I saw was in Antigua when they let us off the plane for a break.

From the airstrip in Antigua we passengers were bused to a little village where we got a free dinner. It felt nice to dine al fresco in the tropics after being cooped up in the sky for so long. After a while we were bussed back to the airplane and it took off for the long haul to Ascension Island, midway between West Africa and Brazil. Since it was an overnight flight, I curled up as comfortably as possible and went to sleep. I didn’t have anything else to do anyway. After I woke up, at some point over the Atlantic, my fellow passengers expressed their envy of my youth and ability to sleep so soundly. They had been uncomfortably tossing and turning in their seats while I merrily slumbered on! The crew then distributed box lunches to us. In all fairness to the much maligned airline food, these were actually quite good.

Soon afterwards, the aircraft started its descent for Ascension, and it landed on time at 8:00am, Thursday, September 13. Emerging from the airplane once again, I beheld the looming brown mountains, all extinct volcanoes, of Ascension Island. I also felt very grateful that we’d had a good, competent navigator in the air crew. He had successfully found this tiny speck of an island in the midst of the vast blue reaches of the Atlantic. He knew his business and it showed!

I travelled only this one time with the Military Airlift Command. Closer to home, a company that I flew with regularly was Piedmont Airlines. Styling itself “The up and coming airline,” Piedmont connected the mid-Atlantic states with New York, Boston, and other major cities. It’s long gone now, though. I rode on Piedmont’s fleet of Boeing 737s going to and from the Rigel, the Mercury, and the Waccamaw. A few of these journeys were scenic standouts.

I recall several occasions when I took Piedmont between Norfolk, Virginia, and either LaGuardia or Newark Airports in the New York area. The nonstop flight took just over an hour and passed over the Delmarva Peninsula between the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays. From a window seat on the appropriate side of the aircraft, I gazed down upon the rural landscape that turned first to wetlands and then to sandy beaches interrupted by inlets. Then the broad Atlantic stretched eastward. It was always a very lovely sight, bracketed by Cape Charles to the south and Cape Henlopen to the north. It was also a calm and peaceful view, a quiet and sparsely populated area sandwiched by bays and far from the urban commotion of Norfolk, New Jersey, and New York. I followed this route about ten times between 1979 and 1983, and I never grew tired of it.

One evening, I did something different. During the Christmas and New Year’s holidays of 1982-1983, the Waccamaw remained idle at the Naval Supply Center piers in Norfolk. Able to take a few days off, I flew home for a brief family visit. I returned to the ship on New Year’s Day, 1983, on connecting Piedmont flights from Boston to Richmond to Norfolk. The first of these took off from Boston about 8:00pm, travelled southwest over Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Long Island, and then went out over the Atlantic toward New Jersey.  I had a window seat on the starboard side. Through the crystal clear night sky I beheld in magnificent illumination the western half of Long Island, New York City, and northern New Jersey. The ocean and harbor waterways contrasted in black with the incandescence of the city and its suburbs. It was a truly spectacular view, beyond comparison to any other view of New York. Unfortunately, it receded more quickly than I would have liked as the aircraft sped on toward Richmond. The rest of the journey, while comfortable and pleasant, was anticlimactic after this breathtaking sight.

Less dramatic and more routine were the domestic flights I made on Delta Air Lines in the 1970s and 80s. It was often aboard Delta 727s that I travelled between New York and Maine. Later on, I rode with Delta while assigned to the Victoria, the Comet, the Saturn, and the Bartlett. I always liked Delta, probably more for sentimental than sightseeing reasons. My very first airplane ride took place with Delta in January of 1976, from JFK to Bangor with a stop in Boston.¹ I recall my astonishment at arriving in Boston in about fifty minutes. Three weeks earlier, I had ridden the all-stops overnight train from Boston to New York. That had taken five hours.

Delta got me off to a good start, and in the end I made more flights on Delta than on any other airline. Many of these took place at night, and on a variety of airplanes including the Lockheed Tri-Star 1011, the largest aircraft in their fleet. I rode this one from Atlanta to New York to Boston in the midnight hours of Saturday, October 31, 1981, the night before Halloween. During the stop at JFK at about 3:00am, it seemed that the pilots had to taxi the plane all over the airport to reach the terminal. During this joyride I saw the British Airways’ Concorde for the first time. A sleek and elegant looking aircraft, she reposed under a battery of floodlights and was indeed an impressive sight. Years later, my children would take a liking to both the British and French Concordes when they would see them fly over their grandparents’ house while preparing to land at JFK.

Finally, I rode the famous Eastern Shuttle a few times between Boston and New York. In its day the shuttle was an aviation icon, but it’s been gone for a long while now. I remember one flight in particular, on a brilliantly clear and sunlit Sunday afternoon, May 25, 1985. I had a window seat on the port side as the plane took off from LaGuardia and headed east over Long Island. This gave me an unlimited view of the North Shore of Long Island, of Long Island Sound, and of coastal Connecticut and Rhode Island. It was truly beautiful. In about twenty minutes the aircraft reached Orient Point. Then it turned slightly northeastward and soon afterwards flew overland toward Boston. As I gazed down upon the Island, the Sound, and southern New England, I thought of how often my family and I had traversed this area by automobile, by train, by ship, and by airplane. In the future, my children would also traverse this area many times while going to and from their grandparents’ house. They would come to especially enjoy crossing Long Island Sound on the ferries between Connecticut and Long Island.

But while this family tradition still lay far in the future, the future had a way of coming very quickly. This Eastern Shuttle flight to Boston passed much too quickly, as did all the journeys of my vagabond youth. So many years have come and gone. So many airlines have come and gone with them. Delta has survived, but Piedmont, Eastern, Trans World, Bar Harbor, and numerous others have vanished. Likewise, many shipping companies have come and gone. Iconic names like American Export, American President, Moore-McCormack, United States Lines, and many others have disappeared. The passage of time has not always been kind to the transportation industry.

Nonetheless, it has been a privilege to travel across the vast globe by both sea and air, to see first-hand “the beauty of the earth”² on which we live as well as “the beauty of the skies.”³ While professionally I have no future in the transportation business, I can still happily sign on as a passenger from time to time and enjoy the benefits without the responsibilities!

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¹ This probably took place on Sunday afternoon, January 11, 1976, but I can’t say with certainty because I had not yet learned the virtue of meticulous record-keeping!
² Folliott S. Pierpont, “For the Beauty of the Earth,” in Hymns of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1985.
³ Ibid.

The Shipping News

For many years The New York Times ran a daily page carrying news of the shipping industry. Located toward the back of the main section of the paper, this page contained news articles concerning merchant shipping and notices of the arrivals and departures of ships in New York Harbor. The news articles were fairly prosaic, involving freight rates, schedule changes, service adjustments, weather reports, and so on. The arrivals and departures were presented in tabular form. These tables listed every commercial ship and military transport vessel, its time and date of arrival or departure, its pier, and its voyage’s destination or port of origin. Sometimes entire itineraries would be listed if a ship was scheduled to make several port calls on the same voyage. In addition, it listed arrivals and departures for selected foreign and American West Coast ports.

There was nothing artistic or literary about this writing. It was strictly business. Today, however, it’s history. The names of the world famous passenger liners as well as the names of comparatively unknown freighters and tankers filled these pages as if they were a social register. In an era when the vast majority of the passengers, mail, and cargo crossed the oceans by ship instead of by airplane, the names of the ships and their times and piers of arrival and departure were important news items.

Here’s an example. Going back 56 years, we read that the passenger ship Nieuw Amsterdam of the Holland-America Line sailed at 12:00 noon on Friday, June 21, 1957, from Hoboken. She was scheduled to arrive at Southampton, England, on the following Friday, June 28, and then call at Le Havre, France, later that same day. Continuing her voyage, the ship would arrive at her home port of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on Saturday, June 29.1

This routine transatlantic voyage interests me because my grandparents, Robert Burns and Julia Murphy, made this sailing in order for my grandfather to attend an engineering conference in Switzerland. They disembarked from the Nieuw Amsterdam in Le Havre, took a train to Paris, and after a few days there resumed their journey. When his business was completed, they travelled by train to Genova, Italy, where on Sunday, July 14, they embarked on the Italian Line’s Cristoforo Colombo. This vessel subsequently delivered them to the passenger piers on the West Side of Manhattan at 9:00am on Tuesday, July 23, 1957.

Day after day and voyage after voyage, this tabular data of arrivals and departures indicate that merchant shipping was a big business. The movement of passengers, merchandise, and mail across the world’s oceans commanded the attention of millions of people who had a personal or financial interest in the shipping. For my grandparents’ travels, this news was important to the family twice a year—the voyage out and the voyage back—for about thirteen years. For many others, it was a livelihood. Hence the importance of devoting daily an entire page of a major metropolitan newspaper to this information. But now, it’s history.

For me, it’s a very interesting history. The shipping news combines my family’s history and my affinity for the things of the sea. Big ships, long voyages, exciting destinations—these are some of the finest things in life! Sailing to Europe is always so much more enjoyable and adventurous, even if it takes longer, than strapping oneself into an airplane seat and getting there overnight. I have flown to Europe once and flown back from Europe once. I’ve sailed there and back many more times. Sailing is definitely better. My grandparents agreed. They certainly had the option of flying, and they did cross the Atlantic a few times by air in the mid 1960s, but they strongly preferred to travel by sea.

Here’s another example. In 1956 they sailed aboard the American Export Lines’ Constitution for the first time. Departing from Pier 84 at the foot of West 44th Street in Manhattan on Saturday, September 1, she called at Algeceras, Spain, on Friday, September 7, and at Cannes, France, and Genova, Italy, on Sunday, September 9. My grandparents disembarked in Genova.

They liked American Export and the Constitution so much that beginning in 1959 they sailed almost exclusively with this company. That year they returned to New York from Genova aboard the Independence, the Constitution’s twin sister. These are the ships that I remember from the 1960s. I was a small child then, but old enough to find everything about these great liners fascinating. On sailing day I spent hours wandering around these vessels with my family, examining everything and asking many questions before the ritual call of “All ashore that’s going ashore” was sounded.

But this is digression.² The shipping news pages in The New York Times call to mind a bygone era, when travel by sea was the norm, not the adventurous exception. It was a time when a person would speak literally of “when my ship comes in.” Shipping was a far-reaching business, a way of life, not just a vacation cruise or a novelty. From the humblest ferry crossing the Hudson River to the grand Queen Mary, vessels of all sizes, shapes, and purposes dominated the waterways. This changed as bridges and tunnels increasingly replaced ferries and the airlines became the mainstay for overseas travel. Ships do remain, of course, and they carry the freight and the petroleum the world uses, but so much of this is so far from public view that it is largely unknown. I’ve met people who honestly had no idea how all the Japanese automobiles arrived in the United States!

To read the shipping news, then, is to step back in time. Scrolling through reels of microfilm researching the ships and the voyages of my grandparents’ travels, I become absorbed by the lists of vessels arriving and departing from New York. The data, while tabular, is not impersonal. Merchant ships with names and personalities stand out on the pages. The American flagship United States; the two Queens of the Cunard Line; the –dam ships of Holland-America, including the Statendam, Noordam, Westerdam, and Nieuw Amsterdam, aboard all of which my grandparents sailed; the pragmatic Swedish Gripsholm and her fleet mates; the diminutive Atlantic; the several Export freighters; the numerous Esso tankers; the military troop transports including the good old Upshur³—these and dozens more connected New York with the rest of the world, and their comings and goings were important news to many, many people.

For some of us, the comings and goings of merchant ships remain very important. Something that was once a chosen career and a way of life for me does not lose its significance. Despite the passage of time, the yearning for the sea remains with me. While my seafaring days are regretfully long past, I can in some sense go to sea again by reading the old newspapers.

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¹ Rather than cite every last detail, I will simply note that all the voyage information comes from three sources: the shipping news pages on the appropriate dates in The New York Times, which are supplemental to my grandmother’s travel journals and my grandparents’ letters. They wrote frequently when they were away, and I consider this body of scripture a family heirloom.

² To continue the digression, see Leonard A. Stevens, The Elizabeth: Passage of a Queen, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968, for a fascinating and in-depth description of the workings of a passenger liner in commercial service between New York and Europe.

³ The Upshur later became the State of Maine, on which I sailed in 1976 and 1978 while studying for the license as third mate.

Pictures of Ships and Family

Some pictures of the family visiting the waterfront on various occasions between 1955 and 2012.   I took all but one of these photographs.  I think they convey a sense of the family's attachment to the sea and the ships that sail on it.  Click on each picture for a larger view.

The picture that started it all.  My grandparents, Robert Burns and Julia Murphy, aboard the American Export Lines' Independence at Pier 84 in New York on Monday morning, October 31, 1966, just prior to departing on their final transatlantic voyage.

The next generation.  The four children with their Mommy and Nana watch from Battery Park in Lower Manhattan as the Queen Elizabeth 2 proceeds to sea.

Steven, Michael, James, and Miss Karen visit the schoolship State of Maine at the State Pier in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on July 1, 1999.

Steven and Michael with the cable ship Global Mariner also at the State Pier in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on August 5, 2001.

My three sons with the Cunard Line's Caronia at the Block Falcon Cruise Terminal in Boston, Massachusetts, on August 13, 2001.

The three boys pose with the Dutch freighter Schippersgracht at the State Pier in Fall River, Massachusetts, on August 27, 2001.

Underway aboard the ferry Governor Herbert H. Lehman, the boys watch the outbound tanker Falcon and the inbound container ship Zim Mediterranean pass each other off St. George, Staten Island, New York, on a hazy August 23, 2002.

The next day, August 24, 2002, the three boys pose in the rain in front of the fabled United States at Pier 82 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Before my time.  My grandparents sailed from New York for Le Havre, France, aboard the United States on June 24, 1955.  My father took this photograph of them with my mother and older brother on sailing day.

Back to the younger generation.  Michael and Steven stand on the stone beach at Orient Point, Long Island, New York, on a cold April 26, 2003.  They have disembarked from the ferry Susan Anne after completing a voyage from New London, Connecticut.

The million dollar view.  Sunrise over Campobello Island, New Brunswick, seen from Eastport, Maine, on June 23, 2003.  The children arose very cheerfully at 3:15am in order to see this.  

A wedding aboard ship.  James poses in the Crow's Nest Lounge of the Holland America Line's  Nieuw Amsterdam in Port Everglades, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on Sunday, February 5, 2012.  Behind him the container ship Melbourne Strait is departing.

The Nautical Library

A political phenomenon of the late twentieth century is the presidential library. After the torch is passed to the new head of state, the one just retired builds a library. In theory a repository of presidential papers intended for use by scholars and historians, the imposing new edifice usually seems as much a monument to a still-living and still self-aggrandizing great man as it does a research facility. The exception to this, of course, is the Library of Congress. Bequeathed to the nation by President Thomas Jefferson, it enjoys universal recognition as one of the greatest, largest, and most diverse collections of research materials in the world. My home library is not as ambitious as this, however, nor does it commemorate my political glory. Instead, it houses a very modest general collection and two more extensive specialized collections.

The first of these specialty areas supported my career in the Merchant Marine. Professional volumes such as Bowditch’s American Practical Navigator, Donn’s Meteorology, and Tate’s A Mariner’s Guide to the Rules of the Road line the shelves. While of little interest to a layman, these and other such tomes are critical components of a mate’s collection. I spent many intense hours with these and other volumes while studying for the various license exams. My favorite was George’s Stability and Trim for the Ship’s Officer. Filled with esoteric prose, complex technical diagrams, advanced mathematics, and applied physics—not exactly light reading—this book successfully saw me through the most difficult part of the chief mate’s exam, and for that I was very grateful. Subsequent to that, I consulted all these volumes regularly for license renewal exercises. To this day, I still refer to these resources, either to refresh my memory or to look up points of curiosity.

In addition to professional and technical books, I have several works on the history of seafaring, plus histories of famous ships. And as a library is not a collection of books only, I have an assortment of pictures—photographs, paintings, and pen-and-ink drawings—of all the ships that I sailed on, of the transatlantic liners that my grandparents sailed on, and of various historical vessels. A few of these are framed and on display; most are filed away for safekeeping, but hopefully, display at a later date. Then, there are my licenses. I keep these in a safe place, too, even though they’re no longer valid for sea service. I treasure them for the knowledge and the experience which they represent, and I admit to feeling somewhat sentimental about them. Finally, there is my sextant. I used this instrument many times aboard many ships to take sightings of the sun, moon, and stars, one of my favorite duties on long transoceanic voyages. Every so often someone asks if he may look at my sextant, and I’m always happy to show it off.

The second specialty area supports a more ongoing project in family history and genealogy. In addition to my interest in seafaring, I’ve long been collecting genealogical documentation and family-historical items. In the process of researching ancestors and relatives, I’ve amassed reams of documents that identify all the folks in the extended family. Who they are and how they’re related is the genealogy; where they lived and what they did is the family history. The two dovetail together naturally. The result is an ever-growing collection of official certificates, ecclesiastical records, written histories, newspaper articles, cemetery maps, and photographs. This assortment covers generations long deceased as well as the generation recently born. In what was perhaps an overindulgence with pen and camera, I’ve assembled dozens of photograph albums and almost as many notebooks depicting and detailing my children’s activities since their births. Some people may find this a bit much, but I like it. On a practical level, this collection always proves its worth. Whenever family members want to know when something took place and who was involved, they come to me as the authority on the matter. If I don’t have an event photographed or written down, then it didn’t happen!

This paper part of the family history and genealogical collection is organized into diverse volumes such as picture albums, binders, notebooks, and a few actual books, too, and this assortment occupies significant shelf space. But neither is this a collection of books only. Framed portraits of family members both living and deceased line the walls above the shelves and in several other rooms as well. Professional memorabilia and personal mementos from several of the deceased line the top shelf and fill several boxes. Once again, I admit to feeling sentimental about much of this material. One of my favorite items combines both seafaring and family history: a portrait of my grandparents in tuxedo and evening gown at the Captain’s party aboard the American Export Lines’ Independence at sea between New York and Casablanca in November of 1966.

In retrospect, I think their departure on this voyage aboard the Independence got me started in family history. I remember the day they left. Back then the passengers’ families were allowed to visit the ships prior to sailing. Armed with my first camera at the age of nine—a cheap kid’s toy that took very mediocre black-and-white photographs—I succeeded in getting on everyone’s nerves in a relentless picture-taking quest. Now, despite their dubious artistic value, these humble first attempts at family portraiture have become family heirlooms.

In addition to the genealogical, family-historical, and nautical materials, I have a modest humanities collection, chiefly in the areas of history, literature, and religion, as well as over fifty years of National Geographic. This includes many of the classics of our Western world, the scripture, both sacred and secular, bequeathed to us by our Greco-Roman Judeo-Christian heritage. These writings, from some of the best minds in history, enable us to acquire a broad spectrum of knowledge and wisdom and thereby raise our own minds to a higher level. Authors with names revered through the ages rank among our best friends and most interesting companions. Their ideas have shaped human history and thought for so long and to such an extent that it seems impossible to even imagine a world without them. These writers, while long dead, “whisper to us out of the dust” (2 Nephi 26:16) with “the words of them which have slumbered” (2 Nephi 27:6). Though dead, they continue to speak, as Professor Jastrow, a scholarly character in a contemporary classic describes:

There’s something personal and alive for me in this room.

These books speak to me. The authors are all my friends

and colleagues, though some of them crumbled to dust

fifteen centuries ago. I shall leave the villa with no regrets,

but it will hurt to leave these books behind.¹

Just as, for example, Plato and Augustine and Shakespeare, though dead, continue to speak to all who will listen, so also do my kin, though dead, speak to me. Through what they wrote and what others wrote about them, through their vital records, their photographs, their memorabilia, and the inscriptions on their gravestones, I have come to know them. I often feel a special unity with them. Their spirits, I believe, guide me in my research, and they are my friends and colleagues as well as my family. I treasure the time that I spend with them in my little library.

I also treasure the hours I spend with the rising generation, recording the children’s activities, compiling their photographs, and organizing their school memorabilia. While many others of my age are building large-scale political and business empires for themselves, I prefer the cloistered life that my library affords. I often think of Prospero, the Shakespearean character who fell out of political favor and lamented not the loss of his office but the loss of his library:

Me, poor man, my library

Was dukedom large enough.²

As is mine today. In my youth the sea was my dukedom—and it was plenty large enough—but now my library suffices. While my library naturally contains material concerning my career in the Merchant Marine, which is now part of our family history, I see it not as a monument to myself like a presidential library, but as a monument to all the members of my family. It commemorates their lives by archiving their histories, displaying their portraits, and enabling the present and future generations to know those of the past. It is bequeathed to the family of the future, to my children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren ad infinitum. My hope is that through this legacy the past generations, though dead, will speak to the future generations just as they have to me.

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¹ Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1978, p. 198.
² William Shakespeare, The Tempest, I:i:109-110.

Fleeting Glimpses

On a rare Saturday off from work, I stood on a short stretch of sandy beach in Rockport, Massachusetts, and gazed eastward through a light mist and an intermittent rain at the great Atlantic Ocean. The horizon was only faintly visible; mostly it just blended with the overcast sky. It was neither a good day for a navigator taking celestial sightings and plotting sun lines nor for a summer tourist tanning in the sun or frolicking in the surf. Weatherwise, it was a bland day, no doubt a disappointment to many. I saw it differently, however. For any day that one can stand at the water’s edge and enjoy the privilege of looking upon the sea is very good day.

Normally, I work every weekend. It came as a very pleasant surprise, therefore, to unexpectedly be given a Saturday off. Wanting to make the most of this fortuitous opportunity, Miss Patty and I left the house early and drove away to the waterfront. We gazed upon the sea in Salem, Gloucester, and Rockport, and we visited the famous Fishermen’s Monument in Gloucester. It was a lovely day, far from the madding crowds of weekend shoppers, but it passed by much too quickly. Even though we spent hours at the seaside, this time was but a fleeting glimpse.

Life contains many such fleeting glimpses. Some of my favorites involving the sea take place aboard trains. Several times each year I ride Amtrak between Boston and New York in order to visit my parents. Aptly named the Shore Line, this stretch of railroad follows the coastline through Rhode Island and Connecticut into New York. It affords magnificent views of Narragansett Bay and Long Island Sound from a succession of vantage points. From East Greenwich, Mystic, New London, Niantic Beach, Rocky Neck, and Old Saybrook, I savor the sight of salt water, albeit briefly, as the trains hurry along toward their destinations. Rarely do they stop between stations. On one journey, though, I enjoyed a bonus as the train halted for several minutes at Niantic Beach because of track work. As the engineer awaited the signal to proceed, I watched the ferry John H sail placidly across the sound from Long Island to New London.

On Long Island, there are many waterfront sites where one can gaze upon either the open ocean or its estuaries. Family favorites include Captree, Fire Island, Point Lookout, Oyster Bay, and Port Jefferson. All beautiful locations, the times spent there are always much too short—mere fleeting glimpses. Once per summer we sail aboard the excursion boat Moon Chaser between Captree and the Fire Island Light, a round trip of an hour and a half. This also passes too quickly—another fleeting glimpse. Even a prolonged duration spent in the company of the sea is, in the end, too short. The week that the family spent aboard the Nieuw Amsterdam in February illustrates this perfectly. Everyone agreed that the voyage ended too quickly. Furthermore, accustomed as I had been to spending several months at a time aboard ship, seven days felt like nothing. It seemed that I had barely unpacked and settled in when it was time to disembark! Another fleeting glimpse.

All my life I have had an affinity for the sea. For me it is a creation of unsurpassable natural beauty, a place of peace and tranquility, and a source of inspiration. The sea possesses an intangible but unmistakable other-worldly quality that sets it apart from the secularized land masses. It seems more a part of the divine realm than the human one. When I gaze out to sea, whether from the deck of a ship or the edge of a continent, I feel that I am in a sense looking into eternity. But eternity is very large, and my time is very small and tightly scheduled. Sooner or later some compelling need calls me away from the sea. All I can achieve, then, are fleeting glimpses.

Most of my life I have had an affinity for family history and genealogy. Like the sea, these intimately interrelated subjects possess intangible but unmistakable other-worldly qualities that set them apart from our secularized society. Whether in a library, a municipal archive, a church office, a cemetery, or at home, genealogical and family-historical research opens windows into both the human past and the divine eternity. As the sea has a compelling quality that draws one in, so does this research. It is commonplace to completely forget the present while becoming engrossed in the events and personalities of the past and discovering new things that happened and new friends who lived many decades or even more than a century ago. But then, just as at the seashore, some urgent human need calls us rudely back to the present, and our fleeting glimpse into the higher realm is suddenly over.

Hunger, for example, is a compelling intruder. On one occasion Miss Patty and I were visiting the public library in Babylon, Long Island, and printing copies of microfilmed newspaper articles concerning my grandparents’ youth. Having gotten an early start, we spent all morning and part of the afternoon on this project, completely losing track of the time in the process. Suddenly feeling incredibly hungry, we looked at the clock and were astonished when we saw how late it had become! Still, for all those hours spent examining my grandparents’ formative years in an era now gone, we felt as though we had just scratched the surface, just glimpsed their youth wherein there must have been so much more that had gone unrecorded.

As wonderful as it has been to discover our ancestors and learn of their life experiences, there is an inherent frustration in the process, too: whatever we find in our research, it is never enough. While our grandparents’ lives are quite well documented, some gaps do remain. Of their parents, however, we know precious little. Going back in time, we have less and less information about each successive generation. The glimpses into the past become smaller and smaller until finally there are no more. In each case, though, whether we have full biographies or just names and dates of death, these views of past lives remain only glimpses. We always wish that we had more information and more photographs, as well as more time to do the research. Just like the view of the great Atlantic Ocean, the view of our ancestry is but a fleeting glimpse.

For that matter, life itself is a fleeting glimpse. In our family, the longest known lifespan is 97 years. In the history of the world, however, this is miniscule. It may sound like a long time, but it is still a finite window of opportunity. Just as the hours spent visiting the seashore and the hours spent researching family history are short and precious, so is life itself. Hence the need to use the time that we have wisely, for once used up it remains forever irretrievably gone.

Carpe diem, asserted the ancient Romans. Seize the day. Every day may be our last, and we would be wise to not waste the tremendous but limited opportunity of life on things of no value. Contemplating eternity and searching for eternal truth, whether at the oceanfront or the family history center, lead us to the things of ultimate value: to truth, light, knowledge, family, everlasting life—in short, the things of God. And when we have achieved this goal, it will not be just a fleeting glimpse but a permanent state.