Irish Waterfront, Then+Now

Gabriel Cohen, with whom PortSide did the Graving Dock book reading at GMD shipyard, runs a great book reading series at Sunny's Bar in Red Hook. First Sunday of every month at 3pm.

January 3, he had an author in the roster who brought me back to town earlier than I would have come otherwise. That was James T. Fisher, author of "On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York"

The title is one heckuva mouthful, but the book promises to explain the story of Father Corridan, the priest, and his fight against corruption on the docks upon which the movie “On the Waterfront” is based. The reading was the bomb. All three readers were good. Fisher turns out to be a professor of Theology and American Studies at Fordham. My ears perk up at the AmStud label; that was one of my two majors at Yale and shaped the lens through which I view the world.

Listening to Fisher, it occurred to me that Corridan in the 50s was inventing here at home what was called liberation theology and so associated with Latin America. Hearing the degree to which senior people in Manhattan’s Catholic church were complicit in corruption on the docks, corruption that led to the killing and disappearance of many men, impressed me and my seat companions, Seth Goodwin and Meg Fellerath, two beloved water rats I was happy to find in the bar.

I introduced myself to Fisher and soon thereafter a torrential exchange of emails began, excerpted here [links added during blog creation]:

Jim:

Carolina it was only later heading home I remembered that my great friend/former student Adam Davis was cast member in that Puccini Opera you hosted out in Bklyn. Adam was touting the setting to the skies. … I love the 'blue space' concept and amazed by the vision behind this; thanks from Jim now the NYT has promoted the write up of Sunny's event from City Room blog to book page, just below Warren Beatty and Joan Collins

all the best to you from Jim

Carolina:

….Glad you like the Bluespace concept. The waterfront is so sorely overlooked and misunderstood that we had to work to find language to get people aware of the water part of the waterfront. Clearly, that was not the case in the era of your book Irish Waterfront.

I overheard the Times journalist remarking to you that your reading contained some important history in rebutting the idea that "On the Waterfront" was a Budd Schulberg justification for HUAC testimony. THANKS for sending the link. I was afraid I'd miss his follow-up column.

I just read his piece. Such a shame that he did not mention, as you did, that the Times itself for weeks carried many pages of stevedoring testimony. You strongly made the point that the stevedoring testimony was a major issue of the day. In neglecting to include that Jim avoids being too self-referential to Times' prior coverage but slights the importance of a maritime issue to a general audience, eg, he continues the forgetting of the Bluespace. While listening to you at Sunny's, I felt that the whole HUAC slant to interpreting the movie was only possible because the world had forgotten the importance of the docks at the time. Similarly, another line of criticism of the movie is that the priest is just too much, is implausible, and that the morality message is too melodramatic, but that line of criticism also depends on not understanding the documentary basis of the film.

Jim:

… why did the Port come to be romanticized nostalgically even as it remained a vital element of the local political economy? SNIP

So I treat some the issues that engage you but until we met I had yet to really dig in to the contemporary issues: tho I take every class every semester (some more than once) to hold class on west side piers it's nearly always historically-oriented. You don't need me tell you what a richly anomalous position you occupy since everything about Red Hook reads from a superficial perspective as "post-industrial," "post-modern etc' and indeed not long after yr time in Am. Studies at Yale the program became engulfed in just such 'discourses.' So part of your vocation as I see it is to teach a wholly different way of seeing what it means to work in a working port when the conditioned impulse is to respond: not so working port, least not like the old days… SNIP

As you know the waterfront commission was nearly dismantled last year once it was alleged to be as complicit in corruption as the hiring system it was designed to supplant in 1953.

Then I read that the new exec. director was inspired to achieve reform after reading my book! I had no idea what to make of this, having overlooked contemporary scene SNIP

Rocky Sullivan's on Feb 3 I plan to talk real directly about Columbia St and about the divisions between irish and italian waterfronts.

P.S. the crime commission stories are on any data base the offers NY Times: the public hearings covered Dec 1952-Jan 1953. Yet for a vivid education on life in the port at that time there is no substitute for the 5 volumes the NY State crime commission released in 53: these are at many local college libraries, NYPL etc.. At least one of the vols is heavy Bklyn-oriented.

Photo at left: 1953 Strike in Erie Basin, Red Hook, from collection of Brooklyn Public Library

-----------

Well! I can’t wait to sit down and talk at length with this guy. I hope to interest him in PortSide’s historical research. Since the death of the researcher Henry Silka, the pace of our research has slowed. An interim product is the Red Hook Visitor Guide we did Sept 2009. I’m definitely headed to Rocky Sullivan’s on Feb 3, 7pm to hear about the split between Italian and Irish waterfronts on Columbia Street.

PS If you want to read the Pulitzer Prize-winning articles that also inspired the movie see this book

Water at 18 Degrees

Maybe some people can finish posts in chrono order, but not around here. Life and Work get in the way!

Back to Sunday 1/10/10

It's just 18 degrees at 0930, but all PortSide water is liquid!

The water drum in my rowing machine froze up a few days after I got back from the holidays on 1/2. It was more important to get the Whalen's water "systems" unfrozen first, so personal fitness was far down the To Do list.

After two days with heat tape under a tarp, the large cylindrical ice cube was again liquid despite it's being 18 degrees outside. The machine is an unheated room with open window in the shed, so yahoo heat tape!

'twas also Chiclet's first day outside after her first heat cycle. If only we could use cat heat to warm things on the boat!

But no. Feline heat applied itself more towards the knocking over of manuals in the office as desperate aforementioned feline tried to look out a porthole.

Were there courting toms lurking behind the headlog? Not that I could spot, but hope springs eternal in the hearts of all the gals on board!

She'll be fixed on Jan 24, but who knows when the Mary Whalen's water systems will get fixed. The interim systems seem under repair all the time during the winter... No one is going into the water tank under the galley floor this time of year to bang off the loose cement wash and re-cement it. That's a task for balmy days ahead.


WaterRower lifestyle as advertised











Actual WaterRower lifestyle here

PS. thank you Pam Hepburn of the Tug Pegasus for the hand-me-down WaterRower machine. I'll provide enthusiastic testimonials for anyone considering this machine.

Nitey Nite!
Carolina

Port Patterns

Tuesday 1/12/10 I looked up from the galley sink and saw a vessel coming down the East River I'd never seen to before, the rather long and oddly named Gypsum Centennial. This was at at 0815.

I looked her up on a ship tracking site. By the time I was writing this at 2225, she was in the anchorage off Owls Head Park. You can trace the pattern of her route yourself at marinetraffic.

Another nice port pattern I found on the floor of the shed. It is how some cacao beans fell off a pallet. A pallet pentimento in beans, with a very nice pattern of pastel pallets behind making an industrial tartan.

Ice Capades

We shut down the PortSide office and the Mary Whalen for 10 days over Christmas and New Years. What does that mean when re-opening the boat Saturday night 1/2?

Ice Capades, eg frozen everything.

The interior of the boat was 30 degrees when I returned and turned on space heaters. Soaking rags were frozen where I left them (kind of handy that one!). The water line supplying the galley sink was frozen. I ran around with a torch and flashlight and ascertained that it wasn't frozen at the elbow where the line comes through the overhead in the tool crib where the line perforates the deck, it wasn't frozen on the line that ran from water tank to that through-deck fitting.

Inspection the following morning revealed that the 6-foot tall water tank, aka "the body pickling tank" up on the boat deck was, for the first time, frozen inside blocking the valve - downside of no water running for 10 days and me not being here to smash ice in the tank.

I checked the weather. Temp would be over freezing on Tuesday 1/5. I decided to wait it out. I'm doing better with the impact of winter weather this year. I used to fume about how much time it took from what I thought was Real Work (in the office); but maybe I'm now understanding that saving, and guarding, the Mary Whalen so she's not plundered as she was in Erie Basin, requires being aboard, slowly fixing systems, putting up with interim solutions. I also have to say that the ski pants Mum gave me for Christmas are making winter life aboard a lot easier. Warmer legs may account for higher spirits.

Monday afternoon, diesel for the galley stove ran out. With that, the galley temp would not get above 40 given the weather. There's just so much a space heater can do in a space with cold air above, below and behind it. John Weaver would be in the office by late Tuesday morning and with his van he could go fill up the diesel jugs, so that wasn't so long to wait.

By Monday afternoon, I realized that my "Whalen Life in Winter skills" were really rusty. I'd forgotten that when it's 20 degrees and blowing hard out of the N or NW, the cold air comes right up the galley drain freezing exiting water unless it comes down hot and in quantity. By pouring out dregs of tea, dollops of water, toothpaste spit, I'd frozen up the drain. By end of Tuesday, the galley was ringed with dirty dishes from me, Weaver and Dan Goncharoff working in the office, eating lunch and drinking tea and coffee.

Temps were not soaring, so Tuesday, I started calling tugs to get a delivery of some warm water to unseize the Body Pickling Tank. After that, Weaver would shroud it in a black tarp, something we didn't get to during December craziness. Thank to the crew of the tug Taurus and K-Sea for the water delivery!!! I ran the hose down a steel pipe so that I could direct it to the mouth of the valve; and in just minutes, there was running water!

Here's a photo from one of last year's Big Freezes. That time, we'd frozen the valve OUTSIDE not inside the Body Pickling Tank, and so to prevent losing water when we took the valve off, I attached a flexible cutting board to a mop handle with zip ties. This I slid into the tank while Weaver unthreaded the valve, and the suction jammed it against the fitting quite tightly, thank you very much....




Tuesday afternoon, 1/5/10, I climbed down the hatch in the galley to see the galley drain. Damn, stupid moi. I should have torched that pipe as soon as I deduced that it was frozen. I'd cracked the valve that Ed Fanuzzi had installed last year. Replacing that would be another item on the to do list.

Here's Ed working on that valve last year.

(Note: Body Pickling Tank photo above is part of the PSP (PortSide Sustainability Project). In the warmer months, we collect rainwater off the pier shed roof and pump it up to the boat.)

Krumkake-a Norwegian Christmas tradition

John Weaver here:

As stories go, this one has more than its share of nostalgia. Going back in history, there was a time when the

S.T. Kiddoo

was re-christened the

Mary A. Whalen

. On that occasion, command was given to Captain Alf H. Dyrland. It was 1958*.

Alf Dyrland’s story goes back, across the Atlantic, to 1931 and the fishing village of

Skudeneshavn

on the southernmost tip of the island of Karmoy just off the southwestern coast of Norway. That year, having completed his seventh grade studies, 14 year old Alf went to sea as a “cabin boy.”

We dissolve to Christmas, 1979. Alf was retired after twenty years as Captain of the

Whalen

and yours truly, courting his daughter Karen, was a guest for the holiday in the house he built in northeast Connecticut. Of the many ritual observances associated with this holiday, perhaps the most intense, as well as joyous event was the

baking of traditional Christmas cookies…

Norwegian Krumkake

.

The recipe was handed down from Alf’s mother. The batter, mixed and chilled overnight, was cooked by Alf on the stovetop using the iron from his mother’s kitchen and rolled into its cone form on a hand turned wooden dowel. You can find

recipes

for Krumkake on the web and in Scandinavian cookbooks. Alf’s has a wrinkle or two that are special and, in as much as the holiday always was a gathering for an extended family, it produces between ninety and one hundred cones.

Alf taught me how to bake and roll, and Karen prepares the batter from her grandmother’s recipe. For a few years after Alf died (1996) I used the old iron. Then an electric Krumkake baker became available and we purchased it at one of the last surviving outposts of Norwegian culture in Brooklyn, “

Nordic Delicacies

” on 3rd Avenue and 69th St.

When Carolina founded PortSide NewYork and rescued the

Mary Whalen

from the jaws of the scrap heap, she invited the public to visit for

Open House New York

in 2006. Karen and I arrived and were warmly welcomed by Carolina. The welcome was so warm, we never left and, now Carolina and the

Mary Whalen

have become part of Alf’s extended family and her ration of Krumkake graces the galley table every Christmas.

(Top photo: Captain Alf Dyrland the day the S.T. Kiddoo was re-christened

Mary A. Whalen

, and converted from gasoline service to heavier oil products.)

(Bottom photo: Bill & Karen Dyrland, two of Captain Alf's children, in the

Whalen

wheelhouse in 2008)

Note: In 2009,

Skudeneshavn

only has a population of 3,229. Imagine how small it was when Alf Dyrland left in 1931.

*Further research has placed the date of the ship being renamed Mary A Whalen and Alf Dyrland becoming captain as 1962.

Hi,

My name is Chiclet.

I'm the ship cat on the Mary A. Whalen. I"m looking for a place to stay over the Christmas holidays because Carolina is going home for Christmas for the first time in 6 years. PortSide isn't doing Operation Christmas Cheer this year due to funding reasons.

Peter Pan busline won't let me on the bus (Scrooges), and they're the only bus company that goes to Cape Cod.

I'm small and bouncy and cuddly. I like to play with Mister Mouse and Kitty Wand and sit on your lap. I'm about 8 months old. We don't really know; I'm adopted. I don't shred furniture and am well trained (well, sometimes I like to knock pens off the table, but I know that's bad.) I'm mostly black, with some white patches on my chest and tummy to reassure the superstitious folks.

Carolina's friends Gary and Amy in Red Hook can take me from 12/28 to 1/2 when she returns. I'm looking for place from 12/23 to 12/28.

Here I am.

Please post a comment here if you want to host me.

Meow,

Chiclet

What’s in a name – first week of December 2008

After the Whalen’s birthday party, I plow through the inbox. The day before the party, Mary Habstritt, wife of Gerry Weinstein, and President of the national Society of Industrial Archeology, had sent an email:

"I was boning up on history of Whalen and saw that her old name S.T. Kiddoo was a mystery. I searched just the last name and got several threads about the surname on www.Ancestry.com that mentioned A history of the Kiddoo family in the United States, 1780-1981 which is full text on the Brigham Young University libraries digital collections site. On p. 188, it tells of a Solomon Thomas Kiddoo (1883-1965) who, after a career in banking in, of all places, Wall SD, became Secretary-Treasury of Fairbanks Morse. Hmmm. I think it cannot be a coincidence that the ship had the same name as an officer of Fairbanks Morse and the ship has a FM engine."

Bingo! We also know that Bushey was a distributor of Fairbanks Morse engines, so we are quite sure this is the person for whom the Mary A. Whalen was first named.

This is a lesson in the limitations of google (a reminder to myself not to work like the 20-somethings I lamented earlier.) In 2005, I had googled “S.T. Kiddoo” extensively looking for some history to explain the name, hoping to find some history that would make saving a tanker more Historic, that would appeal to preservationists. I’d found one S.T. Kiddoo in South Dakota in the teens heading some local banking society. I never included the link as South Dakota seemed so far from the sea, and the citation was 20 years before the tanker was built. Funny; that WAS was the same man as the tanker. By now, google has much more up about Mr. Solomon T. Kiddoo; old records are coming on line. Now, if they will just help us learn more about the woman Mary A. Whalen.

Tanker engine parts – first week of December 2008

We interrupt this gripping narrative to tell you about the Whalen’s 70^th birthday party.

It was great! It was a hoot! We were mobbed! The December weather held!

It wasn’t without hiccups, mind you.

There was a bit of a glitch getting setting up due to someone outside the organization being slow to vet some paperwork, so the Whalen did not get towed to Atlantic Basin Friday morning for the Saturday event. Friday towing would have allowed our Friday volunteers to begin setting up the site in Atlantic Basin. But that didn’t happen, we got towed over at 2130 Friday, and I had to get our electrician in from Staten Island as the officially supplied one had gone home at that hour.

After that, our electrical guy, the master of old systems and all-around Mr. Fix-it Ed Fanuzzi, kicked back in the galley and chatted with Scott, a friend who had brought me take out dinner. I sat in the office writing the party program while the two guys drank coffee, smeared Nutella on Lorna Doones and told dirty jokes. “Carolina’s Home for Wayward Boys,” I dubbed it.

Early Saturday morning, while I was still in a pre-caffeinated state, I got a call from our insurance agent Totch Hartge. He was outside on the dock! He came bearing a gift for the Whalen, a brass ship’s lamp.

Next call was good friend and former neighbor Gary Baum. He had just driven his wife to the subway and was wearing a coat over his pajamas. “Howzit going?!” “We’re behind, we got here a day late.”’ He showed up in pajamas to pitch in.

The event caused such excitement that all the volunteers who’d RSVP-ed actually showed up. (You usually can’t be sure of that). Actually, volunteers we hadn’t heard from showed up! We had more volunteers than we needed! Here’s some text from the post-event PR we sent out. Please forgive me for not writing more original copy. Too much to do...

“December 6th, a happy horde of about 500 came from as far away as Maryland to cheer and visit the tanker Mary A. Whalen, home of PortSide NewYork, during her 70^th birthday party.

The tour guides were a salty lot: Bob Moore, Vice President of Atlantic Container Line a shipping line that calls on ports both sides of the Harbor, Gerry Weinstein and Mary Habstritt of the Lilac Preservation Project, John Weaver, son in law of Alf Dyrland who had been captain of the Whalen for twenty years, and Will Van Dorp, author of the blog Tugster who sagely dubbed the harbor “the sixth borough.”

The galley and engine room were clogged with visitors of all ages, including former crew members, maritime buffs and rank landlubbers. The latter included one woman who stepped off the gangway to say “where’s the tanker?” but all had a grand time. Former crew members came bearing old photos and boat parts, from the Whalen and other tankers, in an effort to put her back together. Waterfront bloggers from Philadelphia and the Long Island Sound chatted over the wood stove; urban and ship preservationists found common ground while discussing things afloat.”

Guests arrived by water: PortSide partner the tug Pegasus attended, as did one working tug. The luxury yacht Manhattan came into Atlantic Basin for a salute. Two gigs from the Village Community Boathouse rowed over from Tribeca, and kayakers came from two other islands, Manhattan and Staten. Local Red Hook businesses got in on the action: Atlantis, a home furnishings store, loaned their signature six-foot red velvet hook for the café area; Steve’s Key Lime Pie compensated for the lack of a boathouse in Valentino Park (hello Parks Department!) and allowed visiting kayakers to leave boats in their garage. Maritime photographer Jonathan Atkin served as Master of Ceremonies.

Tours ceased during a half hour of formalities when proclamations were presented by Anthony Chiappone of the New Jersey State Assembly, the Brooklyn Borough President’s Office, and Roberta Weisbrod of the Working Harbor Committee. PortSide NewYork and the Lilac team gave Sal Catucci, CEO of American Stevedoring a Historic Ship Hero award—an illustration made by Christina Sun—for helping save historic vessels by providing free berths to three ships Nantucket, Lilac and Mary Whalen .

Carolina Salguero, Director of PortSide announced that most of the missing parts needed for the Whalen’s cannibalized engine had been secured in Seattle thanks to the co-operation of Stabbert Maritime and the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, Derelict Vessel Removal Program which had just scrapped an old tanker similar to the Whalen.

Salguero also announced that the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation had invited PortSide to produce a performance on the Whalen in the Navy Yard, and she asKed for performing arts groups with water-themed work to get in touch.”

After the public left the party, some folks hung around in the galley. Some PortSide volunteers, two tug captains (one came by land and one by sea), some harbor activists. I ordered pizzas and realized as I served that it was all guys. “Carolina’s Home for Wayward Boys” AGAIN I laughed to myself.

I also marvelled at how easy life could be if we got the Whalen out of a containerport or out of an industrial park; because after three years of life that included Erie Basin, Red Hook Marine Terminal and Brooklyn Navy Yard, this was the first time that takeout food could be delivered right to the boat.

sigh.

Tanker engine parts -Third week of November 2008

The discussion of engine parts has expanded to include the crankshaft which is encased in the lower engine block. That seems monstrously heavy to move, and I’m wondering if it should be taken out and shipped separately. Gerry Weinstein recommends I put in call to Gary Matthews, a specialist on vintage engines, and ask him to come look at the Whalen’s damaged crank. He’s running an old locomotive in NJ, he worked on tugs in New York harbor for 17 years. He’s married to one of the few women to have been a tug captain Anne Loeding, and together they are restoring an old tug. Gary says he can’t make it until January, or February. Crushing. He says he’ll call some people though.

A revised estimate from Stabbert comes in. I can’t do boo about it.

After months of negotiating about Atlantic Basin, PortSide has been cleared to bring the Mary Whalen in there to throw her 70^th birthday party with free tours of the ship. We have three weeks and one day (MINUS Thanksgiving week) between approval and B-day. That means all permits, invites, program, invites and press releases have to be done in that time.

I tell Stabbert I need to get past 12/6 before I can think about parts.

They accept that. Unbelieveable. Thank god.

Tanker engine parts - Third week of October, 2008

Stabbert says the scrap barge will leave with Ked parts. Their bill is higher than we expected, I don’t have shipping worked out yet. How the hell am I going to get these parts, and after so much work!

All the other things PortSide had planned for the autumn have been front burner lately, including very important networking to push the possibility of getting an operating space in Atlantic Basin.

Real estate has been a big issue since we completed the business plan in May 05, and the developer did a "fade away and radiate” and avoided all meetings where we could present the data in the business plan and discuss lease terms. Actually, we couldn’t really complete the business plan because neither he nor Fairway would come to the table, so we submitted it to the funders, New York City’s Department of Small Business Services calling it “’A Report on Business Planning Activities.” That real estate story fizzle was so perplexing.

When Fairway needed a rezoning to get a supermarket in an m-zone on the waterfront, they were asked “why do you need to be on the waterfront” and they gave the answer “because we will service the working waterfront” and they talked about tugboats coming in to shop. I had supplied the information that tugboats would flock to a waterside supermarket since it had become so hard to get provisions due to the decline of finger piers near neighborhoods. I learned that while doing my National Geographic project on tugboats in NYC. The PortSide business plan followed up on that knowledge and surveyed the local towing industry about how much they spend on boat grub a year ($7.MM) and whether they wanted to shop at Fairway (yes) and why. We concluded that $1.5MM of business wants to shop at Fairway. PortSide was going to position shopping tugboats as an attraction, much as they are in Fells Point, Baltimore, and build our maritime museum concepts around visiting real boats doing real things.

Over the ensuing 3 years, we write many real estate proposals. The Mary Whalen’s fan base grows, but few people seem to understand that it is a hub, a place, that PortSide is trying to be, not a ship project, and certainly not a conventional historic ship project (much as we now love the Mary Whalen).

So… once there were August rumblings that Atlantic Basin was being replanned and that the EDC might be interested in our putting our proposed maritime hub in there (which seems the perfect fulfillment of their own 2008 Maritime Support Services Inventory Study), PortSide has been busy networking about Atlantic Basin, creating program concepts, analyzing how much of what we proposed in 2005 could work in another space, thinking how to combine cultural programs and port operations in that space.

Now that there’s a Stabbert deadline, I shift my energies to finding an interim Seattle storage space so that PortSide can leave this whole engine thing alone for a while and focus on the New Yorker mantra “location location location.”

K-Sea agrees to store the parts in their Seattle yard. They are just across the ship canal from Stabbert.

Whew.

I convey to Stabbert that their bill is tough for PortSide to pay right now, can we discuss an installment payment plan. I offer to get the parts out of their way and held by a third party (K-Sea) til we work this out?

They write back “up to my eyeballs in alligators right now with issues but you have my promise we will not toss the parts you need and will work out a satisfactory arrangement. “

Stabbert is really being great.

Tanker engine parts - First week of October, 2008

I send and email to a shipbuilding history website and ask for Ked history. I hear back from Tim Colton of Maritime Business Strategies, LLC in Delray Beach FL.

“According to the USCG, the Ked was formerly the Fletcher J and was built by Bushey in 1945, not 1943 or 1944. If so, that narrows it down a bit: it almost has to be either 583 or 585. Did you ask if there's a builder's plate on the ship?”

I thank him and suggest he amend his Bushey history to get Hornbeck included by changing his site description from “[Bushey] was the parent company of Red Star Towing and was located on Gowanus Creek, in the Red Hook section, at the foot of Court Street: the site is now occupied by the Hess storage terminal” to say “the site is now occupied by the Hess storage terminal and the yard of Hornbeck Towing which moves the Hess product.”

Always trying to raise awareness of the working waterfront!

He changes his website. We continue exchanging emails. The PortSide Whalen family grows.

I send the URL to Gerry Weinstein, this leads to more info on davits.

“Carolina: A great site. Looks like Bushey did build tankers before the war so they may have had radial davits. I actually e-mailed him a year ago regarding a photo we found in a Minn. antique shop showing the preparations to side launch one of the water tanker versions. Gerry”

They’ve already been in touch. Small world. Big Whalen family.

Tanker engine parts - Fourth week of September, 2008

The wish list is expanding as we learn more about the Ked. My brother spots some davits. Are they the same as the Whalen’s.

9/26/08, I send out an email blast

“i only have 1 davit of the 4 here.the Ked has two. I'm about to send them this drawing to see if what is out there matches my davit here.

do you guys know if Bushey had a standard davit?the one here is continuous taper with a curve not right angle bend, and has a ball at the end thru which there is an eye bolt.answers requested as fast as you can as the Ked is lying around in pieces.”

Gerry Weinstein, Chairman of General Tools and Mr. Archive, provides the most documentation and detailed responses.

“Detail of YO davits (radial type, probably navy spec.) and Bushey quadrantal tilting type, commercial ones. Gerry”

What?! I think:

“what does "Bushey quadrantal tilting type, commercial" mean? I think this means it is a Bushey standard,... quadrantail I"m guessing means it is is square sided plate, not rounded stock, the tilt i can see ,but what does commercial refer to?

could you call me today so i can ask? I want to get the blog catching up with the data flowing in here.

also are the photo #s corresponding to the Bushey album? have you sent YO#3 and YO#4, or are these frame #s from same boat (looks like it), or just your numbering to me. this YO4 also looks like a ghost what with that leaden grey, no appearance of porthole glass (blank eyes), no sign of life aboard, and the foggy no horizon line in the background.

the Bushey photos break my heart, they look so like the Whalen, save for the YO-4’s rounded stern, and they are such elegant, but robust craft. It pained me to see the photos of the Ked sliced up. it's like seeing the Whalen's sister eviscerated.

Gerry:

“Just to recap. Francis S. Bushey taken just before the end. Definitely a Bushey build because of the hard chine aft. Prewar, post war? Don't know, but it should be in the list. That and the A. H. Dumont outboard (no hard chine) had the quadrantal type that worked off a geared sector and leaned out to launch the boat. Pretty fast, saved a few lives on the Titanic. YO's radial type, much older. Harder to work, slower to launch boats. Same as on Lilac. All the YO photos from the same Bushey album probably produced for the Navy. You'll see rest when things "quiet down" GW

Tanker engine parts - Third week of September, 2008

Information on Bushey tankers and Fairbanks Morse engines began pouring in.

Bobby Mowbray, a K-Sea tug engineer and one of the last engineers on the Whalen but not the guy in the engine room when the crank got damaged, was prompt on phone and email with his answers, but he was on a tug and couldn’t come look at things in the engine room with me.

Stabbert was now answering and sending photos. My brother Antonio Salguero of Coastwise Marine Design made a site visit and was sending photos. The engine plaques were gone. They would have confirmed it the engine was the same model. Without them comparing photos from there to photos from the Whalen and vintage references became important.

Gerry Weinstein, the Chairman of General Tools, and a man obsessed with old steam engines, got very interested in helping save this diesel one. He has created photographic documentation of engines and industrial sites for years, working for the US Army Corps of Engineers and others, and has an extensive collection The Archive of Industry. He sent photos from Bushey brochures that showed me what an intact FM 37E12 looked like.

The partnering vibe was kumbayah.

The prob was that I’d never even seen a head for the Whalen’s engine before. And we had no engineer on the team as we hadn’t been planning to fix the engine soon. My learning curve was steep.

Folks were patient with email requests like this one “I see a slight difference in the flange beneath the exhaust, some difference in piping external to the engine block ... but I really cant tell as I have never seen the heads on a 37E12 direct reversing Fairbanks Morse, which is what the Whalen has. Whalen is missing piston, heads, rods and fuel injectors. I'm wondering if the Ked's engine is a slightly newer model of the same engine... I'm wondering if an engineer can tell by looking at attached jpegs or if he knows these engines well enough to know that 37E12's varied slightly over the years... “

Here, take a stab yourself.






Mary Whalen















Ked









Bushey gift album for Navy sea trials of new YO’s.

















I learned a lot about engines.

In one case, thanks to an email from Pam Hepburn of the tug Pegasus Preservation Project who wrote in response to this jpeg “These are the early/first generation diesels the most distinguishing aspect is that the cylinders are alone - as steam engines-and not part of a block- fantastic.”

Pam really knows her engine room.

It takes a village to fix a vintage tanker engine - part 1

Here’s the sticky wicket about blogging.

Often you can’t write about things in real time because to do so could affect the course of events, in ways you can’t foresee, so sometimes you have to just sit on things. Voila, the case of the tanker engine parts and the Bushey tankers Ked and Mary Whalen. The story from September through February will now come out in installments. Yes, I kept all emails and good notes. The posts are mostly all written.

Tanker engine parts - The first week of September, 2008:

Thanks to a tip from Bernie Ente, I learned that another Bushey tanker was being scrapped oh so far away in Seattle, and I made a play for parts. Engine parts, davits, interior cabinetry and brass fittings. Several Whalen cabins were gutted when she was in Erie Basin being an office and one day, we’d like to restore bunks, hanging lockers n such. Right now we need those spaces for offices, but once we have a base ashore, we can get that stuff off the boat and restore more.

Anyway, first answer out of Stabbert Shipyard in Seattle was a lot of silence.

I looked at their website and saw that one line of their business was turning old workboats into luxury yachts. Was this what they would do with Ked, I wondered, and so wouldn’t want to give stuff away? Were they really scrapping the Ked? If so, it certainly would seem preposterous to a scrapper to get a call from across the continent, from a non-profit, and I suspect, from a woman, looking for parts to save an old tanker. No one saves tankers! Tugs maybe; yachts surely, but tankers don’t have Enthusiast Societies, yet.

What to do? Here my old skills as a journalist, a foreign correspondent of the pre-digital era were useful. I did most of my work overseas in a career that ran from opening of Berlin Wall to 9/11 in countries that often didn’t have decent phone systems (or had phones systems with the government listening in). The way you got information was social. You saved every name and number you ever got, you horded them, you kept them in handwritten notebooks; and these names and numbers were exchanged with select (friendly) journalists coming and going to the same countries. This is a segue to a little rant of mine: I’ve noticed that 20-somethings who come to work at PortSide are conversant with web and digital connections but less good at reaching people to solve a problem. Once they’ve googled or filled out the web contact form, they’re done; and when that isn’t working/doesn’t net the solution, it’s often hard to get them to get on the phone, to reach out and touch someone; and most to the point, they don’t seem good at recruiting a person to the cause to help solve the problem at hand. It makes me appreciate being middle-aged and having experienced the world before email, web, and customer service in India.

But back to the Ked parts... I began reaching out. When PortSide was creating its business plan, a Capt. Kris Lindberg out of Seattle had worked for us. He did a raft of things and headed all the market research on the charter and excursion boats in NYC and determined which would be interested in coming to our proposed Maritime Hub. He was getting a Masters in planning at the time and thinking desk job after years of running boats from Seattle to Alaska. After graduating from NYU in 2005, he returned to Seattle. I called.

Turns out Kris knew the Ked well. He had not got a desk job after all and was doing environmental ops for Global Diving & Salvage Inc., and had been on the Ked just months before. Global did the abatement work on the Ked, and had bid on the scrapping job and lost to Stabbert.

I called K-Sea in NY, knowing they had bought a Seattle tugboat company. Could their Seattle folks could see if the Ked was still afloat… Answer: yes.

I called the Washington State Dept of Natural Resources, Derelict Vessel Division to see if they could find a way to help. I had no idea what their contract to Stabbert allowed or mandated, but surely scrappers worked with eye on the clock and wanted no delays. Could they facilitate? Melissa Montgomery said “Yes, we’d love to.”

I got my brother Antonio Salguero of Coastwise Marine Design, on the phone. He’s worked a range of marine jobs near Seattle (fishing boats in Alaska, shipwright at Port Townsend’s shipwright’s co-op, freelance yacht designer and shipwright). Could he come down from Port Townsend to Seattle to visit the Ked and assess? Yes.

On the eastern front, I started calling folks to learn more about the Whalen’s engine, what had failed, what was fixable, what other Bushey tankers had for engines as a way to determine what this thing in the Ked might be, even what this Ked was originally called to learn more about her. I asked about alternative sources for parts because schlepping things from Seattle looked expensive on the transpo alone… and the logistics of cross-continent research were going to be challenging.

All that hadn’t been done earlier, because, honestly, the planning team did not see the engine as an immediate priority. The Whalen can deliver a lot of programming as a dead ship. We came to her as the cheap alternative to a spud barge, a means to a docking end, making her go was not the plan. Admittedly, our thinking was evolving since we learned some things during ship tours.

What we learned was that the engine room was the 2^nd most popular place on the boat. Galley first, engine room second. The wheelhouse, to our surprise, was definitely third. We had considered yanking out the whole old engine (down the road) to give us more space, and then we listened to the public. As Tim Ventimiglia, our museum designer, put it “I thought the boat and engine room would really appeal to middle-aged men, but that is not what is happening.”

I remember the day the Whalen’s engine room cured a woman. I was leading a tour of 15. As we approached the engine room stairs, a woman said “’oh no.”

“What’s the matter,” I asked?

“I’m claustrophic.”

I said “here’s what we’ll do. I’ll hold the group back, you go down there, and if you feel uncomfortable, you can rocket right back up those stairs, and no one will be in your way.”

She went down the stairs. Silence.

“Are you all right?” I yelled.

Then came the answer “WOW.”

I told the group to stay on the fidley and went down. “You OK?”

“This is amazing.” And there she stayed, so excited by the engine that she wasn’t claustrophic and was able to have a crowd of 14 join her for a 20 minute stay down there.

So we learned over tours large and small that because the engine room captivated, it created a way to discuss mechanical and infrastructure topics you would think were too dry for the public: the dated peculiarities of a bell boat system and a direct-reversing engine and what that meant for ship staffing, shaft generators and how the ship created and stored its own power. Even the marine composting toilet system interested people. Not to mention the thrills the engine room brings to kids. For them, it is the best of cave, tree fort and space ship.

The looming, antique lump of the engine had a powerful voice; and so, when engine parts seemed available, I thought we should try for them. They might not get installed for years, but if we started looking for them years from now, they surely wouldn’t exist. With the price of scrap steel high, old boats were being scrapped pell mell; and old marine businesses all over the country were being pushed out by gentrification, so repair places with old parts were on the wane.

And so, as inconvenient as the timing of the Ked’s demise was for PortSide’s autumn plans, I went for it and redoubled my efforts on the phone.

Can the Ked help the Whalen?

My how small the world can get! Thanks to the indefatigable maritime reader-photographer-emailer Bernie Ente, I got a link on September 1 from a west coast newspaper saying there was a Bushey tanker headed for scrap. The Ked is a bit younger (if the story has her age right) and shorter than the Whalen but is unmistakenly a Bushey boat. (photo from Kitsap Sun)

September 2, I got in touch with the Seattle yard handling the scrap job Stabbert Maritime to discuss the possibility of engine parts or anything else we need. (They have an interesting line of work in converting workboats to yachts and produce some posh stuff.) And yesterday I had an encouraging call with Melissa Montgomery, the Washington State official in charge of their state Derelict Vessel Removal Program who gave the shipyard the contract. Her tone was one of “we’d love to help.”

During the PortSide business plan process, we had a young captain working p/t for us while he was getting his Master’s degree in planning. He’s back out in Seattle and I gave him a call. He knows the Ked; she’d been grounded in Bremerton for years. He’d been aboard earlier this year, and he encouraged me to try for a shot at Ked parts and photos of the interior. I’ve also spoken to some people on the water in Seattle who can see how the work progresses. Looks like there is still time to get at that engine!

It’s sad to see another Bushey boat go, but we’re hoping the Ked can help save the Whalen. The Ked has two davits on the boat deck (we are missing 3) and also has a Fairbanks Morse engine. We don’t know what type of engine yet; I’m hoping it’s a 37E12! Standing by!