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Hometown Interview

Here is a shot of me being interviewed about my book "The Boy from Plastic City" by the Mayor of Leominster on Aug. 11, 2016. Click the red letters for the link. You'll find me at 40:22.

J. Dawson

Alyssa

A few years ago I picked up a copy of A Night to Remember by Walter Lord, from of all places, my toolbox. It’s a well-worn paperback and the torn-off cover now serves as a bookmark. That cover bears the iconic image of the massive stern of the RMS Titanic, raised to a 45° angle as she prepares to slide beneath the surface of a black North Atlantic, so calm that Captain Edward Smith described it as being, “like a millpond.” I absentmindedly began to flip the yellowed pages while standing in my cellar, but had no intention of finishing it again, as I had three times over the years. But the story gaffed me again and I started plowing through it. 

~

The history of the Titanic has fascinated me since childhood and in addition to the book (and other sources), I’ve seen all of the film versions that I know about. At the top of heap is James Cameron’s masterful take on the incident. The director closely follows the events depicted in Lord’s book, but, like most adaptations, he tacks on a fictional story to which we the viewers are invited to relate. In Titanic it is the love story of society brat Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) and artist/grifter Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio). This film has now eclipsed former champ The Godfather for number of repeat viewings on my TV. 

It’s an oft-told tale that bears repeating so, in a nutshell; here is what pretty much everybody already knows. The Titanic was built in 1912 at the Harlan-Wolff shipyards in my Grandfather’s birthplace of Belfast, Northern Ireland. She was to be the largest vessel ever to ply the seas. It was the golden age of steamship travel and ships were in great demand, especially fast and regally appointed ones of which the Titanic certainly was. The nouveau riche from America demanded nothing less, but added to the equation was a multi-cultural wave of immigrants pinning their hopes on a fresh start in the New World. For those who barely scraped together the price of passage, accommodations were somewhat less than posh, and this mix of Irish, Finnish, Slavic, Scandinavian and Jewish passengers huddled together in steerage. 

The ship set out from Southampton, England but stopped to board passengers in Cherbourg, France and Queenstown (Cobh), Ireland before steaming west for New York City on her maiden voyage. Disregarding iceberg warnings, RMS Titanic plowed along at a record setting pace, hoping for banner headlines for the White Star line upon her arrival. On the fourth day her luck ran out however when she sideswiped an enormous berg shaped like the Rock of Gibraltar. A spur of ice caught the starboard side of the ship’s hull below the water line and ripped it open like a can opener. Immediately the frigid Atlantic started gushing in. It was 11:40 p.m. (ship’s time), Sunday, April 14, 1912. 

It was a troubling situation but not ship threatening certainly because the designers at Harlan-Wolff (most notably Thomas Andrews, aboard for this inaugural crossing) had taken such things into consideration and had designed the hull with 16 water tight compartments that ran up to E deck. If a compartment were to flood, doors would slam shut, the water would be isolated and the ship would remain seaworthy. But not one compartment had been breached but five and that weight at the bow began to pull Titanic down by the head. As it did the water began to seek its own level and ran over the tops of compartments at E deck as the vessel angled downward. This was a chain of events that could not be reversed. At their impromptu crew meeting, White Star executive Donald Ismay was incredulous upon hearing that, in the words of the designer himself, it was a “mathematical certainty” that the great ship would founder. Mr. Andrews reported to Captain Smith that the ship had about two and a half hours on the surface, no matter how they sliced it.

Once that reality sank in, attention turned to the matter of evacuation but there were a number of complications to that process. First on the list; there were lifeboats for only about a third of the passengers. Since the ship was unsinkable, went the reasoning, why clutter up the aesthetics of the boat decks with lifeboats that would never be used—and that’s what they went with. 

Titanic’s communications crew began tapping out QED and SOS messages over their wireless. “Come at once. We have struck a berg.”  The Titanic's radio engineers sent this emergency message and many like it in Morse code wirelessly to anyone listening. The deck crew fired off signal rockets and beamed Morse messages on the Aldis lamp to try to garner the attention of a ship whose lights appeared to be only a few miles away but to no avail. That ship was the Californian and she was stopped in and ice field for the night as a safety measure. Her night crew saw but could not decipher the meaning of the messaging until finally when they no longer saw the stricken ship’s running lights, assumed she had sailed off when in fact she had sunk. The message did get through to the Carpathia and she tested her boilers on a mad dash from Halifax in a valiant attempt to rescue the passengers and crew of the Titanic. But at best, Carpathia would arrive on the scene two hours after the great ship had snapped in half and slid the two miles to the bottom taking 1500 passengers and crew down with her, or left bobbing in their life jackets to die of hypothermia in the subfreezing sea water. These were the ones who could not get into lifeboats. 

~

I brought A Night to Remember with me to finish on our May 2012 vacation in Ireland. The trip entailed renting a car and navigating to lodging in four pre-arranged “castles” scattered across the Emerald Isle. I had a sketchy dream of tying in a drive to Knockmanaugh, Kilarney where my Grandmother hails from but I’d had so many harrowing experiences driving on the left in that unfamiliar country that I wasn’t willing to press my luck further. I felt like I was taking my life in my hands every time I got behind the wheel.

In the town of Donegal we browsed in a bookstore called The Four Masters. Rereading Scott’s book had reminded me that the bulk of Titanic’s casualties had been the Irish from the Third Class, and while in the shop I spotted a tome entitled The Irish Aboard the Titanic by Senan Maloney. The book detailed the lives of every Irish passenger and crewman, something that had been given scant mention in that time. In 1912 the public was not interested in 700 people sharing two toilets, and the focus of the press was on the rich members of society aboard that cursed vessel, they being the rock stars of their day. I purchased the book with the intension of reading it on our upcoming cruise to Nova Scotia, the place where many of the casualties of the accident were taken for burial. 

~

Our cruise was a graduation gift to our Granddaughter, Alyssa, and we would be sailing with her sister Daphne and her parents, Richard and Alyson, on the Carnival Glory with stops at the ports of St. John, NB and Halifax, NS. When I wasn’t on deck sipping watery Bloody Marys to the incongruous accompaniment of Reggae bands, I was in my cabin immersed in my new book. Its format was to address each Irish passenger showing their pictures, names and ages, whether or not they had survived, their ticket number and what they paid for it, where they boarded and where they were heading. Each of them had a sponsor waiting for them in America and nobody got in without one to report to. This was followed by what was known about their background and their experience during the disaster. My Grandparents who did not know each other at the time had crossed the Atlantic in those same times but fortunately, their ships did not collide with icebergs. 

All those greyscale Irish faces began to haunt me after a while; women putting on their prettiest expressions; men slightly suspicious of the camera—most breasts bursting with youth and promise. As I turned each page a new life revealed itself to me and my own surging Gallagher blood had me hearing penny whistles and uilleann pipes in my dreams. In St. John we disembarked to have a look around at what turned out to be not much—about what I expected. Jocelyn, Alyson and I used the opportunity buy some wine and smuggle it aboard against ship rules. On the way there we passed a small young man with red curly hair and freckles wearing a green sport coat busking on a curb with a fiddle. At this point I was seeing the Irish everywhere I looked but this little leprechaun scratching away at a jaunty Reel pushed the envelope. I stopped to listen for a moment then dropped a Five into the upside down green top had by his side. “Tank You Sor,” said he in a brogue that only confirmed what I already knew. “Do you know the “Sailor’s Hornpipe,” I asked. He thought for a quick second and then launched into the tune familiar to anyone who has ever seen a Popeye cartoon. He was sawing away at it when we moved on and I had to repress the impulse do a little jig down the sidewalk. 

That evening we sailed south out of the Bay of Fundy and rounded the southern cape of Nova Scotia north bound for Halifax. In 1912 we might have crossed paths with the Carpathia off on her rescue mission or the McKay-Bennett on its grim assignment to retrieve the remains of the dead. As Jocelyn lay sleeping I sat on the edge of the bunk having a nightcap of our renegade wine. The cabin was dark and the engines thrummed comfortingly. I drew the drapes apart and looked down. We were on the Starboard side and in a lower level of the ship. The wake seemed close enough to touch and you could hear its splashing. The churning sea was a pale green in the ship’s running lights, but a fog had rolled in and neither the sky nor the horizon were visible. Above the wake only a milky white mist prevailed. So immersed in the story of the Irish aboard the Titanic was I, that their greyscale countenances seemed to form in the fog to peer back at me. It was not lost on me that at this position, I was looking in the direction of the grave of the doomed Titanic. Yes, it was hundreds of miles distant and two miles down, yet these remain her waters. The faces seemed to jockey for position crowding one another, but did they not seem closer than before I thought? I slid the drapes back together a little too quickly, drained my wine and lay back looking at the window and the illumination that spilled in through the cracks. I would not be opening the drapes again on this night.

~

The following day we would spend in Halifax and an excursion was in order. Looking at the guidebooks we found one of the many that looked promising and bought tickets. While waiting at the terminal we walked through the assortment of booths selling memorabilia, crafts and a lot of T-shirts. I began to see what a cottage industry had sprung up around this worst sea disaster in history. References to the event seemed to be everywhere in the city. We got onto a tour bus that was to take us to the cemetery of many of the victims as well as a trip to quaint Peggy’s Cove (save your money). Our tour guide was a white-haired former school teacher who was direct from a central casting call for “Somebody’s Grandma.” She was wiry and well informed and had a way of quieting the bus passengers when she was doing her narrative that belied her teaching background. I half expected her to go up the aisle to see if anyone was chewing gum. As we drove to the Fairhaven cemetery, she ran though the facts of the disaster and the aftermath, though by this point I could have almost have given a tour myself. 

Alyssa sat next to me on the tour bus listening to our guide who sat across the aisle from me. My granddaughter has a way of slipping into “the zone” when her imagination whisks her away. I checked in with her a couple of times to see if she was okay and she always was. No one loves the Titanic Movie more than she. Alyssa has probably watched the tape more than me and one night when we watched it for the umpteenth time, I could see her moving her lips along with the dialog as she sat on the carpet playing with her Barbies. She relates to Rose and loves Jack. Apparently this is not an unusual condition and was common among young girls of this time period. Let’s call it Titanic Syndrome for want of a better term. 

We disembarked the bus and made our way through the gate of Fair Haven Cemetery and up the slope to where one hundred and twenty-one of the Titanic casualties are interred. One third of those graves are not identified. Surveyor E. W. Christie laid out three long lines of graves in gentle curves following the contours of the sloping site. By co-incidence, the curved shape suggests the outline of the bow of a ship. Among the stones is one marked J. Dawson. Joseph Dawson was a coal trimmer in the engine room and probably never expected to see the sky until he returned home to Southampton, but the events of April 14 brought him to the boat deck in the last moments of the life of the great ship. The life boats were long gone and the “Black Gang” removed their shoes because they knew they’d soon be going swimming. Dawson had the presence of mind to pocket his National Sailors and Firemen's Union card which would at least identify his body for his family. He was twenty-three years old.

The cable ship McKay-Bennett was dispatched to pick up what casualties they could find while the Carpathia sailed the 713 bedraggled survivors into New York harbor and the attendant media frenzy. McKay-Bennett’s mission was far less glamorous. They were to retrieve and embalm what remains they could locate. Upon reaching the wreck site, it quickly became apparent that there were far more bodies floating in the ocean than anyone had expected. They had not brought enough supplies to prepare this many bodies (306) for burial, so 116 were buried at sea. To put it indelicately, they were plucked out of the ocean and plopped back in. The buried-at-sea were mostly third class passengers but that did not raise the hackles of many because there was a de-facto class system that allowed people to expect such things. J. Dawson was among the lucky cadavers. Because he was carrying his union ID, he would be properly buried and have a dignified headstone that would bear his name. Other ships would find more casualties, but many were never found. After Cameron’s Titanic, word got out that there was a J. Dawson buried in Halifax and girls began to pilgrimage there. There they left offerings of flowers, movie tickets and some intimate articles of apparel. If there was such a thing as the dead looking down at us from a cloud, I can imagine poor Joseph Dawson complaining, “Where were you when I needed you?”

~

After our excursion to Peggy’s Cove, the bus descended the high ground into Halifax. By this point I may have been the last person paying attention to our guide’s narration. Alyssa was sleeping at my side and the guide was talking into a microphone sitting in a seat to my left. She also was obviously tired by this point but she talked on about the terminal. With eyes that seemed to look inward as she described the scene at which our ship was now docked down below. It was here that the bodies of the Titanic victims were unloaded and organized for interment. The Mackay-Bennett arrived at Flagship Pier at North Coaling Jetty No. 4, HM Dockyard early on the morning of 30 April 1912. She arrived at the pier to unload her cargo around 9:30 a.m. This was where the gaily painted Carnival Glory was now docked, and I could tell by our guide’s eyes that she was in a zone of her own.

Postscript:

After the Titanic disaster no ship ever sailed without adequate life boats for everyone. In addition; Coast Guard boats began to patrol the shipping lanes to report on any iceberg danger. The Titanic had an Olympic Class sister ship; the Britannic. In the wake of the Titanic disaster, the water tight bulkheads of Britannic were raised to B Deck. Although intended to be a passenger ship, she was called into duty as a hospital ship with the advent of World War One. In November of 1916, in the Mediterranean off of Greece, she was struck by an explosion that was either a mine or a torpedo. There were 1,066 souls aboard out of which 30 died. Even with additional reinforcement and the higher bulkheads, she joined her sister at the bottom of the sea in about an hour.

Post-Post-Scriptum:

In researching for this blog, I read A Night to Remember yet again. Now I can put it back into my toolbox…for a while anyway.

Moon

Fort Bragg, NC, 1967

Mooney and I had drawn short straws in 1967—that season of war—and though we didn’t know one another at the time, we had that fact in common. By coincidence we found ourselves in the same National Guard unit drilling in the Plastic City. The deal went like this: six months of active duty training (eight weeks basic soldiering 101 followed by four months of schooling in a discipline specified by your home unit). So after we would learn to take orders without question, how to make beds along with the unsavory craft of sanctioned homicide, we would proceed on to Advanced Individual Training (AIT) to learn the care and feeding the UH-1B helicopter—that most overburdened workhorse of the Army’s war effort in “The Nam.”

As we went through the monotonous rigors of indoctrination into “The Guard” we got acquainted as forced comrades are want to do. The natural cynicism of young men of our age and era coursed through our conversations. This war was all madness…a fact we well understood. It was a great in-joke that this time happened to be on us. We had friends in common and we bonded as we prepared to depart on our journey. “Moon” was a shortish, roly-poly Irishman with a shock of red hair and a cherubic face full of freckles who, despite his size, didn’t shy away from an altercation.

Fort Eustis
After we were disassembled into different platoons at Fort Bragg, I only ran into Moon occasionally during those eight weeks. It wasn’t until we got to Fort Eustis, Virginia (a.k.a. Fort Uterus, Vagina) that we became those two Yankees from Masta-two-shits and figuratively joined-at-the-hip. The first night we got into our new barracks we were approached by a smallish guy with five o’clock shadow, a lugubrious grin and an attitude that matched before we’d even dropped our duffel bags. It wouldn’t have been a big deal if not for the half-dozen sneering cohorts fanning out at his sides O.K. Corral style. Seems this nimrod took issue with the fact that while most of these regular Army soldiers taking AIT would be shipping out to Viet Nam following graduation, Moon and I would be returning to Massachusetts. As we faced-off against this mob, I was getting the distinct feeling that things were about to turn really ugly. Moon’s gift of gab and Irish luck came through for him though when it turned out that he and our torturer were from the same hometown and even had friends in common. Once the confrontation became less confrontational, his goons, relieved of duty, shrugged their shoulders and flopped onto their bunks while Moon and Nimrod chatted away the remains-of-the-day like a pair of debutantes at a white-glove tea. 

~

So those months ran along and we learned all about the workings of the “Huey.” I committed to memory nuggets of technical info such as the contents of the fire extinguisher which is (sound it out) Mono bromo tri flouro methane, knowledge that has served me well in the years since…yeah, right. The instructors nickname for the hardware that attached the main rotor to the aircraft was the "Jesus Nut" for pretty obvious reasons. The tail rotor had a moniker as well, they called it the “Fan.” Why? Because if it comes off you watch that pilot’s ass sweat.” We were in training to be “Crew Chiefs” and, God forbid, not under-the-hood mechanics. The Crew Chief’s job was to get passengers on and off the aircraft and in a combat situation, man one of the M-60s while hanging out of the open cabin doors on monkey straps to strafe the LZ. This position made for a tempting target from below, and without getting into gory details, a new Crew Chief’s frequent first duty when assigned to a Huey in Nam was to clean up after his predecessor.

~

One of the “Dirty Dozen” of Georgia guardsmen in the billet returned from Christmas leave with an acoustic guitar under his arm. He kept it under his bunk with the intention of improving on the instrument while off-duty. When it caught my eye he offered it to me to try and I sang a few snippets of songs. From then on I gave him what tips I could and eventually my repertoire got to be “Summer Rain” by Johnny Rivers, “I Who Have Nothing” by James Brown and an oldie from Elvis called “Soldier Boy.” Given the situation and the sentiments of the song, “Soldier Boy” was a hit in the barracks. For a time, after lights-out, they would pass me the guitar and I would lullaby the young warriors into the arms of Orpheus perched Buddha-like on my top bunk. 

 ~

Moon was an entertaining storyteller but I think some of his humor chafed this bunch of rednecks—he was just too much of a damn Yankee. He liked motorcycles and skiing, that much I knew from chatting during the first flight to Fort Bragg, but his greater passion was scuba diving. As a kid he had been so fascinated by it that he had stuck his father’s air-compressor hose into his mouth and jumped into Lake Shirley to sit on the bottom as long as he could stand it. One night as the soldiers broke into snores one-by-one,  and while legions of cockroaches swarmed the latrine, Moon, from his bottom bunk, near-whispered a story from his days as a commercial diver.

The Dive
It seems there was a maintenance project going on in Boston, not far from the Museum of Science where the Charles reaches the harbor. The huge pumps along with their enormous inlet/outlet pipes were being updated and restored, and he and his diving partner, Glenn (his boss), had the assignment of assessing the daily progress. It was day and night work although it wouldn’t have made any difference inside the piping with its perpetual darkness. There was of course electric lighting in place but it never seemed quite adequate in its amber glow and seemed less so at night though this was totally psychological. He and Glenn had slipped into the water and made their way into that gaping maw.

At first they swam together but bit-by-bit Glenn dropped back, figiting with something along the way. Moon kept on ahead. As when he was a youngster, as soon as he got underwater a feeling of intense wonder and excitement gripped him and he was in-the-zone again. When he achieved that state time slowed down for him and he became mesmerized by his environment. There were a few places where the pipes intersected so it was imperative to stay together, but that cardinal rule had now been broken, and he’d gotten so far from Glenn that he couldn’t see him any more. He cast his flashlight back to where he’d been. The plankton in the water was so dense that visibility was not more than a few yards. The flashlight proved worthless and shining it only lit up the silt to the blaring level of amber static. It was like putting on your high beams in a snowstorm. He could see the hand in front of his face, but just barely. Kicking over to the inner arc of the pipe wall, he was reminded that he was not alone. The wall was festooned with the usual cast-of-characters. There were barnacles and mussels, dog winkles and whelks, sea squirts and stars, urchins and…crabs…lots and lots of crabs. He was hovering close enough that they raised their claws in warning. A school of mummichogs was orbiting about in curiosity as well which inexplicably brought cave paintings to mind.

Suddenly it hit him, “Shit, what time is it?” In his hubris he hadn’t noted when they went under so his watch wouldn’t help him. He looked at his gauges using his flashlight and the breathing gas was at a concerningly low level. He looked around him again and realized he’d lost his bearings and was not sure where he had come from. He became aware that he was bobbing with the slight push/pull of the tidal forces working against the pumps. Those pumps now seemed to thrum like a giant’s heartbeat, louder and louder. He started swimming in the logical direction but encountered another crusted wall where he didn’t expect one. The Air Pressure Alert (APA) sounded and flashed, making him nearly jump out of his skin. He had no choice, he had to start stroking and kicking in some direction…

…The sensation was like being inside of a huge heart, maybe passing through a valve...(lub-dub)...like riding the current of circulation…shrunken down to the size of a blood cell maybe...(remember to breathe)...like in that stupid movie with Raquel Welch...(push-pull)...she looked so good in that wetsuit on the movie poster...it got me to piss away a sunny Saturday in a dark theater...what was it called? “What was…wait; he thought, is that a shadow?” The sound of his own heartbeat now began to throb in his ears…

…it was, and that shadow grew to be an unmistakably human form: Glenn. A hand thrust towards him from out of the murk and their arms locked at the wrist…God creating Adam. It pulled him in what turned out to be the right direction and then disappeared into the fog of silt and plankton ahead of him, leading the way. After what seemed a million years later Moon breached the surface and grappled himself up onto the staging dock, yanked off his mask and regulator and gulped at the night air like they weren’t making any more of it. Glenn was standing there fully suited-up but dry-as-a-bone. He spit out his regulator and barked, “What in the fuck took you so long? I was just getting ready to go back down looking for you.”

“You...just...pulled...me...out,” Moon gasped the words with just a hint of doubt.

“You’re narcotic dude. I had trouble with my shit and I had to abort my dive. I tried to get your attention but I lost you in the soup. You were swimming solo down there, Cap.”

Coda: 
Fantastic Voyage, yeah that was it, Fantastic Voyage.

That's Amore

This darn "Boy From Plastic City" is cutting into my drinking time.

Read it Sam...read it again!

Whadda ya mean, "Don't Bogart that book, my friend?"

Mother's Day Reminder

Oh Drat, I forgot to get Mother a present. I wonder if she would

like "The Boy from Plastic City?"