Ship Captain's Daughter Read online

  The off-watch crew waits to go ashore.

  After our snack, we walked up forward to Dad’s quarters. Mom was already there, knitting or reading. She’d put in her years on deck, so usually, after saying hello to everyone, she went up to Dad’s room to wait for the break. Sometimes she took her sketch pad and drew pictures of the ships or the harbor. Sometimes she did Dad’s laundry.

  Dad’s room had only two chairs. I sat on the bed, which was on a metal platform. Mother showed him the mail, had him sign some things, or talked about what was on the cover of the Time magazine she’d brought him. Maybe she gave him some photographs, or letters, or an article from the paper.

  Mom knits in the captain’s quarters on the SS Charles M. Schwab. Her knitting instructions are on the pillow.

  While they talked, I pulled the heavy maroon bed curtains around me and pretended I was a movie star, or I fell asleep. After a while there was a loud whistle from the dock, Mother picked up her book or knitting, and Dad and I went back out on deck to finish the load and do the “trim”—the final distribution of cargo.

  Adventures in Port

  Most visits were pretty much the same, but there is one I will never forget, thanks to the bumboat. Dad and I were out on deck. He was writing down figures in his black leather loading book, and I was passing the time by counting how many spouts there were in a ship’s length, and then how many pigeons I could see.

  Then (hooray!) I saw the bumboat scooting around the corner, bouncing over the water. It was like watching a cartoon character pull alongside. The little floating store was black with a yellow wheelhouse and a hemp bumper on the bow that looked like a mustache. Most intriguing was the mysterious door through which everyone disappeared.

  Why was everyone so eager to go down there? I stood beside Dad watching as the men started to line up, slinging their legs over the railing, and scrambling straight down. Would I ever dare to do that? “No,” I said to myself, “I would not!” Just looking at the boat surging up and down on the waves made me dizzy. I watched with interest, however, as the men climbed back up with bags full of candy, magazines, clothes, cigarettes, and even an occasional transistor radio. Suddenly, I saw Mr. Kaner, the owner and captain, pop out the door. He had a mustache that looked just like the bumper on the bow of the boat, reminding me of Groucho Marx. Looking up, he waved, pointed to the door, and yelled, “Hi, Bill. Come on down.”

  A bumboat at the Great Northern docks in Allouez outside of Superior, Wisconsin. The bumboats were floating convenience stores owned by the Kaner brothers of Superior. They are no longer in service due to the decrease in the number of ships on the Great Lakes and the ability to order from the internet.

  I couldn’t believe it when Dad turned to me and said, “Do you want to go?”

  I gulped. “Well, um, maybe, kind of …” I looked warily at the ladder. “You can do it,” Dad said. “I’ll be right below you.” He slung his leg over the railing. Then he told me to turn around and bend backward under the wire as he guided my right foot down to the first rung. Then he drew down my left foot. Now my toes were resting right against the steel ship. There was no angle to this ladder, just straight up and down. It wiggled as I took my next step. I froze and sucked in my breath. Dad kept one hand on my leg.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Keep going.”

  I started again. When I felt my first foot on the deck, I started to breathe again. He took my hand, and we made our way to the little door. Four steps down and, pyew! The smell of sweet tobacco made me gag. I plugged my nose and hesitated, but the cheery calendar girls smiling and winking all around were very welcoming, not to mention the ladies on the covers of magazines on the book rack. Half of our ship’s crew was in there, talking and laughing, drinking beer and smoking and telling jokes. No other girls in there, that’s for sure!

  Dad quickly steered me around to the back, which was so crowded that I disappeared in between the cases of watches, bins of underwear and socks, boxes of birthday cards, bottles of perfume, razors, aftershave, and columns of cartons of Camels and Lucky Strikes. All sizes of transistor radios covered the walls from floor to ceiling. I noticed a whole section of cough medicines and a display of Brylcreem with a big cardboard picture of a man with curly dark brown hair and a blond woman with her hand behind his ear. What I liked best of all, though, were the boxes of candy and gum lined up in double rows in front of the cash register right next to the cigarette lighters.

  Behind the register stood Mr. Kaner, who was gruff, gravelly voiced, and kind of scary to a young customer like myself. He seemed to know everyone by name and was passing on the news from the last ship, where he had just seen a sailor who had previously been on our ship. When he saw me, his bushy eyebrows shot up in surprise. I took a step backward, but he came around the counter, bent down, and made a big fuss over me, telling me that I was beautiful and that I had been brave to come down. Afterward, he took me over to the freezer and let me pick out a free ice cream bar. Dad bought a Dreamsicle for himself, and we said good-bye to Mr. Kaner and went out on deck to eat our treats.

  Standing in the stern of Dad’s ship at the Great Northern ore docks in Superior, Wisconsin, Mom wonders where Dad and I have gone.

  When we’d finished, we stuck our sticks in the big ash can with all the cigarette butts and went over to the ladder. We looked up and—uh-oh—saw Mom glaring down at us. “I think we’re in trouble,” Dad said.

  It was a little easier going up. I didn’t stop once, and I tried not to look scared, but after Dad helped push me under the wire again and then got himself back on deck, I heard my mother whisper to him, “Willis Carl Michler, what were you thinking! Don’t you ever take that girl down there again!” Dad and I winked at each other.

  I don’t think the ladder was her main concern.

  When the load was done, Mom and I hugged Dad good-bye and climbed down the ship’s ladder, which was a little lower now with all the ore in the hold. The deckhands let go of the cables; the ship started backing out of the slip, and Dad sailed off for another five-and-a-half-day trip.

  In the fall, my teacher taught a unit on Duluth, the harbor, and the sailing life. She told the class that my dad was a sailor. She asked me if it was exciting to have a dad who worked on an ore freighter.

  “It is when the bumboat comes,” I answered. I don’t think she knew what I meant.

  This life had many memorable moments, but they were totally unpredictable. For example, Dad occasionally carried a load of coal to Washburn, Wisconsin, seventy miles down the Wisconsin shore. Unloading coal took a long time, and didn’t require much oversight by the first mate. Here, in a town with only one dock on a sandy beach, that could mean a walk in the lakefront park, a visit by ferry to Madeline Island, or, in the fall, a drive inland to visit an apple orchard. On one such layover my dad even triumphantly climbed the fire tower up on the hill of the neighboring town of Bayfield, as he’d once done as a teenage boy. These deviations from the routine were full of a sense of stolen time, of sheer luck. When such moments came along, we dropped everything and grabbed them.

  One such window of opportunity came the summer I was eight. Dad was delivering cargo “down below” in Sandusky, Ohio, when the steelworkers went out on strike. Dad was marooned, his ship tied up for an indefinite amount of time. The strike could end at any time, but it seemed that the sides were deadlocked, and the ships wouldn’t set sail again until matters were resolved. The question was, would the striking workers hold out long enough for Mom and me to drive all the way to Ohio? And if so, could Mom do it? She would either have to drive from Duluth to Chicago and then all the way around the bottom of Lake Michigan, or go through Wisconsin to Manitowoc, take the ferry across Lake Michigan to Ludington, Michigan, and then continue south to Sandusky.

  A flurry of phone calls went back and forth. Mom looked at the map one more time and then she decided, “We can do it!” The next morning we were off. She chose to go to Manitowoc. We packed our clothes, put sandwiches
and coffee in our Scotch cooler, and started out. Sandusky, here we come!

  We drove for hours, arriving at the ferry dock after dark. Men directed our car into the wide mouth of the car carrier, after which we climbed out and walked between the cars to the stairway up to the lounge. We found a bench to sit on, and I finally fell asleep. It was the middle of the night by the time we got off—too late to get our money’s worth from staying in a motel, Mom said—so we slept in the car for a few hours in the ferry parking lot. We started off again at first light, listening to Arthur Godfrey on the radio as we drove along. By midmorning, with only a few hours of sleep, Mom was starting to look really tired.

  It was after lunch that we finally passed the “Welcome to Sandusky” sign, but we still had to find the shipyards. After stopping at a gas station to ask directions and making a few wrong turns, finally the guardhouse came into view. We pulled up and were just getting out to ask if we could call Dad on the phone, when the door of the little house opened and out he popped, in shorts instead of his usual work clothes. The trip turned out to be well worth it, as we stayed in Sandusky for two weeks.

  Dad was still a first mate then and had only one room for quarters, but the captain let us stay in the guest rooms on board and even use the lounge, which had a little TV in a big blond wood cabinet. My mother thought that was very “modern.”

  As the first mate, Dad was in charge of the crew, but there wasn’t much to do while they waited for the strike to end except scrape and paint the deck and do other maintenance jobs. The men still served their watches but could leave the ship when they were off duty. Sometimes a group would walk together up to the little collection of gas stations and convenience stores out on the road. Other times the men would talk and play cards with the crews of the other ships with which we were tied up. Dad’s ship was one of four ships in a group, and we had to walk across the planks connecting them to go ashore. The good thing was that the pier where we were tied up was equipped with a stationary ramp to get on and off, rather than a ladder.

  My parents and I onboard the ship in Sandusky as we wait for the strike to end

  It was hot, and the crew was out on deck most of the time. We had an air conditioner in one porthole, but it was very noisy, so we were usually on deck, too. Dad got the men to tell stories. Oscar had been in the war and talked about the rain and mud in the trenches. He had a Norwegian accent and liked to shave outside. He had been a shoemaker in the war and fixed everyone’s shoes now, including his own, by flipping the soles over when they began to wear out. Tony could draw cartoons, though mostly he drew figures of curvy women with short skirts, high boots, and long hair. Harry was from Tennessee and played the fiddle. He talked to my mother about his own mother. He was homesick.

  During the strike in Sandusky, I take a turn sweeping on deck, while a couple of the deckhands, Tony and Harry, look on.

  One day, for something to do, the men threw a firecracker at a seagull. The bird swooped after it and squawked hysterically when it blew up. They all laughed. I thought it was mean but I laughed too so that I wouldn’t look like a sissy.

  Most importantly, we had a car and could go off on excursions. That meant we could go to Catawba Island, which was magical. It had an amusement park that glittered at night and a beautiful beach where I learned how to swim. One afternoon, we were sitting on the beach on our blanket after eating our ship provisions of pork sandwiches and cupcakes, and suddenly Dad said, “Everyone in the water.” I loved the water, but I didn’t know how to swim. We ran in hand in hand, Mom on one side and Dad on the other, and kept running until I couldn’t touch bottom anymore. They held me up as I began to float and then suddenly, Dad put his arm under my stomach and flipped my legs up parallel to the water and let me go.

  “Paddle,” he shouted, and he moved his hands up and down dog-paddle style. I did, wildly, but my legs kept sinking down and down, and the water was coming up over my chin. As I was screaming and flailing, Dad rescued me, pulling my legs back up parallel to the water. Then he pushed me off again, yelling, “Kick and paddle.” I started paddling like mad, kicking at the same time, and suddenly I was swimming. We swam together all afternoon and then dried off in the late-afternoon sun.

  Dad’s First Command

  The following year, 1953, started out the same. Dad left in mid-March when the lake thawed, and Mother started checking the paper again for his estimated weekly arrival times at ports near us. April went by, and May and June, and then, that July, it happened—I was no longer the daughter of a first mate. Our whole world changed. Just before my ninth birthday, my dad became a captain.

  The significance of this event is difficult to convey. Promotions were awarded strictly by seniority and the availability of ships. Ore contracts dictated how many ships were in service. The men on the officer’s track took their various licenses—weather plotting, navigational aids, piloting—and then they waited. The line of succession was long.

  When my father first realized his dream of “getting a ship to sail,” thirty-six ships made up the Interlake Steamship fleet. As of this writing, there are nine.

  It happened like this. Dad was returning to Duluth with a ship, and Mom learned that he was due to arrive at the Duluth, Mesabi, and Iron Range dock in Duluth at two a.m. She wouldn’t let me go with her to meet the ship in the middle of the night, so my grandparents came and stayed over.

  Late that night I heard Mom’s alarm clock ring. Then I heard her lock the back door and start the car. I fell back asleep. The next thing I heard was the refrigerator door open and close, and voices in the kitchen, and I realized Dad was able to get off the ship for a visit. They were home!

  The SS Adriatic was Dad’s first command and the ship my family remembered with enduring fondness. JIM DAN HILL MARINE ARCHIVES, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-SUPERIOR

  I got up and crept down the stairs, wanting to surprise them. But just when I came around the corner, I saw Dad pulling the cork out of a bottle of wine, and the two of them burst out laughing. I didn’t know what to do, so I just stopped and listened.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” Dad said. “I heard that they might, and then I heard that they weren’t going to, and then the skipper told me the news.” He sat down and started eating a cold leftover pork chop, and Mom toasted him with her glass.

  I’d better go upstairs, I thought. But just as I was turning around, Dad looked up and saw me. “I thought I heard something over there. Come here, sleepyhead, and join the party.”

  As I walked toward him, he jumped up to give me a hug, and then he surprised me by pushing me back at arm’s length. Putting his hands on my shoulders, he looked at me as if he meant business.

  “Guess what, doll? They’re pulling out another ship. They’re moving more ore this summer than they have since the war, and they’re fitting her out right now in Buffalo! And you know what?” He grinned. “Your dad is going to be the captain. After twenty-seven years on the deck, your dad is going to be ‘The Old Man!’”

  “Wow!” I said, as enthusiastically as I could.

  Of course, I knew this was a big thing. I had heard the story about how, years before, Dad had narrowly escaped a loss in seniority when my grandmother was severely ill. He had asked for a leave, which was not granted. At that time it was unheard of even to ask. He did get off for a couple of weeks, and upon his return there was no job available. After pleading his case at the home office, he eventually got rehired. The five years of service he had accrued were saved. It was wartime, and it was finally decided that while he had been away, he was officially in the Merchant Marine. The service time was credited, and as a result my dad had the seniority required to be promoted without having to wait for the next opportunity.

  I knew that, but Mom wanted to make sure I realized how important this was. She reached over and pulled me onto her lap, looked me in the eye, and said, “Do you really know what this means? It means that your dad will be up on his own deck, that he will have a bedroom, an office, and a
n observation room [a room the length of the front cabin ringed with portholes], and even a couch. It means he can get off when he is in port without asking and without trading watches. It means he will go to the meetings with the captains and chiefs. It means he will make more money. It means everything, that’s what it means. It means we’ve been waiting for this our whole lives!”

  “And,” Dad said to Mom, “it means that you now have thirty sailing days. And guess what?” he said to me. “When you turn twelve, you can take trips, too.”

  Dad standing proudly on the “captain’s deck”

  “It means,” he said, raising his glass to Mom, “that you are the wife of a ship captain! And that you,” he said, turning to me, “are the ship captain’s daughter!”

  Dad’s first ship, the Adriatic, was half the length of the current fleet’s flagship. It was coal-fired and old, but the captain’s quarters were constructed of beautiful wood. To our family, it was the Queen Mary.

  The captain’s quarters of the SS Adriatic with its beautiful bookcase, and above it, the big brass ship’s clock that chimed every half hour, day and night.

  Many things did change after that night. But some things in the sailing life never do. It was true, Dad didn’t have to load the ship anymore, which meant, if there was no pressing business, it was possible for him to be the first man off and the last one on in port. But even as a captain, there were the basic facts of the sailing life, and the main one was, there was no getting away from “sailing time.”