The summer of 1943 I was 16. We lived in Shively, Kentucky, but my parents were good friends with the Kelly family of New Bedford, Mass, (my mother’s home town) and they arranged for me to spend the summer visiting with them and their son Donald, who was about my age. Travel was by Greyhound bus.
I made myself at home pretty quickly, and Donald and I got along very well. But we were shortly looking for something to do. We learned that the Palmer Scott boatyard was looking for boat builders, and decided to apply. This was in the midst of WW II, and it was ruled that building these wooden fishing boats was an essential contribution to the war effort.
New Bedford and Fairhaven are separated by the Acushnet river, and are connected by the Fairhaven Bridge. This is a drawbridge, in which the span pivots 90 degrees on a central support to allow ships to pass on either side. My grandfather Louis Baldwin had been the “draw tender” on that bridge for over 37 years. In a newspaper interview after 25 years on the job, he said “if they’d spent another million on the bridge, they could have made it high enough so no moving span would be necessary”. But of course, he would have had to seek other employment. Once, when I was six or eight, he took me up to the control room atop the bridge, where I watched as he opened the bridge for a ship to pass. Quite a thrill.
The Palmer Scott boatyard was located on the Fairhaven side of the river, adjacent to the drawbridge. (I’ve been told that the boatyard is still operating, but moved to a location on Cape Cod.) During the war, all seaports took security measures. Donald Kelly and I had to go to the office of “Captain of the Port” and obtain waterfront passes to go to and from the boatyard. We often carpooled to work with a man who drove a Crosley automobile. It was the smallest thing on the road, ( 26.5 horsepower) but it undoubtedly stretched his “A Coupon” gasoline ration of four gallons per week.
At the boatyard, our products were to be a 65 foot and a 75 foot fishing boat. I worked mainly on the 65 footer. When I arrived, the keel had been laid, and we were erecting temporary bulkheads or formers which defined the cross-section of the hull every few feet. To these, we attached fore-and-aft “ribbands”, and the shape of the boat began to be visible, although it was all temporary construction.
The ribs were 2” by 4” oak. The keel had been notched to receive the lower ends of the ribs, which then had to be formed to the shape of the hull. We had a “steam chest” which was a length of iron pipe, maybe twelve or fifteen feet long and a foot or more in diameter. It was supported about 25 or 30 degrees from horizontal, with the lower end capped. A flap of canvas covered the upper end. A bucket of water was poured in, a fire built under the lower end, and it was ready for business. Once the water was boiling, an oak rib would be placed in the pipe, and in a few minutes it would be withdrawn, hot and flexible.
The rib would be forced into the recess in the keel, then secured to the ribbands with C-clamps, so it assumed the shape of the hull. When the oak cooled, it would retain that shape. When the ribs were all in place, it was time to start planking.
I began with duties such as greasing the threads of the C-clamps (we had a lot of them), supporting the ends of planks as someone else guided them through a bandsaw, and any other assistance the experienced boatbuilders requested. For this I got the government designated minimum wage of 40ç per hour; $16 per week. Our crew was “old” guys, and Don Kelly and myself. No draft age people. One of my fellow workmen had actually made a voyage on the sailing whaleship Charles W, Morgan, which is now in the museum at Mystic, Connecticut.
The “ways” for our boats were just above the sand of the riverbank, and one day one of the workmen was standing in the wet sand using an electric wrench attaching or removing ribbands . There was a short circuit, and he was unable to move, except we could hear him through clenched teeth saying “shut off the f**king current” A couple of guys dived for the master switch mounted on a pole nearby. When they pulled the switch, he abruptly sat down in the sand, But he was all right. The next day an electrician was replacing all the two-wire circuits with grounded three-wire circuits.
Planking the hull proceeded from the keel upward, and from the shear, or deck level, downward, finally closed with a course known as the shutter. Each plank was secured to the ribs with “boat nails” which were countersunk below the surface of the plank. At this stage one of my duties was to glue wooden plugs over each nail head, using Weldwood glue. When the glue was set, the plug was trimmed with a chisel and/or plane to be flush with the plank surface.
Each plank, of 2 inch oak, was individually shaped, by a process known as “spiling” (most dictionaries omit this meaning of the word) in which a thin flexible board called a batten was tacked to the ribs in place of the board being designed, and data necessary to shape the board was transferred by compass and ruler to the batten, from which it was then transferred to the oak plank. I became pretty good at this and mastered a technique I’ve never used again.
Some of the final planking was on the “tumbledown” area near the propeller shaft and rudder. There was a short plank, highly formed after steaming,, on either side of the hull – essentially mirror images of each other. One of them had been nailed in place, and the other was about to go into the steam chest. The planks were beveled on one side to provide a space between adjacent planks for the oakum caulking. I told our boss, Oliver, that I thought that plank was beveled for the wrong side of the hull. He sent me off with “I don’t think you’re right.” But as quitting time that day approached, I saw our chief plank craftsman working furiously on a replacement part. (Overtime work was practically unheard of.) Neither of them ever acknowledged that I was right, but I believe the evidence was with me.
As the planking proceeded, we removed the formers and ribbands as they were no longer needed. Now our handiwork looked like a boat. The prefabricated pilot house was brought in by truck.
Around the end of August, I had to say goodbye to the Kellys and go back to Kentucky for the start of a new high school term. We were two or three days from launch, and I was very disappointed that I didn’t get to see our boat in the water. But I had the sense that it was a well-built boat, and I presume that its owners caught a lot of fish to aid in the war effort..
Tags: Fishing Boat, New Bedford, Summer Vacation
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