May 20, 2005
Fingering The S. S. Schenectady
Revisiting A WWII Swan Island Shipyard Zine
What follows is a version of something which originally appeared here in December of 2003. It serves as the introduction to our full-color print republication of the referenced material, available from Portland Communique Press. We're posting this material again as a sort of compansion to an article in today's Oregonian about ships built at Portland-area shipyards during World War II.
When we first caught brief sight of the bound collection of "The Finger" on the shelf at the Great Northwest Bookstore in Portland, Oregon, its name and style led us to believe it must be some sort of radical underground paper from the 1960s. It wasn’t until we spied the date on the first issue -- October 9, 1942 -- that we realized it obviously was something quite different.
Although the set had been bound together in hardback form, with "THE FINGER" and "OCT. 9, 1942 - JAN 3, 1944" embossed along the spine, there was no indication of the book's source, although that it had been carefully bound at all suggested it had come from a collection, of some sort, from somewhere. That binding, however, was free of any label or imprint.
The collection then sat untouched for months before we began to seek out information on "The Finger," its origins, and its creators.
A visit to the Oregon Historical Society Research Library in late November, 2003, yielded mainly some sense of the historical context of life at the Portland-area shipyards of Kaiser Company, Inc.
According to a 1944 publication of Kaiser itself called Tanker Champions of the World, intended to commemorate the work done at the company's Swan Island shipyard:
The first contract to build 56 T2-SE-A1 tankers was signed March 24, 1942, and the first ship steel was received in the yard May 23, 1942. Sixteen days later, June 8, the first steel was fabricated in the Plate Shop and on July 1, the first keel was laid. The hull was launched October 24, 1942, and delivered December 31, 1942.
That ship was the S. S. Schenectady, "largest ship built on the Pacific Coast, first of a fleet of fine tankers" according to Tanker Champions of the World. Almost a year to the day later, on October 23, 1943, "Swan Island received the Tanker Champion flag for having achieved the highest productivity per way of any American shipyard engaged in tanker construction."
You'll notice that the first volume of "The Finger" runs from October 9 until October 24, 1942 -- the final two weeks of construction for the S. S. Schenectady. And indeed, it is in this context that "The Finger" receives the only mention of it we could find at the Oregon Historical Society.
During those years, there was a company magazine for shipyard employees called Bo's'n's Whistle. And in the November 5, 1942, issue which celebrated the launch of the S. S. Schenectady and all that Kaiser workers had done to make it happen ("...launched just seven months to the day after surveyors started laying out the yard, and 115 days after keel laying ... a new national record for this class of ship"), we find this:
In the face of such major obstacles as shortages of vital manpower and materials, notably steel and oxygen, Swan Island management and men have gone ahead in the spirit of "It can be done," and established a national record for their very first ship.
One of the staggering undertakings on the jobs was the installation of 70,000 feet of pipe ... more than 13 miles, including the mammoth heating coils. Many essential items had not arrived at the last minute, and over a hundred emergency purchase orders ... including rudder, trucks, and bearings were issued in an effort to keep construction on scheduled time. These problems, coupled with an acute shortage of oxygen, were just a few of the difficulties licked in building the "Schenectady."
Excitement ran high at Swan Island during the last two weeks before launching, and a mysterious small daily publication known as "The Finger" came into being. Reputedly published by a dwarf living in a dug-out under the outfitting dock, this paper put the finger on employees not pitching in to help meet the launching deadline. Cartoons and posters by workmen helped build high morale among Swan Island workers.
Beyond this, nothing more is known other than what the editor (or editors) of "The Finger" did or did not reveal in the course of publishing. According to Kaiser Pemanente Northwest, their archives from Kaiser’s World War II shipyard operations do not include any material regarding the publication.
Further, a retired Kaiser employee who briefly worked at the shipyards during World War II, himself unfamiliar with the publication, asked at a retiree luncheon in December, 2003, if anyone present had any recollection of it. No one did.
For that matter, there is no current evidence, beyond the word of the publication's editors, that "The Finger" was in fact produced by and for shipyard workers themselves at all.
While clearly not a well-monied effort (one would not expect a paper put out by laborers to be so), hindsight -- or perhaps 21st century cynicism -- makes it just as easy to imagine that it could have been a Kaiser publication posing as a worker-produced effort.
Workers chastizing fellow workers, after all, likely would find a better reception in the shipyards than management doing the same. Then again, this was a period of intense wartime patriotism, and it isn't difficult to imagine workers wanting to keep the pressure up on those amongst them who weren't performing.
Neither do we know how many of each edition were produced, who created it, who wrote it, who paid for it, how it was distributed, nor how widely read it might have been.
What is clear from "The Finger" itself is that its October 24, 1942, issue was meant to be its final. Having played its own role in pushing shipyard workers to meet the intended launch date for the S. S. Schenectady, that issue is marked as a "Five Star Final Edition."
But then, on January 16, 1943, after successful sea trials, the S. S. Schenectady returned to harbor and sat at the dock at Swan Island. A report of the United States Coast Guard describes what happened next:
Without warning and with a report which was heard for at least a mile, the deck and sides of the vessel fractured just aft of the bridge superstructure. The fracture extended almost instantaneously to the turn of the bilge port and starboard. The deck side shell, longitudinal bulkhead and bottom girders fractured. Only the bottom plating held. The vessel jack-knifed and the center portion rose so that no water entered. The bow and stern settled into the silt of the river bottom.
Four days later, "The Finger" reappeared to rally shipyard workers to the cause of repairing their first tanker. "Maybe we don't know why the SCHENECTADY broke," the paper wrote, "but we sure as Hell know how to fix her."
A couple notes about this sudden reappearance of "The Finger" in 1943. If the set reproduced here is full and complete, it was not the start of a new run, but intended to be a one-off call-to-arms in the aftermath of the break-up of the S. S. Schenectady. Strangely, the issue is labelled as being "Vol. 3, No. 1" -- although there is no indication that the paper published at all since the conclusion of its initial run on October 24, 1942.
Stranger still, later that year, "The Finger" reappeared yet again. An issue dated November 10, 1943 -- and labelled "VOL. II, NO. 1" -- begins with the exclamation, "Boys and girls, the FINGER is back!" It offers no particular explanation for this, the second time (to my current knowledge) it suddenly reappeared. The editor does, however, offer this insight into the paper's operation:
The FINGER is published by yard employees for yard employees, and is free of all editing by the management. Kaiser Company, Inc., has reserved only two rights -- that of canning the editor and stopping publication of our little rag if we get too rough. We haven't been and won't be a mighty publication, but we can "put the finger" on the guy who isn't producing.
This 1943 run of "The Finger" included a new masthead logo, more complex layout, and superior printing, and no particular indication whether or not it was produced by the same team as the original.
In this new run's December 22nd issue, the editors briefly returned to the subject of Swan Island's first love, the S. S. Schenectady. An item which stands as an ode of sorts describes the ship's life, from launch through near-destruction, repair, and return to operation. It ends thusly:
The "Old Lady" is turning out to be a champ. Speeding through war waters to new accomplishments, she probably chuckles to herself and says:
"If the boys back home could only see me now!"
"The Finger" ended -- as far as I know for the final time -- with the very next issue. Dated January 3, 1944, it was one year and nearly three months since "The Finger" first appeared during the construction of the Schenectady.
Its final headline read, "FINGER FOLDS" and its front page included a quote from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:
The moving finger writes and having writ,
Moves on; nor all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it
Comments (4)
pdxkona on 20 May 2005
Wow! Awesome to have some context and background story to 'The Finger' which I perused through once.
That's really good to cool to know about the S. S. Schenectady...and what a charge to the story knowing how she cracked, and then somehow miraculously they repaired her. I'm sure our shipyard workers in that era were proud to be the best in the west; years later, I'm proud of them likewise.
tomhiggins on 20 May 2005
What is also great about this story is that a zine, thats what it was, was picked up 60 some years after the fact and still held relevence for folks. That bix found it and republished it so that I could sit and read it is amazingly cool.
Ya think BenIsDead or Crank will have that sort of longevity?:)-
-tom
allehseya on 21 May 2005
Show us another artifact and tell us another story, please?
Tenskwatawa on 25 May 2005
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Didja ever hear the one about The Man Who Lived in Paradise, the autobiography of A. C Gilbert, the namesake of the Gilbert Children's Museum (or whatever it's called, now that it's an Exploratorium, or whatever, franchisee), in Salem?
Gilbert was born in 1885 (uncertain recall) in Salem, or Monmouth. His granddad was the first bank (owner?) in Salem and granddad's brother platted the streets of Salem. The book offers a rich involvement with the pastoral life in the area, in the 1890s, with a feature in the subject's life of overcompensating in organized athletics for a physical inferiority complex -- he thought he had the puny's. In adolescence he designed 'gym equipment' for himself, organized 'local' teams (unaffiliated with schools or commercial sponsorship), and instigated track and field meets with similar organizations across quite a wide region including the Multnomah Athletic Club. In adult life he promoted (in the p.r. sense of the term) the establishment of the U.S. Olympics Committee and several times was judge of Olympics track and field events.
But it was a scene at age 10 which Gilbert describes that seems the telling of his innermost interest and lifelong pursuit. Being in one of Salem's 'privileged families,' it was rigged that he would be called on stage from the audience at the 'Orpheum',' to 'assist' the touring (vaudevillian) magician appearing that night. And the scarf disappeared or the card was magically found or whatever the trick was that involved him, and then the magician patronizingly said to him "Don't you wish you could do such magic?," and the young A.C. precociously says "Oh, but I can." Because he had been practicing. And, upstaging the pro, he did his trick, and got an afterwards audience in the dressing room, and was initiated into the magicians' realm of secrets backstage that night. In later life, Gilbert was the inventer or many of the familiar magician's props of the 1900s -- lady sawed in half, swords through the basket, etc. -- and the manufacturer of them as owner of the company that professional magicians bought from that you never heard of.
Oregon's own.
Pacific University today, in Forest Grove, was his boarding school (high school). He was encouraged to attend Yale, (and did), by an incidental acquaintance who saw him compete in a track meet in Albany (NY), or Syracuse or Schenectady (I forget -- but gadzooks, look, I accidently touched on the thread's topic). Gilbert received a Medical Doctor degree from Yale. And threw it away, never practiced medicine one day.
He financed his college attendance by performing magic shows at the social clubs and fraternities around, and peddling Mysto Magician boxed tricks he assembled. In his 4th year (?), he took a year's sabbatical and sailed to London to compete in the 1908 (second modern) Olympics. (Oops, maybe he was born in 1888.) His event was the pole vault and he obtained permission in advance to dig a hole in which to plant his pole, as he had learned back in Oregon. But on the condition that his score (height) would be measured from the field surface, not along the pole from the depth of the hole. His vault was 1st or 2nd (I forget, later he held the world record, for a time), but after the event the British judge filed complaint to disqualify Gilbert "for marring the field surface," and it was twnety-some years later before he was awarded his (gold?) medal, by acclaim and appeal. The medal is in the Gilbert Museum in Salem, as are others he won.
So he invented the cup in which pole vaulters set their pole. After college, he sold his interest in the Mysto Magic company to his partner, and with that stake started the toy company that was to invent the Erector set, for which he is perhaps most widely known. Oregon's own. As a toy magnate he was profitable enough to retain an inventor on salary in a two year search to improve electric wiring. They used the Thomas Edison methodology: Try everything; today often called trial-and-error.
The then-new electric motor invention was as big as a small car. Mostly used in businesses to drive a fan blade blowing air that cooled water vats and made ice. That was when ice was invented, as opposed to being discovered, (mined, extracted, and retrieved). Ice was a great invention.
However, electric motors were problematic. Wire insulation was rubber only, and the thinnest it could be worked was about a quarter-inch diameter, and in making the 'windings' -- hundreds of wraps -- of wire on the armature of an electric motor the result was big and bulky. Gilbert's hired inventor ultimately found it insulated wires just fine to dip them in shellac and the result was an electric motor you could hold in one hand. Which became the heart of a vast range of 'portable' products. One of the first, circa 1915, being a hand-held vibrator with a small rubber suction cup Gilbert's company marketed as a 'woman's personal assistant,' (or something like that), and went on to include a portable fan, a home refrigerator (the compressor needs a motor), an electric mixer, a vacuum cleaner, home power saw, home power drill, sander, that little electric motor in American Flyer toy trains and in Erector sets, and so on and so on. All of these 'first' products are (or were a few years ago) on display at the Museum in Salem. In effect, Gilbert invented home appliances.
His company, (in Connecticut, also the location of the nature, or 'wilderness' preserve land he donated to the state, named Paradise, and referred to in the title), was the standard setter for employee relations in developing industrial America. 35-hour work week, paid vacations, work injury insurance coverage, medical (health) insurance and extended to the employee's family, housing stipends and assistance, pensioned retirement plans, life insurances, arranged employee picnics, retreats and social events, length-of-employment pay raises, bonuses from productivity and sales successes, and employee equity (share) options. 1920. Oregon's own.
My favorite scene, probably for its relation to education, turns on Gilbert's theory of learning. He thought learning only happened during play, and that school lessons, for being structured and disciplined and assigned 'work,' was antithetical to learning. The scene has him pleading to the Nat'l Education Ass'n to please please NOT buy his toys to put in school classrooms because then the kids would not play with them and then they would not 'learn' anything.
A couple of years ago in December, one TV channel aired "The Man Who Saved Christmas," starring Jason Alexander (George on 'Seinfeld') as A.C. Gilbert. Wrong casting. Wrong framing. Wrong characterization of the man. Oregon's own, and maybe its best.. (Present company excepted, of course.)
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