SS United States Conservancy Attracts Supporters at Philadelphia Union League
This post was written by SSUSC on April 22, 2010
Posted Under: Save Our Ship

On April 20, Conservancy Board members Susan Gibbs and Steven Ujifusa gave a presentation on the SS United States at the Union League of Philadelphia. The event was hosted by the League’s Yacht Club. Over 60 guests showed up for dinner, cocktails, and a multimedia presentation that included music, Powerpoint, and excerpts from the documentary “SS United States: Lady in Waiting.”

Steven Ujifusa provided an historical overview of William Francis Gibbs (a Philadelphia native whose father was a member of the Union League in the early twentieth century) and the ship’s construction, service career, and lay-up. Susan Gibbs then informed the audience about the Conservancy’s Save Our Ship campaign and Plank Owner program.

“We were received very well at the Union League,” said Gibbs, who encouraged the gathered members to become involved with the Conservancy’s efforts to restore the ship as a stationary waterfront attraction. “This is the kind of outreach we need to continue, in cities across the country, in order to ensure our success in preserving this irreplaceable American icon.”

Founded in 1862 to support the Northern cause and policies of President Abraham Lincoln, today the Union League of Philadelphia is one of the city’s premier business and social clubs.

“We want to offer a special thanks to the League’s Wesley McMichael and Ann Markowitz for making this event such a success,” said Ujifusa.

Stand by for further updates on the Conservancy’s efforts to Save Our Ship.

http://ssunitedstatesconservancy.org/SSUS/blog/conservancy-attracts-supporters-at-phila-union-league/

Kudos to the person who did this spectacular recreation of the “Titanic” in Crysis. One truly gets an appreciation for how perfect this ship’s external proportions were despite her enormous size.

The video below indicates a new, disturbing theory that caused the “Titanic” to split in half, not at a high angle, but at a shallow one. She split along one of her expansion joints, which allowed her rigid steel superstructure to flex slightly with the movement of the sea. For naval architects, this was a necessary evil in ocean liner construction, especially as ships grew longer than 700 feet, and these expansion joints were dangerous weak points. The “Titanic” might have actually cracked (albeit not lethally) during her first Atlantic gale, had she ever faced one. The United States Lines flagship “Leviathan,” built in 1914 as the German “Vaterland,” actually cracked along her forward expansion joint during a North Atlantic gale in late 1929 while running at full speed. William Francis Gibbs, who had overseen the renovation of “Leviathan” from 1920 to 1923, never forgot this lesson.

In the case of the “Titanic,” the new theory of the break up suggests that the ship actually split apart while she was at a relatively shallow 10-15 angle downwards. This probably means that the 1,500 people trapped onboard the ship after the lifeboats had gone were caught completely by surprise when the lights went out and the ship began to rapidly sink.

The SS “United States,” built with an aluminum superstructure, did not require these expansion joints. Aluminum, unlike steel, has greater flexibility while having a comparable level of strength. Aluminum however is very difficult to shape, and it was not until after World War II did shipyards have the ability to construct upperworks of commercial ships with large amounts of the metal. Joining the steel hull and the aluminum superstructure was an immense challenge for the shipyard. To prevent galvanic corrosion, an extremely durable insulation had to be placed between the two metals to prevent the aluminum from disintegrating where it came into contact with steel.

Not only would the “United States” have probably survived the iceberg strike which sank the “Titanic,” but also would never have split in such a catastrophic manner.

March 3, 2010

By Steven B. Ujifusa
For PlanPhilly

The owners of the SS United States are now accepting scrappers’ bids for the famous ocean liner. Norwegian Cruise Lines, which is owned by Genting Hong Kong, will allow scrap merchants to survey the ship over the next few weeks. The fastest and arguably most beautiful transatlantic liner ever built – whose faded red, white, and blue funnels have become part of the Philadelphia landscape – has been moored at Pier 82 in South Philadelphia since 1996.

Norwegian Cruise Lines purchased the United States in 2003 with the intention of restoring her as a cruise ship.  In February 2009, as a result of the souring economy, NCL announced that it was abandoning these plans and that they were putting the ship up for sale. Originally, the terms of sale stated that she could not be sold to a non-U.S. entity or for scrap. Now it appears that the non-scrapping provision has been removed, and that scrap merchants are being allowed to make bids on the ship.

NCL’s main motivation for selling the ship is to unburden itself of the berthing and maintenance fees, which run upwards of $800,000 per year. The current scrap market price of the liner is estimated to about $2 million.

In the meantime, the SS United States Conservancy is launching an all-out fundraising and awareness campaign to save the ship from the scrappers. Norwegian Cruise Line offered the Conservancy the opportunity to purchase the ship in 2009, but the nonprofit organization was not in a financial position to accept the challenge at that time.  The Conservancy has since launched a “plank owner” program in which ordinary citizens can make a donation to raise money to alleviate the docking fees and develop a viable business plan for her as a stationary, floating attraction, either in New York or Philadelphia.  The Conservancy’s eventual goal is to be part of a public-private partnership that will renovate and operate the ship.

It’s an ambitious and expensive vision. “The Conservancy’s Save Our Ship campaign shows the groundswell of public support for the SS United States we’ve seen throughout the nation,” said Conservancy Board President Susan Gibbs, whose grandfather, William Francis Gibbs, designed the vessel.  “We’re modeling this campaign on the public subscription which saved the USS Constitution back in the 1920s. The power and symbolism of this ship strikes a real chord.  The nation has faced real challenges in recent years.  Here is a patriotic project that all Americans can embrace.”

Fans of the “Big U” feel that this not just about saving a ship, but saving an irreplaceable piece of American history. “This is both a patriotic and a practical effort,” said Conservancy Executive Director Dan McSweeney, whose father emigrated from Scotland to America to serve as a crew member aboard the vessel. “We’re absolutely committed to saving one of the most important symbols of America in the 20th century, but we’re also talking about creating hundreds, if not thousands, of jobs when this ship is refurbished and becomes a stationary attraction in a large U.S. city.  We must save this irreplaceable American icon and continue the process of establishing a public-private partnership to re-purpose her.”

The ship has attracted a lot of interest recently as a possible historic attraction along a revitalized Delaware waterfront. Members of the Conservancy met with Thomas Corcoran of the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation and Alan Greenberger of the City Planning Commission last October to discuss possible uses and locations for the ship. The restoration of the ship as a waterfront attraction has been endorsed by City Council President Anna Verna. Last December,  First District Councilman Frank DiCicco sponsored a resolution that recognized the history of the SS United States and supported its preservation in Philadelphia. “A rehabilitated SS United States would be an exciting addition to the Delaware River that could be successful tourist attraction,” the resolution stated, and that “the refit would create hundreds of jobs for a number of skilled laborers.”

At the federal level, the preservation of the ship has also been endorsed by Congressman Joe Sestak, a retired admiral and Democratic senatorial candidate.

Last year, the plight of the United States made headlines in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. The Conservancy scored a major coup in July 2009 when it received a $300,000 matching grant from philanthropist H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest.

Thomas Watkins, a retired Pennsylvania state judge and friend of Lenfest, was instrumental in securing the grant, and is outraged at the current situation.

“The sale for scrap of an irreplaceable national icon that bears our country’s name by a Chinese-based company is a metaphor for the state our country is in right now,” said Watkins. We are already in hock to the Chinese as a nation. What’s next? The Statue of Liberty? The Alamo?  The Golden Gate Bridge?”

For its part, Norwegian Cruise Lines released a press statement on Wednesday evening.  “We have continued discussions with the SS United States Conservancy,” the release said in part, “but to date, they have not made an offer to purchase the ship.  There are significant costs, approximately $800,000 annually, associated with maintaining and berthing the vessel.  Therefore, we continue to seek alternative arrangements with the intent of selling the vessel to a suitable buyer.”

****

Naturally, there has been discussion in the design and planning community about the ship as a creative solution to the casino controversy in South Philadelphia. In his January 25 article in Philadelphia Weekly, Brendan Skwire wrote that since, “it looks like the state is determined to shove casinos down our throats … I say make lemonade from lemons. Sell the ship to Foxwoods and open it as a casino!” And now Steve Wynn has entered the picture.  It is also estimated that her lower decks could accommodate 200 parking spaces.

When asked about the possibility of the ship as a casino, the Conservancy stated that it has an open mind for financially viable ways to save the ship from destruction. “We are open to the idea of the ship as a casino if it was a way to save her,” said Dan McSweeney of the Conservancy, “but it would have to be part of a larger complex that would include a museum and cultural attractions.”

Joanne Aitkin, an architect at Kieran Timberlake and chair of the Design Advocacy Group (DAG), thinks that the use of the ship partially as a casino is a good idea. “The ship as a casino seems like a perfect fit to me,” Aitken wrote in an email. “Exchanging a big box on the waterfront for a cool ship – what’s to decide?  Seems like it would be a huge draw.”

George Claflen Jr., another prominent architect and fellow member of DAG, feels that the ship could be restored incrementally, and that the actual cost of saving her in the short term is quite small.  “Steve Wynn has been talking about building a ‘cute casino,’” Claflen said in a phone interview. “The SS United States could be a landmark casino. It can be saved and developed incrementally. I can envision a casino on the upper decks, lower decks as open space for future expansion, and then the engine/boiler spaces can be stabilized as a ruin like Eastern State Penitentiary.”

“I’m very distressed about where things are with the ship,” Claflen continued. “The potential has been in Philadelphia’s face for 15 years, and just seeing that beautiful ship towering above our city should be a reminder that we do not want to lose it.  This is too dramatic an opportunity to pass up for the Delaware River revitalization.”

****

Completed in 1952, the SS United States still holds the Blue Riband of the Atlantic for making the fastest crossing of the Atlantic Ocean: 3 days, 10 hours, 40 minutes at an average speed of 35.59 knots, or about 40 land miles per hour. From 1952 to 1969, the “Big U” was the most famous ocean liner in the world, a favorite of the rich and famous as well as ordinary tourists and immigrants.

She counted the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe, Bob Hope, and Princess Grace of Monaco among her first class passengers. Yet she was also a secret weapon in the Cold War, as she could be converted within 48 hours into a 15,000 soldier troopship, and could steam 10,000 miles around the world at 30 knots without refueling.  Her hull and engine designs were classified military secrets. Most importantly, she was a symbol of the optimism and exuberance of the 1950s post-World War II era, when America was at the peak of its industrial might.

Her construction was the lifelong dream of Philadelphia native William Francis Gibbs (1886-1967), America’s preeminent naval architect who had one dream: to create the fastest, safest, most beautiful ocean liner in the world. An eccentric, driven patrician, Gibbs felt that his ship was blessed with what he called “the power of survival,” and that his design team “knew that they were trying for the greatest ship in the world,” he said, “and that they were doing it as trustees for the citizens of the United States…”

The United States was the crowning achievement of Gibbs’s career. In addition to passenger liners, his firm of Gibbs & Cox also designed 70 percent of all the naval vessels constructed during World War II—about 5,000 ships in all.  Perhaps Gibbs’s most famous contribution was the mass-produced Liberty ship. FDR’s Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal was one of many admirers who felt that Gibbs’s contributions to the war at sea were essential to final victory.

For Conservancy Board President Susan Gibbs, the fact that ship now sits forgotten in the city of her grandfather’s birth is a strange historical irony. “It is so poignant that my grandfather first dreamed of designing big ships when he was a Philadelphia boy and would watch the action at shipyards along the Delaware River.  And now his dream ship is languishing, forgotten by the nation she so proudly served.  There must be a reason why this ship is still with us, after so much neglect and after so many years.  It must be because we still have a chance to save her.”

Links:
http://www.ssusplankowner.org
http://www.ssunitedstatesconservancy.org
http://www.kyw1060.com/pages/6488948.php?contentType=4&contentId=5680912
http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/news-and-opinion/Ante-Up-on-the-SS-United-States-82563577.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125417162355547323.html

Steven Ujifusa is a board member of the SS United States Conservancy, a national nonprofit dedicated to saving the great ship and preserving her historical legacy.  He is currently working on a general interest book on the SS United States and the life of her designer William Francis Gibbs. The book will be published by Twelve Books (http://www.twelvebooks.com) in early 2011.  To learn more about the book and the SS United States, visit http://www.stevenujifusa.com.

http://www.ssusplankowner.org/

David Brooks

\”The Power Elite\” by David Brooks

In today’s New York Times, columnist David Brooks wrote, “We’ve increased the diversity and talent level of people at the top of society, yet trust in elites has never been lower.”  In the past fifty years, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have opened up their doors to minorities and public school graduates, and the result has helped lead to a tremendous explosion in wealth and talent.   Educational institutions and other social institutions are now less defenders of an existing, fixed elite than an assimilation mechanism that blends new talent into an existing but fluid establishment.  The enormous economic growth from 1980 to 2000 would not have been possible without the shattering of old barriers and the unleashing of a new jolt of energy.

Yet it was not done out of pure altruism; by the 1950s, college presidents realized that they had to open their doors, or lose academic standing.  All rhetoric aside, producing “gentlemen” alone was no longer a financially viable enterprise. After the devastation of the Depression and the explosive growth fueled by World War II, America’s corporations needed not just relationships and connections to remain on top of the business heap, but talent. Raw talent.

The SS United States was a product of  postwar America that was not just at the peak of her power and prestige, but also of an America on the brink of transition: the old, industrial, and stratified society of the pre-World War II era, and the new, meritocratic world of the broader-based prosperity of the 1950s.  She also would not have been possible without the backing of the old power elite that Brooks eulogizes.

Her chief designer, William Francis Gibbs, was the scion of a wealthy, striving Philadelphia family.  His parents, originally from provincial Hackettstown, New Jersey, did everything they could to ensure little Willy went to the “best” day school in Philadelphia (Delancey), grew up in the “best” neighborhood (Rittenhouse Square), and attended the “best” college (Harvard), and the “best” law school (Columbia).  Despite his odd appearance, the tall, lean William Francis Gibbs still “looked” aristocratic, and was highly-versed in the arts and culture.  Even as an adult, he wore a morning coat to church and tails to opening night at the Metropolitan Opera.

As president of the largest naval architecture firm in America, Gibbs was very much at the center of what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex.  He was a savvy and sharp businessman who insisted on dealing with only the Navy’s top-brass, and was skillful at pushing his revolutionary engineering and safety measures on the military’s most conservative, old world branch.

Yet there the resemblance to the “power elite” ends.  As he later told a reporter, he would never have amounted to anything if his father had not lost all his money and was forced to go out and work for a living.

Such a decline in economic fortunes have two possible outcomes.   He might have become bitter and nostalgic, trying to recreate what once was, living in a phantom world of the past.  One thinks of the mentality of the post-bellum South.

Yet I firmly believe Mr. Gibbs took the other option: forging ahead.  The economic calamity gave him drive, a superhuman drive, to move forward and funnel his tensions and angst into creativity.   He no doubt realized that much of the wealth created during the Gilded Age, especially in Philadelphia, was the result of opportunistic, predatory tactics that did very little more than create spectacular boom-and-bust cycles.  Fortunes like those gained (and lost) by his father were often cloaked in the trappings of European aristocracy, and it was considered patriotic for the wealthiest Americans to live like latter-day Medicis.

As an adult, Gibbs was extremely sensitive to divisions.  As vestryman of St. Thomas Fifth Avenue, he abolished private pews, allowing the general public to worship along side the wealthy in a house of God, and installed glass doors so that people could peer inside this magnificent edifice, whose design was very much in the “Throne and Altar” Gothic style of Ralph Adams Cram.  He wore shabby clothes and shunned most social functions, and insisted that he learned his trade not at some fancy school, but by his own study and learning through experience.

He lived comfortably, but relatively modestly compared to the yacht club set of Manhattan and Long Island.  He preferred the company of artists and theater people to corporate executives and socialites.  Probably because, like him, they had learned by doing, and were self-invented characters who defined themselves by their craft.

And in a time when most of America’s white-shoe commercial banking and law firms used discriminatory hiring tactics, William Francis Gibbs hired people at his famous firm without regard to religion or ethnic background.  The person who designed the ship’s propellers was a rare thing in 1950s America: a woman engineer/mathematician.  The firm’s office at 21 West Street was arranged on an open floor plan. Mr. Gibbs’s had his own small office, but it wasn’t really private, as the door was always open and anyone could interrupt him.  If they so dared, as his grim expression and curmudgeonly voice, often punctuated with profanity that would shock a sailor, intimidated many a subordinate.  Yet if a subordinate was in need, a new bicycle or coat might mysteriously appear at his or her desk.

The irony was that although the workspace of Gibbs & Cox was open, it was shut off from the outside world by a maze of locks, cameras, and security guards.  It was justified by top-secret Navy work. But was he also afraid that the world he created might be swept away?

To Mr. Gibbs’s credit, although he claimed the SS United States had the “power of survival,” he never dared to claim that she was unsinkable.  He built as safe a ship has he possibly could, “the best I know how,” and he preferred “known horrors to unknown horrors.”  He knew that if something did go wrong and lives were lost, he would be responsible.

* * * *

For all of Mr. Gibbs’s eccentricities and artistic vision, the SS United States was very much a product of the American financial and military power elite of the 1950s.  And this country has had a very odd relationship with success and power.  The fascination with and hatred of institutions such as Harvard, one with inextricable ties with the American Puritan tradition, is that in an aspirational culture, they still represent significant cultural barriers in the bitter political polarization of the nation today.  The “Power Elite,” whether old or new, conjures up feelings of yearning and aspiration (think of the success of Polo Ralph Lauren), resentment and righteous anger (think Teabag populism) or a mixture of both.

There has been a deep-seated hatred and mistrust of hereditary elite since Colonial times.  In the early Republic, to be called a monarchist (as John Adams was during the Election of 1800) was comparable to being called a fascist today.   His son John Quincy Adams was dismissed as an effete, over-educated fop by his Jacksonian detractors, a man who would rather read Hebrew and Latin tracts and play billiards than go hunting and shooting.  It did not matter that Adams was impoverished and Jackson one of the wealthiest landowners in the South.

Partially as a reaction against a public perceptions of over-refinement, by the late 19th century elite boarding schools had regimens of cold showers, contact sports, and spartan living to toughen up rich boys.  And one famous New England boarding school headmaster supposedly said, “I don’t like boys that think too much.”

As a lover of books and literature, Theodore Roosevelt would have disagreed, but he did rail against men on Wall Street who chased after “soft living,” status, and luxury.

His fifth cousin Franklin Roosevelt was a master at combining patrician flair with the smart, populist communication skills of a Tammany Hall politician. He also was a political realist, and had no qualms about playing a political boxing match, Tammany style.

Yet his Groton compatriot, Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson was not so lucky.  He was stunned that a huge segment of post-World War II America hated him not so much for what he said, but for his appearance and manner of speech.  It was so English, so condescending, so “foreign.”  No wonder the mustached, striped-pants, carnation-in-the-buttonhole pillar of the Eastern internationalist establishment was  lambasted by Joe McCarthy as being soft on Communism.  “Pinko” Acheson.

There is the “Joe the Plumber,” aspirational success of a populist bent.  It is okay to be rich as long one acts just like a regular guy.   Or as Joe said, I might not be rich now, but I might be later, so don’t tax the superrich.  Thomas Frank analyzes this interesting, seemingly contradictory political trend in his book The Wrecking Crew.

It is true that those possess substantial fortunes are often not those who “live the life” and surrounded by all the trapping of success, but those who own small business, keep a low profile, and save a lot of money.   They generally are secure in themselves and who they are that they don’t need to let the whole world know.  Ben Franklin would probably pen a dust jacket endorsement of The Millionaire Next Door.

Some politicians have played these social cards very well. Our last two presidents were loaded with Ivy League credentials.  George Bush was a member of the hereditary elite if there ever was one, but the Yalie passed himself as a populist in the same way the Harvardian FDR did in the 1930s.  Despite his poor communication skills, he brought home the bacon for his party and managed to win two terms in office. And he disavowed his connections with Yale.  Barack Obama, a poster-child for the meritocratic elite of the modern era, has had to deal with charges of “foreignness” and “indecisiveness” that come with an “academic” mindset.  He is an accomplished speech writer and elegant writer, but does he “think too much”?

Do we want a leader who is smarter than a regular guy?

Or do we want a leader just like us a regular guy?

Can intelligence and analysis be combined with virtue and practicality?

Can the nation still come together to create heroic, tangible achievements?

* * * *

Today, as the SS United States awaits her fate, the nation that once created her is once again on the brink of a great transition.  The nation’s faith in its government, its business establishment, and its political ideals has been severely shaken in the past decade.

I think that if Mr. Gibbs were alive, we would observe that if securities become so hard to value that even the experts cannot price them, then that’s comparable to building a ship so big and complex that even the most skilled people cannot operate her.  The result is that the ship is wrecked. And the Atlantic, like the market, is a vengeful master, one that viciously punishes those who claim that they have finally conquered it.  He might say that claiming one has built an unsinkable ship is like claiming one can consistently produce a riskless 10% return.

In the end, the SS United States was not felled by fire, collision, or torpedoes.  She survives, but exists in a state of decayed obsolesce. Is it only symbolic that a ship bearing our country’s name,  a masterpiece of engineering ingenuity and artistic creativity that consumed so many man hours not just of calculations, but vision, talent, and willpower, is now in serious danger of being consumed by the scrapyard?

Will the crisis we are now undergoing lead to a yearning to once once before, a mentality that can lead to genteel decay and nostalgia for an idealized past?  Or will it lead to a renewed national drive, one that will create more self-invented characters who create future, metaphorical versions of the SS United States?

It was a little exactly a year ago that I made my last research trip to Newport News, Virginia. During the course of researching my proposal and the actual book, I had made 3 trips to the Mariners’ Museum, the repository where the design material related to the SS United States, as well as William Francis Gibbs’s surviving personal archives, are kept under lock-and-key.

I took the train twice from Philadelphia twice in mid-2007, a dreary, 6 hour drive through towns that had only appeared in the TV news and history books: Quantico, Ashland, Fredericksburg. I would then get off at the small Newport News station, get a taxi to the Hertz rent-a-car, and drive to the Red Roof Inn in neighboring Hampton. There, I would live the solitary life of a researcher for a week, driving up and down Mercury Boulevard, with its monotonous strip malls filled with anonymous small businesses crying desperately for attention. The low structures were occasionally punctuated by the sickly yellow sign announcing “Waffle House,” hovering above a building illuminated by hanging fluorescent globes. Waffle House and I became quite friendly during these trips. But I did find one local restaurant, tucked away next to a hobby store near the intersection of Mercury and Jefferson Boulevards, a place that served both standard American seafood and Thai/Vietnamese fare. It was run by a wild-haired, bearded man who said he had worked as a fisherman. I remember that he made some excellent coconut soup. He knew of the SS United States, which had been laid in Newport News from 1969 to 1992. It was obvious he was a man of the sea. A framed photo display of a grand yacht named Chanticleer, built in the 1940s and now sitting rotting somewhere in the Hampton Roads area, hung on the restaurant’s faded white walls.

When I returned to Newport News in January 2009, I rented a car in Philadelphia and drove down to Newport News. I decided that I had to remove myself from the fetters of long-distance rail travel and take the scenic route through the farms and back roads of Delaware and Maryland.  I also crossed over the spectacular Chesapeake Bay Bridge, its piers slapped by the churning gray waves of winter.

When I arrived back on the peninsula, I discovered to my dismay that the Thai/Vietnamese restaurant was gone, replaced by an electronics store in its drab, anonymous mini-strip mall. So aside from the meals I cooked on my extended stay room’s small stove, I would be subsisting once again on Waffle House and chain restaurants.

The archives had moved from the Mariners’ Museum proper to Christopher Newport University, a stone’s throw away from the old location. Much of the campus had sprung up seemingly overnight. The new campus was, with the exception of the new library, built to fairly correct Georgian standards, with the exception of greatly exaggerated size. The brickwork, dormers, and arched arcades were executed in what appeared to be historically-correct proportions, although decoration was simplified and porticoes a bit more steeply angled than their older models. Then there was the massive Trimble library, which was a blend of “Virginia Georgian” and “McMansion Baroque,” topped by a laterned dome that loomed over the campus like St. Peter’s Basilica over Rome. The main staircase and rotunda were like the Titanic’s on steroids, all polished marble, dark woods, and gleaming brass. It was here that the Mariner’s Museum Library was now located, in a low-ceiling, windowless space that I spent 8 hours a day for a week poring through two massive volumes that covered all aspects of the SS United States’s design and construction. I took occasional 15 minute breaks, sipping coffee in the Einstein Cafe, or wandering the second floor reading rooms and meeting spaces, all in a baronial scale and plushness. As this was a public university, I wondered where the sudden infusion of cash had come to pay for all this historicist grandeur. An improvement over the cinderblock and concrete “Brutalist” (some would say “Stalinist”) campus architecture I had seen long ago at SUNY Purchase while a summer program student in middle school.

This visit to Newport News, I stayed at one of those extended stay joints that offer a studio with a kitchen. It was nestled in a woodsy area and surrounded by office parks. The room was spartan and institutional, but not exactly stark. I often made breakfast and dinner there, and was often so exhausted by hours bent over books and manuscripts that I would pass out by 9:30pm. But loneliness did set in, and I would hop in the car and drive down Jefferson Boulevard looking for a cheap place to eat. It was a far cry from Center City Philadelphia, where a drink, a box of sushi, and good friends were only a few blocks away.

The library was closed on the weekends, so I sought some cultural nourishment elsewhere. I made a couple of trips to Colonial Williamsburg, where I attended a Sunday service and a harpsichord recital (of all things!) at Bruton Parish Church. I also drove all the way to Charlottesville to make my long-overdue pilgrimage to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. The day was rainy, and quaint little Charlottesville glowered in the dreary, fog-draped Blue Ridge Mountains. Yet by the time I reached the summit of Thomas Jefferson’s “Little Mountain,” the air had cleared somewhat. From the outside, the house looked a lot smaller than I expected, although appearances were deceptive. As I toured the well-manicured, terraced grounds and the Enlightenment-gadget filled house (Thomas Jefferson would have been first in line for an iPhone had they been invented), I could not help contrast the property with the sober, rambling wood-frame farm house occupied by Jefferson’s rival John Adams in Quincy, Massachusetts. While Thomas Jefferson sat in his study, surrounded by French furniture and animal/geological specimens gathered during the Lewis and Clark expedition, John Adams worked the rocky Quincy fields alongside his farmhands, digging post-holes and clearing brush. Jefferson, as formidable a scholar and legal mind as Adams, of course had about 200 other people to do the manual labor for him.

Leaving the Mariners’ Museum, I found that there had been a new addition to the entrance: an 18 foot diameter, five bladed bronze propeller suspended above a cascading granite fountain. At dusk, the bronze cast a golden glow over the basin, a shimmering beacon on the street. I am glad that at least one portion of the Big Ship remains in her birthplace.

I have had a hard time finding a recording of William Francis Gibbs’s voice, as Gibbs & Cox destroyed most of his recorded archives a decade after his death in 1967.  I had seen plenty of video footage of him, but Mr. Gibbs is mute.  In one piece of film footage, taken when the SS United States’s arrived in Southampton,  Mr. Gibbs peers back at the camera with a slight twinkle in his eye and showing the smallest of knowing smiles. I had also read through a few speeches and several pieces of his writing.   His earlier writing was stilted and formal, as if he was trying to break out of some sort of cage, and that expressing himself was a real trial.  For someone rigidly brought up in Philadelphia’s 19th century upper class world of cricket clubs and private schools, expressing one’s feelings was not high on the list of childhood priorities.  It was a closed, formal world that I believe he fought hard to escape.

Although he spent most of his professional life in New York, he always identified himself as a Philadelphian, and he also took the best elements of that world along with him, namely the culture, gentility, and old world tastes in clothing and the arts. As one friend said, he represented the best of the 19th and the 20th centuries, a man who designed the most modern ships in the world but still wore a morning coat, a homburg hat, and striped pants to church. And he maintained a strong policy of hiring without regard to ethnicity or religion, an unusual practice at big firms in mid-twentieth century America.

Yet his speeches, ones that he gave without notes in front of large gatherings, were peppered with irony, dry humor, and wisdom. His became so famous for his dead-pan delivery that he became a popular emcee at awards dinners.

When attending Yankees games, one friend noted, he was completely at ease, and his enthusiasm was infectious.  That dour expression, she said, was just an act; he saved his smile for those he knew and trusted best.

I had heard Mr. Gibbs has having a “very salty tongue,” and that his speech was peppered with short, abrupt Anglo-Saxon phrases.   His voice was one of intelligence and authority.  I heard in my mind a gravely, patrician intonation learned at Philadelphia’s Delancey School and Harvard College, one that I could easily hear quoting Shakespeare at dinner parties and using some extraordinary curse words in the shipyard.

Finally, I have come across a rare British Pathe newsreel of Mr. Gibbs speaking in front of reporters on July 8, 1952, when the SS United States arrived in Southampton on her maiden voyage.   He is dressed in his trademark battered fedora hat, black batwing tie, and gray trench coat.

To hear Mr. Gibbs speak, cue up the video to 2:30.

Selected Originals – BLUE RIBAND FIRST TRY