The SS Herbert C. Jackson, Dad’s last command, leaves the Twin Ports of Duluth-Superior for yet another trip “down below.” DIANE HILDEN
“Goodbye, Willie,” I heard Mother whisper. We stood there watching until the ship melted into a cloud, and then it was gone, due at the Soo in twenty-six hours, and thirty-six hours later at a steel mill in Chicago, where another ship captain’s wife and daughter would be waiting for it, down below.
The experience of command of a ship at sea is unforgettable; it is without parallel or equal. The responsibility is heavy, but the rewards—which become embedded in the very fabric of your life—are priceless.
FROM COMMAND AT SEA
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Kate Thompson, senior editor at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press, for her vision of memoir as history and her interest in mine.
Thanks also to developmental editors Sara Phillips for drawing out my father’s Wisconsin heritage and Erika Wittekind for honing the work and teasing out additional dimensions, as well as Elizabeth Boone for seeing it through production.
John Toren was coauthor in many instances. His sensitivity, language skill, and mechanical expertise helped nudge the story to what it wanted to be, and his idea of bringing it to the Wisconsin Historical Society is the reason the book in this form exists.
The list of further acknowledgments is daunting.
I thank my parents, who saved pictures and articles and who wrote journals with a sense that this life mattered. Childhood friends Ann Jenkins and Jeffrey Long shared my experience of growing up in a maritime community on a lake with an alluring and relentless horizon and thought I should share this regional life. My husband, Herb, and children, Amy and Lee, contributed through suggestions from their own memories. Louis Jenkins read, commented, and encouraged, as did Marit Nowlin, Peggy Dollinger, Professor Catherine Guisan, Bill and Linda Lundberg, Laura and Peter Merriam, Jan and Bill Munson, Linda Smith, Anita Zager, Fred and Jan Martin, Mara Hart, and Judith Josephson.
Local people connected to the shipping industry were essential in providing the correct facts and vocabulary. Davis Helberg, former director of the Seaway Port Authority, graciously arranged for me to attend a Propeller Club meeting, where I met mariner icons Dick Bibby, Wes Harkins, and Captain Gil Porter, who knew my father. Captain Porter volunteered his ongoing help and sat with me in his kitchen going through the manuscript word by word to make sure it was “right.” Great Lakes pilot Shawn Mckenzie also met with me early on, made suggestions, and connected me with Ellen Leu, whose father was the storyteller in “Winter Life” and with whom I had a delightful exchange regarding our experiences as ship captain’s daughters. Brian Thierry told me about loading. Mary George from the Lake Superior Maritime Visitor Center was an ongoing source of valuable information. She told me about the weight of ice on ships and also sent me to Lake Superior Magazine editor Konnie LeMay, who looked at the collection of material and asked the critical question, “What’s the story?”
Archivist Laura Jacobs from the Jim Dan Hill Library at the University of Wisconsin-Superior supplied important data and found the picture of my father’s first command.
Editors went through it in evolving stages: Julie Jensen, Gail Trowbridge, Jill Breckenridge, Evelyn Klein, and Connie Wanek, all with critical input, and professors Calvin Roetzel, Paula Cooey, and Jean Jacobson were cheerleaders.
Jeff Shroeder got me untangled from many computer panics, and Amy Jenkins was the very first person who combined the initial vignettes and laid them out in a way that suggested they might become a book.
J’ai Lisa’s interest at Kinko’s was heartening.
Finally, my sincere thanks to those I may have forgotten but whose ideas, information, and affirmation have made an invaluable contribution to the final product.
MARY T. GEORGE
About the Author
Ann Michler Lewis grew up in Duluth, Minnesota, where she lived from 1944 to 1967. She graduated from the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and taught English at Duluth East High School. Since 1972 she has lived in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she and her husband raised their son and daughter, making periodic family pilgrimages back “home” to Lake Superior. She has privately published a book of poems and sailing stories called My Duluth, now out of print. Fascinated by how the power of place shapes the human story, she thinks British writer Lawrence Durrell has captured it best: “We are the children of our landscape. It influences behavior and even thought, in the measure to which we are responsive to it.”
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