Word: freighter
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Last week a battered old hulk was towed into Sturgeon Bay, Wis., to the din of saluting tugboat whistles and cheering throngs along the shore. The ugly hulk was the 600-ft. ore freighter George M. Humphrey, rusty red from 15 months under water. Her pilothouse had been crushed and her funnel twisted by the winter ice; the ripping current had torn off layers of paint, left her rail in tatters and smashed in the bulkheads. But to all of Sturgeon Bay (pop. 5,439) and especially to stocky, blue-eyed Captain John Roen, she was as worthy...
Million-Dollar Gamble. But tough, Norwegian-born Captain Roen, 56, a seafarer since he was 14, disagreed. If someone wanted the ship badly enough to pay a good price for the job, he would show that the biggest freighter that ever sank in the Great Lakes could be salvaged. No private concern was interested. The War Department, anxious to get the channel cleared, made a deal with Roen. The deal: if he could raise the ship, he could have her; if not, he must chop her off at his own expense to allow 35 feet of clear water over...
Roen spent the winter sinking and raising a 30-in. model of the Humphrey in a tank of water over & over again. Finally he knew every detail of the job. In the Straits this summer Roen sank a salvage barge over the freighter, attached cables and filled the barge with air, thus lifting the freighter six feet off the bottom. Then he towed the Humphrey along until she dragged on the bottom again. In a series of eight of these operations, he moved the Humphrey a mile and a half under water. When she reached shoal water, Captain John began...
...shipyards in the Northwest went back to a seven-day week. The reason: inability to obtain 10,000 additional workers needed to keep pace with tanker and transport building schedules. But at the Bethlehem-Sparrows Point Shipyard at Baltimore, the keel was laid for a sleek, 9,902-ton freighter intended for the postwar services of the American Export Lines to Mediterranean and Indian ports...
...Finland would tie up some 20 Russian divisions, prevent a Russian breakthrough to Norway and possible juncture with the Western Allies. Down by the harbor a stolid crowd watched flustered Germans dredge for 15 tanks, sent to the bottom the day before when a small and poorly loaded German freighter turned over near the quay...