Word: manly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Since then, Hazelwood has been a man under siege. Not long after the accident, a TV reporter beat him to the mailbox and rifled through his letters until neighbors chased her away. Other journalists have surrounded his home, flashing cameras through windows and banging on doors. Still others have stolen bags of garbage from the curb. Then there are the sneers of strangers, the steady stream of Hazelwood songs and jokes, the death threats to his family from anonymous callers, some of whom promise to blow the pretty yellow house to smithereens. Whatever respite Hazelwood may have enjoyed...
Hazelwood was one of a select group of around 15 classmates chosen to work for Esso, as Exxon was then called. As a third mate, he earned $24,000, extraordinary pay for a young man starting out in 1968. Hazelwood, who by then preferred to be called Joe, reported for duty on the Esso Florence in Wilmington, N.C. His seafaring instincts made an instant impression. "Joe had what we old-timers refer to as a seaman's eye," recalls Steve Brelsford, a retired Exxon captain and Hazelwood's first boss. "He had that sixth sense about seafaring that enables...
...away at the traditional authority of shipmasters. "Joe didn't have Exxon tattooed under his eyelids," says a high-ranking Exxon engineer. "He'd make his own judgments and act accordingly. That's why those at sea respected him and those on land thought he wasn't a company man...
...After the spill, Hazelwood became a marked man. He flew home to Huntington Bay, shaved his beard to change his appearance, and was promptly arrested. In court an assistant district attorney called him "the architect of an American tragedy," and a state supreme court judge compared the damage from the spill to the destruction of Hiroshima. Hazelwood was held overnight in a lockup with more than 50 other prisoners, many of them accused or convicted murderers, armed robbers and drug dealers. When his cellmates learned that his bond had been set at $1 million (and bail at $500,000), they...
Hazelwood is a free man today, at least until his trial, now scheduled to begin in October. He spends much of his time lobster fishing in Huntington Bay with a friend in order to earn money. The work is filthy, but it helps keep Hazelwood's mind off his new role as America's Environmental Enemy No. 1. It will probably be 1990 before Exxon and the National Transportation Safety Board release their reports on the Valdez spill. Meanwhile, late-night comics continue to rip into the skipper, and several songs about a drunken Hazelwood play on Alaskan radio stations...