Why, When I was a Boy... (Maritime Commerce Division)

My old friend Ivan on his ranch down in Alabama reflects on the mutability of the human condition:

[W]hat amazes me is that Singapore is now... buying up huge chunks of bargain America.

I was in Singapore in 1948 whenIi was a 20 year old able bodied seaman on either the SS Kyska or SS Jean Lafitte (can't remember which) of the John B. Waterman Steamship Co., out of Mobile. Singapore isnt really a country -- it's a nation-state or a city-state. back then it was in what I think was was called the British Federation of Malay States.

Getting docked there was a precarious operation back then. there wasn't enough dock space so ships were tied up alongside each other until it was your turn to be alongside the dock, and loaded or unloaded. A Lykes Brothers ship out of Tampa was being eased away from the dock to make room for us to tie up, and I was manning a steam winch (anybody remember steam operated winches?) on the bow, with a mooring line attached to it. the other end of the mooring line had been passed around the Lykes Brothers ship and was fastened to a bollard on the dock. as slack developed in the 8 inch thick mooring line, I took it up with the winch.

We were just a few feet away from the Lykes Brothers ship as it was being eased out of our way, and some of our crew and some of their crew were on deck, talking across the water. I was totally occupied with keeping that mooring line taut but not to the point of snapping it, but my attention was diverted when I heard one of our crew holler across the water "how's the whores here?" -- a kind of natural question from arriving seamen not really interested in much else.

A kind of forlorn voice, probably suffering from what seamen then called "Cupid's catarrh," responded -- "half of them got the clap." What went through our minds when we heard that? The guy next to me is going to catch it but I aint.

Now, this city-state of Singapore, run mostly by descendants of Chinese immigrants, is buying up industrial America. lots of bargains. GM and Ford together are worth a tiny fraction of what Exxon-Mobil is worth. and the problems we've got are a lot worse than gonorrhea.

Update: John G. Waterman Shipping was long a mainstay of the Mobile economy; it passed oiut of existence in the 70s. Lykes Brothers it was sold out of Bankruptcy Court in Tampa in 1997; merged and merged again, it fell at last into the hands of a German transport company Hapag-Lloyd.