We’ve all seen the commercials. Kathie Lee Gifford smiles at us, shows all those dazzling teeth, and sings, “If—you—could—see me now.” The ads must be successful, because they keep on coming. That means thousands of middle-class Americans head off for frolicking cruises in the Caribbean, with stops in exotic ports and shipboard buffets that keep the weight-loss commercials coming also.
In the years just before World War II, however, the vessels that performed cruise-ship functions were a lot less grandiose. When people of the U.S. middle class—just coming out of the Great Depression—wanted a shipboard vacation, they went on the Great Lakes. Ports of call were Cleveland, Buffalo, Detroit, Chicago, Duluth, Mackinac Island, and Isle Royal.
About a dozen years ago I did a series of oral history interviews with a man who worked that route from 1937 to 1940 in some of the ships of the old Georgian Bay Line—the North American, South American, and Alabama. Not surprisingly, the business in those northern climes was in the summer, but the wages available for even a few months were considerably above those offered by most jobs ashore. This individual started out as a purser’s clerk. In 1939, when he became purser of the Alabama, his salary was far more than he had made working in a chemical plant during previous summer vacations while in college.
The Alabama boasted an orchestra and master of ceremonies for evening entertainment and offered a variety of other attractions. In each port the ship arranged sight-seeing tours. Then, as now, food was one of the great enticements. The purser, who ate most of his meals in the passengers’ dining room, learned that the passengers averaged a weight gain of about ten pounds during a one-week cruise. He also enjoyed eating in the crew mess two days a week. There, the ship’s boatswain and seven Sicilian sailors would cook up great batches of chicken on Mondays and spaghetti on Thursdays.
The purser had to be meticulous in his record-keeping—maintaining lists of berthing assignments, payroll, fares, crew members’ personnel records, immigration and customs records, fuel and supplies taken on, and so forth. He also found out the effectiveness of small bribes. For instance, when the Alabama approached the locks at Sault Ste. Marie, separating Lake Superior from Lake Huron, a line of freighters was usually ahead. The cruise ship’s captain told the purser to take a pie to the man who ran the locks. That put the Alabama at the head of the line.
At times the ship took on coal at a place on the Canadian side near Detroit. While the Alabama was there, the purser paid a $2.00 fee to the customs agent for clearing the ship. One day, the agent was not at the coaling spot, so the purser had to go to the customs office in town. As he handed over the $2.00, he noticed that the customs agent nearly had a stroke. “Don’t hand me that here,” he said. It turned out there was no actual fee at all; this was his own personal scam, unwittingly exposed.
At times the purser went to the bridge and spent some of his off-hours steering the Alabama. He found that he was better than a couple of the regular helmsman, one of whom used to scallop through the water. But one man had no rival; he was superb. He could keep the ship on an arrow-straight course, at times without even looking at the compass card. He explained that he could feel the ship begin to turn and knew just how much rudder to use to counteract the change. At other times the purser talked to the mates about navigation. They did not use celestial sights, mainly because they were so familiar with the routes and because the Great Lakes generally had established traffic lanes in them—almost like driving on a highway.
In September 1939 the Alabama was under way when word came aboard that the Germans had sunk the British passenger ship Athenia. The sobering effect on the passengers was obvious, and so it was later, as the ship passed through the Welland Canal connecting Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. At the Canadian end, because that nation was at war, were guards and rolls of barbed wire.
The purser, who was in his late 20s, was engaged to be married, so he did not pursue a social life or dance with the women passengers—though it was never for any lack of opportunity. He remembered the frustration of the women, who found themselves outnumbering the male passengers by about eight to one. They came for romance, often wound up disappointed, and so spent their time plunking coins into slot machines.
One he remembered was a tall, attractive brunette named Dorothy Sexhauer, whose father owned about 42 grain elevators. She passed on a joke that was common in her dad’s company. Someone would call the office and ask, “Do you have a Sexhauer [pronounced sex hour] there?” The telephone operator would then respond, “Heck no, we don’t even have time for coffee breaks.”
In later years I was awfully glad that the purser had not taken up with Dorothy Sexhauer or any of the other women he met during those cruises on the Great Lakes. The man who told me about his shipboard days is Carl Stillwell, my father. The stories I recorded on tape in the 1980s were the same ones I had heard from boyhood onward—the ones that inspired both my brother Mark and me to become Navy men when the time came to pick a service. Both of us made our first naval cruises on the Great Lakes.