The "Flying Bird" of Puget Sound

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She was, of course, the MV Kalakala, known offi­cially as “the world’s first streamlined ferry.” For more than 32 years, from 1935 until 1967, she plied the narrow and congested waters of Puget Sound on the Seattle-Bremerton run. From her maiden voyage on 3 July 1935 to 8 August 1952, she made 35,601 round trips be­tween the two ports, covering a total of 1,007,229.5 nauti­cal miles. (No compilation was made for the last 15 years of her active career.) At a conservative estimate of 1,000 passengers a trip—only half her rated capacity—she car­ried more than 71 million people during that 17-year pe­riod, the majority of them sailors and “yardbirds.”

She was conceived as a conventional double-ended, passengers-only ferry at the Moore Dry Dock Company in Oakland, California, and was christened Peralta in 1926, honoring a pioneer San Francisco Bay Area family. For six years, she made the run from San Francisco’s land­mark Ferry Building to the Oakland Mole as the flagship of the Key System Line. In April 1927, only a month after entering service, she tried to take out a San Francisco ferry pier, causing some $35,000 in damages.

Ten months later, late in the afternoon of 17 February 1928, the Peralta approached the Oakland ferry and train terminal jammed with 4,000 homeward-bound commut­ers. Since the first passengers off the ferry got their choice of seats on the waiting electric cars, the bow section was, typically, elbow to elbow. As the vessel neared the slip, her broad prow dipped low into a trough, and a wave spilled down the main deck, bowling over passengers like ninepins. In the ensuing panic, a number of them jumped overboard or were swept into the water. Five lives were lost. In the subsequent investigation, the U. S. Maritime Service reluctantly cleared the crew of charges of negli­gence. The government inspectors could not prove what they strongly suspected: the forward trimming tank, rather than the after one, had been filled with water, fatally low­ering the Peralta's freeboard under the extra weight of the many commuters.²

Although she continued to ply her route past the white wooden buildings of the Naval Receiving Station on wind-swept Yerba Buena Island, the Peralta was viewed with trepidation by superstitious old salts. They recalled that she had hung up on the ways during launching. Every­one knew that was an ill omen. The Peralta was jinxed, they swore.

In 1933, the ancient wooden pier terminal at Oakland caught fire on a May evening. A light rain was falling, and the clouds were hanging low. But neither nature nor the fire department could prevent the blaze from spreading to the Peralta, moored alongside with cold boilers. She burned to the waterline. But before doing so, she did man­age to save three Key System employees who were trapped inside the terminal. They smashed a window and leaped to the ferry’s upper deck, carrying the day’s re­ceipts, some $8,000 in cash, with them. As the last hawser burned through, the Peralta was cast adrift, “flaming from waterline to pilot house.”³ The men were taken off by a tugboat.

Key System officials apparently decided the Peralta truly was a jinxed ship. They had the hulk towed back to Moore Dry Dock, where she had been launched with such fanfare less than seven years before. She passed into the hands of the wreckers.

But the Peralta was rescued at the penultimate moment. Her hero was Captain Alexander Peabody, the colorful and controversial president of the Puget Sound Navigation Company, better known as the “Black Ball Line.” He bought the battered hulk, her topsides crumpled and peeled away like a giant sardine can, for what was de­scribed as a “ridiculously low price.” Chartering the oceangoing tug Creole, he had his bargain towed to Lake Washington Shipyards at Houghton, across from Seattle. She arrived on 20 October 1933.⁴

During the next 19 months, the vessel underwent a complete metamorphosis. She was converted from a dou- ble-ender to a single-ended auto-passenger ferry with a capacity of about 90 cars and 2,000 people. Since much higher speeds were required on the long Bremerton run (13.5 nautical miles) than on the Oakland run, the original steam turbine generator, the four boilers, and the two elec­tric-propulsion motors were removed. They were replaced with a ten-cylinder, 3,000-horsepower Busch-Sulzer di­rect-reversing diesel engine that would turn up 16 knots. The auxiliary engine was an eight-cylinder, 600-horse-

Many have tried to describe her unforgettable appearance.

“A silvery, blimp-shaped symbol” said the 11 May 1975 Seattle Times. One writer thought she resembled Howard Hughes’s “Spruce Goose” without wings. When I rode her in 1940-^41, I fancied her a capacious 1936 “Airflo” Chrysler with a blunter nose. And to author Harre Demoro, “From the stern, [she] slightly resembled a whale with its mouth open.”¹

Power diesel from the same St. Louis manufacturer. The ^0nly steam equipment retained was a small boiler that pro­^vided heat for the passenger cabins.

But Captain Peabody still was not satisfied. He wanted ^ls new flagship to be so distinctive in appearance she j^ould attract nationwide publicity, thereby stimulating usiness on his routes in those Depression years. He asked eattle’s Boeing Aircraft Company to design a stream­ed superstructure that would give the ferry an “aerody- enic look.” Boeing was not, in the mid-1950s, the busy P ant it would become later that decade. It had just com­P ^cte<J the design and construction of the Model 299 four- ^eagine bomber, the prototype for the B-17 Flying Fortress p. World War II fame. But the crash of the plane at Wright Ohio, on 30 October 1935, had put the whole proj­

ect in limbo. The first production contract for the “YB- 17” would not follow until January 1937.⁵ Accordingly, Boeing engineers were delighted to accept this unorthodox challenge, pledging themselves to secrecy to sharpen the drama of the vessel’s recommissioning.

The Boeing design was indeed innovative. Nothing like it had ever been seen afloat. The change in power plants / had achieved a 36% reduction in weight. The weight was reduced still further by employing lightweight, electric- welded plate steel for the upperworks. The old main deck became the auto deck, with two spacious passenger decks above. The fourth, or bridge, deck was fitted with a small wheelhouse of sheet copper, rather resembling a pilot’s cockpit with portholes, centered between two flying bridges. Abaft the wheelhouse, and integral with it, was a

texas housing the master’s, chief engineer’s, and owner’s cabins and an officers’ head. To carry out the streamlined motif, the stack, painted red with a black trim, scarcely extended above the superstructure; the lifeboats were moved from their conventional weather-deck location to cutaways far aft on both sides of the main deck. At the bow, two large doors closed off the auto deck from the elements, completing the suggestion of an airplane’s bluntly rounded nose.

By employing this radical contour, wind resistance was reduced by 10%. That was the claim. The fact was, as Robert Leithead observed in “The Navy Yard Route— Part Two,” “The shape was adopted mainly for promo­tional purposes, as was the shiny aluminum paint job that she was to carry for the rest of her life as a ferry.”⁶

The much-touted aerodynamic styling may actually have made the ferry slower. Thirty years later, when the new Seattle Ferry Terminal was opened, the bow doors were removed for faster loading and unloading. Under way, the wind now whistled through the auto deck rather than being forced up and over the “fuselage.” Result: the ferry was a fraction of a knot faster! Retired Boeing engi­neers must have enjoyed a chuckle over this repudiation of aerodynamic theory.

“Perhaps it was Boeing’s airy touch that inspired her new name, the ‘Kalakala,’ Chinook for ‘Flying Bird,”’ the Seattle Times speculated in its 11 May 1975 issue. Perhaps, this is so—if one can imagine a wingless, Argus-eyed, silver bird, unable to lift herself off the water. But no one can doubt she was the answer to a public relations firm’s prayer. Even the pronunciation of her name called for publicity and advertising campaigns: “Kah-/oc£-ah-lah, with the accent on the second sylla­ble,” Washington was told.

For many years after her 1935 debut, the Kalakala made six or seven round trips per day between Seattle and the wooden terminal near the navy yard gate in Bremer­ton, with occasional diversions to other routes. And for many years, the fare was a bargain: 450 each way for passengers; $1.10 for auto and driver. Sailors and their girl friends, officers and their ladies, shipyard workers, truck drivers, clerks, bookkeepers, businessmen, tavern owners, thieves, hustlers, “ladies of the night” employed in second-floor “hotels” downtown all rode the Kalakala.

The Kalakala was unique within as well as without. Conventional dual-purpose.ferries were limited, in most cases, to a single passenger deck, onto which the operators tried to fit the maximum number of bodies. In the resultant lack of lebensraum, they were almost modem. But the roomier “Flying Bird” ferried her patrons in style as well.

The lower passenger deck offered a large, gracefully curved observation cabin with oversized portholes at the bow and an equally spacious women’s lounge with similar portholes at the stem. Well-upholstered synthetic-leather benches filled most of this deck. The outboard benches were carried around in a sweeping semicircle from row to row to accent the streamlined effect.

The upper passenger deck was recessed to provide a

broad, elliptical promenade. Comfortable benches in brown synthetic bedecked observation lounges fore and aft. A full-service dining room occupied the entire amid­ships area. Booths lined the large, plate-glass picture win­dows on either side, flanking a double-horseshoe lunch counter.

I spent many a pleasant 55 minutes on the Kalakala while my ship, the California (BB-44), was in overhaul at Puget Sound in 1940-41. The low, lush-green islands and peninsulas and capes of Puget Sound would appear and pass astern; snow-capped Mount Rainier was an irregular conical shape to the south. If I had been paid recently, I indulged in a bottle of Olympia beer—250 with a 100 tip for the waitress. If funds were short, I sat on a round stool at the counter and had a cup of 50 coffee—free refills, and uo tip expected from enlisted men.

The trip always gave me a quiet pleasure. That hour on the Kalakala provided a sort of transition from the disci­plined, organized life on a battleship to what seemed, by contrast, the busy purposeless anarchy of civilian life. By the time the ferry neared the red brick campanile of the Colman Dock, I had had time to adjust to the clamorous confusion of the city.

Two decks down, the auto deck was laid out to transport ^0 or so cars in three narrow lanes on each side of the central uptake. Many a fender and running board came to grief here, especially on the rows of stanchions that marched along the deck between the two outboard lanes and the four inner ones. As originally built, the Peralta had a sponson overhang of 11.5 feet port and starboard, giving her the typical broad, squatty ferryboat appearance. But the Boeing designers pared the overhang by seven feet °n each side, reducing her beam to 53.4 feet. This width was tolerable for the narrow autos of the 1930s and 1940s but proved inadequate for the wide-stanced Belchfire 8s of the 1950s and 60s. By the latter decade, her capacity was restricted to 49 to 64 vehicles, depending upon car and ^tfuck mix. This fact, coupled with her vertical clearance of °nly a bit more than 11 feet, finally doomed the Kalakala. (The cost of maintenance on the outdated Busch-Sulzer diesel was another, lesser factor.)

In her early years, the Kalakala offered some special facilities for shipyard personnel. What had been the after boiler room, one deck below the auto deck, was fitted out ^as a taproom and lounge, with full bath facilities. The Workers could shave, shower, shampoo, change clothes, nave a beer, and be set for a night on the town by the time ^lhe ferry docked at Pier 52. By late 1940, navy yard ex­pansion made this sort of amenity unfeasible. The showers |^Vere turned off, the taproom removed, and only the °unge remained. But for a time, the Kalakala must have ^een one of the few ferries in the world to offer such ^c°nveniences to her patrons The flagship of the Black Ball Line shared one idiosyn­crasy with

most of the other ferries of the line. Being ^Slngle-ended, the Kalakala lacked dual rudders, screws, ^aud wheelhouses. At Bremerton, she loaded autos from ^e stern, headed straight out from the slip, and docked ⁿose-on at the Colman Ferry Terminal. On her return, ^er loading from the bow, she had to back out in a wide

arc to starboard before going ahead on her engine and getting on course for Bremerton. Upon arrival, she stopped in midstream, turned around, and backed into the slip. In all, five to ten minutes were added to her return trip. Many a hungover sailor, sweating out an absent over liberty, cursed the line for not transposing this traditional docking procedure.

The Kalakala soon gave notice that, despite a new name and a new trim figure, she had not yet shaken off the Peralta jinx. On the fine clear day of 4 November 1936, en route to Seattle, she had just rounded Point Glover, opposite Pleasant Beach, when she met the Bremerton- bound Chippewa. Fighting an ebbing tide, the latter al­tered course to port, blowing two short blasts of her whis­tle to indicate she wanted to pass starboard to starboard. Instead of indicating assent by answering with two blasts, the Kalakala responded with one—“I am directing my course to starboard.” As the ferries closed off Fort Ward, the Kalakala finally sounded the danger signal of four short blasts. The Chippewa answered with three—“my engines are backing full speed.” But it was too late. The vessels collided nearly head-on. The Kalakala emerged from this bruising with only a dented superstructure, a damaged pilothouse, and some broken windows. But the older, wooden Chippewa suffered a gaping wound in her auto deck and the loss of five cars.

The “Flying Bird” did not seem to mind what kind of publicity she got, so long as the Seattle and Bremerton reporters spelled her name correctly. Approaching Col­man Dock on 27 September 1938, her direct-reversing diesel failed to reverse, she slammed into the landing slip, and ten passengers were injured. Since the failure to re-

verse reocurred with some frequency as the years went by, every landing was a small adventure. Would she or would she not assault the slip?

As the Kalakala's fifth anniversary approached, the new Tacoma Narrows suspension bridge was opened with a four-day celebration, 1-4 July 1940. The magnificent bridge, boasting a main span of nearly half a mile across the channel, eliminated the ferry route that linked Tacoma with Gig Harbor on the Olympic Peninsula. The Kalakala was chosen to make the symbolic last trip between the two points. On 2 July, with a thousand celebrants and VIPs on board, she made a bibulous run up the narrows, under the bridge, circled, and returned.

Only four months later, on 7 November, the long span, buffeted by storm-force winds, swayed, twisted, tore itself apart, and plummeted into the tidal waters 180 feet below. Before the last Life and wire-service reporters and photog­raphers had left the scene, ferry service was restored. Ten years and a war passed before “Galloping Gertie” could be replaced with a new suspension bridge. And the mari­ners along the Seattle waterfront spent many an hour over their schooners of Rainier ale discussing the two events: the “Flying Bird’s” commemorative voyage and “Gal­loping Gertie’s” plunge. Could the Peralta jinx extend even to bridges?

Whether or not the Kalakala was a source of supernatu­ral vibrations has yet to be proven. She was, however, subject to real vibrations, resulting from her pounding en­gine combined with the light steel of her upperworks. This was particularly true when she was changing speeds, stop­ping, and reversing, and on the convoluted navy yard route, that was about all she did. For years, commuters complained about her “shake, rattle, and roll” and gave her the nickname Kalunkala.

When she was shifted to the nonstop Seattle-Victoria, British Columbia, run in 1945 and 1946, her big Busch- Sulzer was at last able to sustain a uniform speed over the five-hour trip. At about the halfway point on the run, the engine smoothed out and the vibrations were damped. To those of the ships-have-personalities school, it was obvi­ous that the Kalakala had acquired a taste for the open sea when she was towed up from Oakland and yearned to be a true passenger liner.

A minor upgrading in 1956 produced a further improve­ment. Her original propeller, eight-and-a-half feet in di­ameter, was replaced with a five-bladed manganese- bronze type with a one-foot larger diameter. The new pro­peller reduced the vibration on the Bremerton run by an estimated 40%.

With war clouds on the horizon and the workload of the navy yard expanding accordingly, the Kalakala largely put aside her temperamental ways and settled down to do her duty. In late 1940, the Kalakala-Chippewa schedule of 14 round trips daily was boosted to 23 by adding two

ferries purchased from Southern Pacific. (The opening of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge in 1936 and the Golden Gate Bridge a year later doomed the San Francisco Bay Area ferry system. Many of the unemployed ferries found their way into Puget Sound service.)

When these ferries proved too small and too slow for the hectic Bremerton run, the Black Ball Line replaced them in May 1941 with two larger diesel-electric vessels, the Wallapa (ex-Fresno) and Enetai (ex-Santa Rosa), which were converted to single-ended, direct-diesel drive. The Navy, anxious to improve the service to Bremerton, provided the high-priority support required to purchase the Busch-Sulzer engines.

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the navy yard recruited thousands of new workers needed to operate the yard around-the-clock. Since a critical housing shortage existed in the Bremerton area, many of them had to be transported from Seattle. The Kalakala and her three companions soon were making 29 round trips a day. The Navy had stretched a submarine net across Rich Passage, almost opposite Fort Ward, which complicated these runs. Two tenders, operating by whistle signal, were busy day ^and night slacking off the net to allow the ferries and other craft to pass, hopefully before they lost steerageway in the racing tides and strong winds that usually prevailed. Whether any enemy subs were deterred is not known, but [he net did ensnare two ferries, the Willapa and Chippewa, ^ln 1942 when they drifted out of the main channel during Poor visibility. Navy tugs rescued them.

On 1 November 1942, a fifth ferry joined the navy yard route. The steam-powered Malahat (ex-Napa Valley), a 1910 passenger liner converted to a San Francisco ferry in 1927, was towed to Seattle in 1942. Bremerton ferries now were carrying 5,000 civilian employees to and from yard every day, along with 500 to 1,000 sailors.

The largest number of workers were on the day shift; therefore, schedules were juggled to permit three early morning sailings from Seattle within half an hour: at 0600, 0610, and 0630. Similarly, three late afternoon departures were made from Bremerton at 1640, 1700, and 1710. Un­fortunately for enlisted men, they were not allowed to board at any of these times. The first Bremerton ferry they could catch was at 0715, followed by a second at 0820, and a third at 0850. Some interesting sea stories must have been told at many a captain’s mast.

Passengers had to check in all cameras and binoculars before boarding. This caveat was enforced most strictly on the Bremerton run, where passengers had an excellent, close-up view of the navy yard’s finger piers and the ships moored there as the ferries stopped in mid-channel and backed into the slip.

It was not long before disciplinary problems arose on the afternoon Bremerton-Seattle runs. Off-duty shipyard workers tanked up on beer and began vandalizing the fer­ries. According to Robert Leithead in “The Navy Yard Route—Part Three”:

“Chairs were broken and thrown overboard, hard-to- get cork life rings, complete with coiled rope (then classed as extremely critical material with the hemp supply cut off by the Pacific war) were tossed over the rail. Finally, after a fire was lighted under the chair of a sleeping worker by pranksters who then called out, “Fire!” and nearly started a panic aboard, drastic steps were taken to halt the destructiveness. All beer sales were stopped. Chairs and seats were replaced with benches and Coast Guard patrolmen (sic) were as­signed to each ship from then on. The vandalism quickly subsided. As is generally the case, all the com­motion had been caused by less than 5 per cent of the passengers.”

During the war years, the Kalakala was remarkably docile. Granted, she collided with a barge off Glover Point on 16 August 1943, knocking two railroad box cars into Puget Sound with slight damage to herself. And on 2 March 1945, groping her way in dense fog, she went aground on Pleasant Beach but was soon floated off by the flood tide. But these were mere peccadilloes. (She appar­ently was attracted to Pleasant Beach. On 22 June 1951, she piled up there again, when a coupling on her auxiliary engine failed and left her without power. A Navy tug pulled her off, and she was only two-and-a-half hours late arriving in Bremerton.)

When VJ Day came in August 1945, the Black Ball Line honored its employees for their contributions to the war effort with two free evening cruises on the Kalakala.

From the horseshoe bar, a passenger might relax not only with a 5<t steamy mug of coffee, but perhaps with some idle chitchat and a smile from a waitress like Viola, Annie, Grace, or Pee Wee.