William A. Tilllam, Jr. was born in Watkins Glen in upstate New York. After graduation from high school, he enrolled in New York State Merchant Marine Academy at Fort Schuyler, The Bronx in 1940. The joined the engineering program, and almost immediately after graduation from For Schulyer, he was called up to serve with the United States Navy. After the war, he studied engineering at Syracuse University and had a career as an engineer with General Electric Co. for a quarter of a century.
During the Second World War, he was a lieutenant and the chief engineer on the USS Abner Read. The ship – a destroyer – was sunk in the Battle of Leyte Gulf in November 1944. Prior, the ship was severely damaged by a mine near Alaska; he received a commendation for helping get the ship back to port after the mining.
Unlike today’s freighters where a crew can be aboard for several soul-crushing months at a time without seeing a port, freighters in the 1940s and 1950s made frequent port calls – either for replenishment of stores or cargo transfers. Port calls for a ship’s crew meant a jaunt around the port district or visits to places further afield. Sometimes, a merchant seaman might go to a seedy bookshop and purchase a racy postcard and magazine or two, or maybe see a show. Despite popular conceptions of them having libertine sensibilities, most seamen did not have a penchant for hard liquor and frequenting jiggle joints. For the most part, merchant seamen operated under the mores of their era and their appetites by today’s standards would be considered tame – yet context is important. And so, from time to time, when families sift through mementos of their merchant mariner relatives, strange risque photocards and the odd cheesecake snapshot may appear. These may be of friends or lovers of the moment. And other times, a photograph may appear and instantly becomes the site of trauma.
The photograph below was produced by an ex-Merchant Marine man by the name of David C. Tucker. He snapped photographs for local media in Baltimore, Maryland primarily of the waterfront; with his output being of ships and shipping. However, he apparently also traded in fetish images – a trio have surfaced of a semi-nude without context from 1947; this series, in particular, features a young woman holding the props of a majorette. During the mid-1940s through the 1950s, majorettes were a theme of pin-up artists with images gracing calendars and invariably a trope of burlesque performers. From a composition standpoint, Mr. Tucker has the majorette character not engaging the gaze of the viewer, which would imply licentiousness. As opposed to a demure look to the side which would convey that the majorette is a coquette, and thus inviting the male gaze, Mr. Tucker’s majorette is posed looking away from the viewer; this gives the image an almost voyeuristic quality. Albeit, the sheer fabric of the costume suggests the voyeur’s imagination has penetrated the layers of clothing and rambles freely over the almost naked form of the object of their gaze. This photograph could have been a promotional copy for a burlesque dancer, however, the envelope suggests it was sold for fetish purposes since it lacks the performer’s name.
This specific image was once in the collection of an ex-Merchant Mariner whose adult child discovered it while cleaning out her father’s belongings after his death. The other two images in the series were destroyed due to water damage. The destroyed images comprised one image of the majorette character with the baton pressed against her breasts, and another without a baton; both in the same pose as the one presented.
The discovery of the photographs was disturbing for the daughter as she was a majorette in junior and senior high school – the period when this photograph was procured by her father. Although I did not press the finder of the image, she stated that after finding it, many questions she had about her father fell into place and the unease she felt growing up – that she, in her youth banished as the markers of paranoid thought – came rushing back. Along with these photographs were others of her and her friends as majorettes. She mentioned how he looked at her when she was a young woman and made passes at her teenage friends.
She told me her father was a war veteran and he was quiet about what he experienced out at sea; he once and only once spoke of a buddy whose body was ripped apart by shrapnel and how others who were washed off deck and burned alive in flaming oil slicks while his convoy was attacked. He must have been traumatized, I said. “He took it out on ma and me.” She told me she could not tell me what he did, but it was all very wrong in retrospect, “A father does not do what he did to his daughter.”
The photograph and the narrative that accompany it affected me deeply for several years – especially since the daughter passed away and her surviving family knows nothing of their grandfather, his war service, or much of who he was. The story and the revelation brought to the fore the veritable code of silence that has pervaded the lives of those who lived through the trauma of the war and domestic abuse; the daughter linked what her mother said about how her father changed from an optimistic man to a sullen one when he returned. If he had treatment, if he talked, perhaps things that had happened would not have, I posited. The photograph, easily overlooked as a racy pin-up, when put in the context of the abuse it represented to the daughter, had me look at it as a perverse memento by a damaged man.
In no way do I wish to besmirch the good deeds and sacrifices done by the few for the many by presenting this story; I am, though, left asking how we have so quickly forgotten the horrors merchant seamen underwent and how some “cracked” by the weight of their pain. Some lost themselves in drink, others by womanizing, and others to abusing those who loved and trusted them. If this fellow had access to psychiatric care as offered to service members who returned from the war, would his pain have manifested itself in abuse? This is a question that may never have an answer.
In 1972 the Soviet Union and Europe suffered a drought that resulted in catastrophic crop failures. Although the Soviet Union was perenially plagued with periodic droughts and crop failure, 1972 was significant since the main crop affected was wheat – a dietary mainstay for both people and livestock. This failure brought about talks between the United States and the Soviet Union that culminated in the grain agreement of 1975 between the two countries; the United States pledged to send 8 million tons of wheat a year to the Soviet Union. This agreement was significant for the Unites States shipping industry as it came on the heels of the United States-Soviet Maritime Agreement of 1972. The earlier deal called for one-third of the U.S.-Soviet trade to be carried in U.S.-flag vessels, one-third in Soviet-flag vessels, and one-third in third flag vessels – the latter enabled United States’ allies to benefit from the trade agreement. In addition, part of the 1972 agreement was the opening of 40 United States and the reciprocal opening of 40 Soviet ports to trade. As a result, the Soviet grain trade offered a steep increase in American ships visiting Soviet ports.
“The [1972] accord, described by the Administration as “an indispensable first step” toward a contemplated vast increase in Soviet-American commercial relations, also provides for the unloading and loading of Soviet merchant vessels in East Coast and Gulf Coast ports for the first time since 1963. New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore are among the United States ports in which American union leaders have agreed to handle Soviet vessels under the over-all accord.”
Of those ports opened to the West was Petrograd, today’s St. Petersburg. Due to both accords, Petrograd saw both the import of grain and a collateral clandestine trade in foreign media grow. Soviet merchant sailor sea bags increasingly contained magazines, newspapers, records, and pornography; they imported these materials at their peril: the Soviet state followed a stringent policy of censorship and ban on materials deemed subversive to the Communist Party, the State, and society. In spite (or despite) the threat of imprisonment or worse, the trade of forbidden items flourished in Petrograd and other large urban areas. Media was often translated and copied via various means and entered the underground economy in forbidden texts; these materials had the blanket term samizdat (самиздат). This was a coy play on the word Gosizdat (Госиздат):
“[Which] is a telescoping of Gosudarstvennoye Izdatelstvo, the name of the monopoly‐wielding State Publishing House. The same part of the new word means “self.” The whole samizdat—translates as: “We publish ourselves”—that is, not the state, but we, the people.”
The means of samizdat production could be by the author of the media or by a reader – and thus not sanctioned, and being forbidden, it circulated outside of official distribution channels. All media in the Soviet Union was censored and sold under license by the State; samizdat, not so – it circulated under the noses of the authorities. In early periods, samizdat came in typewritten, photographic, or longhand forms; by the end of the Soviet era, some were produced via primitive computer word processing applications. Examples of samizdat comprise of smuggled books may be found where their pages were photographed and cut to size and stapled or sewn together and glued into a cover of another book; still, others were created with photostats placed between plain cardboard wrappers, or simply stapled-together manuscripts. An underlying ethos of samizdat was that the production of these materials meant resistance to state repression, and to resist was a means to live.
In the late-1970s, when the Soviet Union opened itself ever so carefully to the West in a time of need, did an American merchant seaman acquire the small collection of photographs below for a carton of cigarettes and smuggle them out of Petrograd to the United States. The collection features a series of four photographs and a single photograph. I am unsure if the four and the one are connected; the latter is a single photograph of a woman posing like a Greek statue; the remaining four photographs offer some sort of erotic social satire – as explained to me, they employ universal characters of the Soviet period used in dirty or satirical stories: a militiaman, a market trader from the Caucasus, a street tough, and a bodybuilder. Each hunts for a woman’s body and attempts to possess her; in the end, she chooses the bodybuilder, to the chagrin of all.
Samizdat often seen by Westerners involves forbidden literature such as the political tract “Memoirs of a Bolshevik-Leninist” or hand-made books; photographs such as this collection are rarely commented upon. Nevertheless, despite the harsh cultural repression at play in the Soviet Union, the images represent resistance and the need to poke fun at authority.
This was quite the trade for a carton of cigarettes. My lingering question is what was the context that led to the trade.
Charles Payne Lloyd enrolled in the U.S. Maritime Commission Cadet Corps in August 1942. As a Deck Cadet he sailed the world aboard the SS Thomas Sim Lee from October 1942 to June 1943 ranging from Casablanca to Western Australia. After this date, the next time Charles shows up in the public record is as a 3rd Mate aboard the Isthmian Lines managed SS Poland Victory having signed on March 9, 1944. The last ship he sailed on was the Isthmian Lines managed SS Thomas Cresap , after having signed on as 2nd Mate on December 15, 1944.
Ralph Gale Rutter graduated from Kings Point in July, 1944. He was the grandson of the noted Washington State banker Robert Lewis Rutter – an important capitalist in turn-of-the last-century Spokane. Gale, as he was known, earned a Scholastic Star while at Kings Point and spent his Sea Year in three war zones.
Gale shared room 2309 Murphy Hall with three other cadet-midshipsmen. Among them he was known as Gale “The Ferrer” Rutter; according to a collective memory in Midships, Spring 1944: “[Gale] left the Academy twice; the first time to get his Coast Guard pass, the second when he graduated.” I suspect the mention of him leaving campus was a bit tongue in cheek. His photographs are unusual for the period – since they document candid sides of cadet-midshipmen life with a dash of a dry sense of humor: from the joy of extended liberty to making his bed for inspection.
The photograph of his roommates and him sitting around their room’s table was included in Midships. Note the ashtray and lit cigarette between them – having smokes inside a barracks room was a privilege afforded cadet-midshipmen first-class.
(this gallery page is in process – I have about 50 more photographs to scan)
The photos in this gallery come from the estate of Rudolph P. Aron. He worked on the Isthmian ship SS Steel Age during the Second World War, and briefly as a Second Officer on the SS Jean Ribuat.
The photos are not dated, but appear to have been taken in Hawai’i and the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) between 1945-1947. They also show many aspects of shipboard work: signing articles, cargo handling, leisure time, and shooting the sun.
The story goes that Robert “Bob” Paul Neukum lied about his age and enrolled as a Deck cadet at the Merchant Marine Academy in 1943. His parents were not pleased – his father an accountant and his mother a socialite in St. Louis, Missouri had different plans for him. Nevertheless, he survived the gauntlet of war and graduated from Kings Point after an intense eighteen months of study with his section in January 1945. After the war, he quit the Merchant Marine and pursued a career in singing while raising a family. He passed away within the week of his seventy-fifth birthday.
Bob made several voyages as a cadet and then later as a licensed third mate, going to North Africa, Murmansk, and India. The ships he sailed were the famous Liberty ships – hastily thrown together for the duration with a tendency to crack or worse – breaking in half when they encountered rough seas. During his first Fall after having left high school, he had the dubious honor of being the first of his class to be involved in any combat action when his ship came under air attack while in port in London. On the way to Murmansk, he was aboard one of the ships that comprised of the ill-fated Convoy JW 55B. This convoy of merchant ships lured the German battlecruiser Scharnhorst out of her Norwegian fjord and into the gunsights of the HMS Duke of York. With Bob’s convoy caught in the crossfire, the last of the great battleship duels of the war raged around his ship. Scharnhorst went down with a complement of 1,968 men, including 44 teenage cadets on their first training cruise; only 36 German sailors could be fished from the icy Barents Sea. In another convoy, he watched in terror as seamen aboard other ships were burnt alive in flaming oil slicks or swept off-deck into the angry sea. All the while, Bob worked on his sea project. He whispered not a breath of any of it in his letters back home. Instead, Bob sent snapshots of the boiling sea and programs from concerts.
Bob graduated a scant eight months before V-J Day. He heard the announcement of Japan’s capitulation in a Pensacola hotel. That night, he and his comrades celebrated by throwing any and everything from the hotel’s windows. After the war, he had no desire to continue the life of a seaman. While a cadet-midshipman he starred in a musical at Kings Point under the direction of Roland Fiore (who later left the Academy and conducted the Summer Municipal Opera in Kansas City for many years) – and found his lifelong passion. As a child and young adult Bob had always been quite musical and was always performing; throughout grade and high school he was a member of the band, in glee club high school musicals, and performed in the drum and bugle corps; as a senior in high school, he was conductor of the school’s orchestra. With this background and with Mr. Fiore’s encouragement, he decided to have a go as a singer under the bright lights of Broadway. Bob was anxious to make money in a hurry since he had a girlfriend back in St. Louis he wanted to marry; things did not work out for the two and Bob remained in New York to make a career for himself.
Breaking into show business was tough. Bob had to hustle his first few years on the beach. He often did not know where he was going to sleep the night; he bunked at the Y, crashed on friend’s couch, or even slept on the floor of Roland Fiore’s wife’s parents house in New Jersey. He persevered, and after many dozens of auditions, he finally broke the barrier and began picking up bit parts and chorus work in musicals. He eventually established himself as one of the journeymen or regulars in New York’s music scene doing primarily Broadway chorus work. By this point he lived in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen – New York’s actor’s neighborhood – on 48th Street, and was picking the shows he would perform in.
It was in one of these earlier shows – Along Fifth Avenue – that he met his future wife, Dottie Pyren. She was a singer and dancer, and the daughter of Ukranian immigrants. She was from lower Manhattan where she lived with her parents. Along Fifth Avenue was meant to be a vehicle to get some young unknowns before the public and on the road to stardom; two of its unknowns were Jackie Gleason and Nancy Walker. The show lasted five months, but it was long enough for Bob and Dottie to develop a lasting relationship. Theirs was a four-year courtship and on June 19, 1951 with little notice to everyone – even his parents – they married in a small wedding in a Ukrainian church in the old immigrant neighborhood where Dottie was born and raised. At the time they were wed, Bob was singing in the Broadway production Gentleman Prefer Blondes – where he shared the stage with Carol Channing. When the show went on the road, they offered Dottie a part and off the two went.
After touring wound down, they moved to Leonia, New Jersey. Dottie retired after her first son was born; in all, Dottie and Bob had five children together. To help support his family, Bob continued to sing – mostly in clubs since Broadway was in decline. His last show was Fade Out – Fade In closing in 1965 after 271 performances. Being an ardent Roman Catholic, he branched out into liturgical music performing at weddings, funerals, and high masses – all these being in vogue in New York at the time. He became one of the leading authorities in the New York metropolitan area on Gregorian chant. He continued this along with voice-over work and performed in several quartets singing at the Debutante balls every year. His crowning achievement was singing for the Pope and a couple of presidents.
In later years, Bob was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and both he and Dottie moved to Arizona. However, before he lost his memory, he finally spoke to his family about the war years. He recounted the traumas of his youth making understandable the refuge he found in singing. After he required more specialized care, Bob went to a nursing home. Four months later he passed away, six days past his seventy-fifth birthday in May 2000. Dottie followed him in 2005.
Bob’s obituary says nothing of his time at Kings Point and nothing about his connection with the U.S. Merchant Marine. His gravestone has the two letters MM representing a span of an unforgettable three years at sea – a flashbulb moment in his life.
