Seamen's Seminar

Main objective of the U. S. Maritime Commission in its task of reviving the U. S. merchant marine is the construction of at least 500 new ships in the next ten years. To man these ships, the commission wants well-trained men. In his straight-from-the-shoulder critique of U. S. shipping last year, Joseph Patrick Kennedy, then commission chairman, recommended Government-run training schools for seamen as one sure way of insuring a skilled personnel. At this suggestion the warring factions of U. S. marine labor stopped making faces at one another long enough to make a unanimous wry face at Joe Kennedy. In addition to being an implied slight to the 140,000 members of U. S. maritime unions, such schools might well become breeding places for finks (scabs). Had not Joe Kennedy himself once threatened that the naval militia might one day be called on to keep steam up during maritime strikes? But over Labor's objections, Congress last June wrote Joe Kennedy's suggestion into the Merchant Marine Act.

Last week, 36 student seamen, first batch of more than 2,400 expected to enroll within a year, were ferried out to tiny, shuttle-shaped Hoffman Island in lower New York Bay for the first session of the new Merchant Marine Training School. Superintendent was smiling Lieut. Commander George Evans McCabe of the U. S. Coast Guard, an energetic expert in seacraft who will rate a salute from every man in the school (". . . and not with a sneer on his face, either"). Teachers will be six commissioned officers and 30 petty officers from the Coast Guard cutter service. For training ships the men will have two famous windjammers--the square-rigged Tusitala, once the hobby of retired Steelman James A. Farrell, and the Joseph Conrad, in which Author Alan Villiers used to sail all over the world--and the Coast Guard patrol boat Faunce. Later, the freighter Edgemoor, now being reconditioned, will be added to the school equipment. Training courses as planned will require three months, during which the enrolled seamen will be paid $36 a month. First month will stress the rudiments of sailing ("even a steward should be able to throw a bowline") ; second month deck men, stewards and engine men will receive instruction in their special fields; third month will be a training cruise. Graduates are not guaranteed jobs and are not expected to be officer material at the end of their 90 days of general seamanship instruction, but they will receive certificates, ratings, the right to wear special insignia, the right to return for brushing-up courses later.

Aside from an emergency course of sprouts whisked up by the old Shipping Board during the War, the U. S. has never had a merchant-marine training school, has been far behind all other seafaring nations in this respect. Two additional branches are planned, one for the Gulf ports, another on the Pacific coast.

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