The Art of Ship Building in 1930

i graduated from high school and naturally employment was at a very low level at that time this was in the depression of the 30s and i i wasn't particularly thrilled with the idea of leaving minnesota coming down to virginia however it was a job opportunity well it's pretty tough for coming from the country on the farm and working on the ship but that was what i need to do and want to do is to get a job i went from high school in 1934 september the 19th and i made 38 cents an hour and i saved a hundred dollars in that year and my mother charged me five dollars a week for a random room and i went in as a machinist apprentice and then i made 42 cents an hour the second year 52 cents an hour third year in the fourth year i made 64 cents an hour i was in high cotton bought an automobile wasn't much but i bought it on reveal the entrance to the shipyard probably still is was on washington avenue and he drove or walked through the gates there and came down a slight incline to get to the normal ground level or let's say sea level almost the main clinic was right on the left-hand side as you came down the navy building which was quite about a three-story building was just at the foot of the slope where the navy had their offices to satisfy the navy construction and then on the right side as you came down the hill where your transportation vehicles were maintained and then just beyond that was the apprentice school and then beyond that you get out into the main yard and the north side had all the ways on the south side had a lot of all of the outfitting docks where the ship was moved for outfitting the machine shops were mainly in between there that's generally the layout the keel will be the flat plate on the bottom of the ship in the middle which is on the ways on the slope uh ready for the frames to be mounted on it and then on the frames they'll start building up around it with a shell plating and they have what they call it's uh the clevity board and that's a board made to um equal the angle on which the ship is so if you use the level you get the right angle on whatever you were installing when it's first starting and the keel is laid you got a certain group of men that deal with the riveting of the plates and that sort of thing and then as the ship is completed you have other industries coming in for the machinery spaces and the passenger areas you know whatever type of labor it took to build that particular item so from beginning to end you've got almost a full gamut of types of labor in building a ship the ship rights and the ship fitters work very closely together the erectors which are the ones that operate the cranes and things like that and actually you had to use them because they had to do the lifting and the moving and put the things in place and then you said the ship writes to you or the riggers would set it they'd bolt it in place and then later on attack or whatever the case may be and then later on the welders would come in and the realtors would come in and finish it off now they're working on the ship itself where you had to use a burner to cut things off a chipper to ship things off the pneumatic hammer you had them on the ship and you go get him and bring him to where you're working and he'd do the job for it i was a little bit worried about working on the hull but he had the staging build and the framework which was made it uh protected from falling and it worked out fine wind blow you're standing on on a stage board was 12 inches wide over top of water because the ship hung over the water and the wind came down the james river it would you couldn't put enough clothes on but in the summertime you will welcome that breeze because it's it's pretty warm too and the physical labor was pretty heavy big bolts big nuts big wrenches big hammers big malls putting on the propeller or the rudder and there was a job working on staging it down below 50 or 60 feet nothing below you and you dropped a hammer and nick kicked something off the staging boy you were yelled at let me tell you everybody working on that that's the kind of work you had to do i walked across the beam that wide all the way across from one side to the other i was balancing myself and nothing below me you took risks ocean didn't exist in those days a ship under construction is just a dirty place it's no way you can keep it clean even though they have a cleanup crew men that go through the ship start from one end of the other and when they finish they start out all over again just sweeping and gathering up debris because the noise was bad we had rivers overhead riveters over here beside you or chippers around you and the stench was terrible the heat was terrible the smoke you got to live through all that it's something you accepted it was part of life sheen job of course you stood at a machine and you never sat and you didn't do anything but run that machine on the main machine shop floor they built the turbines for the ship and any other metal steel appliances that were needed a big shop a big shop the machine shop in those days machined a lot of the equipment that went on board the ship they polished the propellers in there they had huge machinery that did all of the machining lathes planers milling machines you name it ship fitting was mostly you had you had your own six foot rule and other any tools you needed you drew from the tool shop but it was pretty primitive as far as what you dealt with your hands and what made it primitive tools to do what you had to do in the ship fitters everything was bolt was riveted in those days the welding didn't come in until during world war ii uh as far as finish welding but the riveting was cumbersome the trades people were good at what they did it was piece work they got paid depending on the size of the type of rivet where it was done the rivets are put in uh red hot glow and red and driven up and then of course when they cool down they shrink and that pulls the joint together even tighter so really the joint is very strong very tight so the the whites and the in the blacks they had to work together uh in that sense of the word but uh so far as being uh sociably and whatnot of course the toilet facilities were entirely different down in the yard sanitary facilities were not so good they had a built pier off from the rudder and you sat on a piece of two by four and that's why you did your business right in the river it started off at 40 cents an hour but in the welding we were piece working at the time and that was most money i ever made before so i thought i was rich at that time i paid you so much a foot for you well different whales pay at different prices payday was handled out in the yard behind the main office building and they had a number of windows across the back side of the main office building where the different departments would line up to pick up the pay and the pay was in cash and every friday if you were up on main street you'd see the armored cars going back and forth from the bank bringing the cash into the shipyard to pay off the labor and it didn't pay on company time you went to the pay when the after the work day was over and one year 13 weeks in a row it rained and you didn't mind the rain they paid you in cash in an envelope and anything less than five dollars would be in silver dollars one two four well we started out at first 40 hours and then we went 35 hours mr roosevelt says we're going to cut down on the hours in order to get more people working the launching was always the the focal point the launching would be the main thing that happened with a ship in the ship's career while it was being built the ship was built on the ways it's supported by we call them shores they look like telephone poles poles just a forest of them supporting the ship up off the ways and knock all the shores out and that itself is something the uh riggers would do this they volunteer and they would have these big 12 by 12 ropes they chant and they knocked the shores out of time and either port to stop inside on the day of the launch they they put the grease on the waves and the ship is lowered onto the waves by jacks once it starts to move it goes all the steel work is finished all the hull and deck houses and things like that but a lot of the electrical and the sheet metal work and the furniture and uh piping and all these things are done over on what we call the south side which was the outfitting side of the ships had wooden decks over the steel in those days and they had wooden hand railings on them and the ship cabinets would do that the owners would do a lot of the furniture work and would do a lot of the finished woodwork a little more decorative in other words and the painters the painters are on the salsa all the painting was done primarily after the ship was launched sometimes they would open the ships to the public a passenger ship and they were something to see very attractive all the hard dirty work that goes into making something that looks so pretty when it's finished you