Icebreakers

My father passed away in 1987, so sufficiently long ago that I find I no longer think of him--good or bad--every day. But I do still find myself thinking of him.

He was a civilian employee for the Department of Defense, U.S. Navy, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He was a project engineer who contributed to the design of hulls.

Somehow his engineering degree and WW II experience turning reconnaissance photos into maps for the U.S. Army on Guam, morphed into working on ship design. I did not follow in his footsteps.

As a youngster I remember a few trips to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to witness a ship's christening. I never saw the ship slip out of dry dock into the water. Apparently, they didn't do that with the few christenings I saw. The water level rose in the dry dock bed, somewhat in reverse to a falling New Year's Eve ball in Times Square. When the water reached the keel, the ship was christened by a dignitary.

In one instance, the dignitary was Mamie Eisenhower, the president's wife, who was unable to get the bottle of champagne to smash against the hull, needing assistance from a nearby Admiral to get the contents spilled. It was good to know that ships were built to withstand champagne bottles.

What sparked my memories of my father was yesterday's WSJ story about the U.S. Coast Guard's need for at least two new icebreakers, each coming in at $1 billion or so. I don't really remember what it cost to build a ship in the early 1950s, but I'm sure the word billion didn't enter into the sentence.

One of the last ships to be built at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which closed in 1964, was the U.S.S. Constellation, an aircraft carrier. It stay in service long enough to be deployed during the Gulf War in the early 1990s.

They never built an icebreaker at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, so my father never worked on a government icebreaker. But there was the icebreaker he created at home.

When a neighbor and his wife came over for what I guess was cocktail hour, my father made the Manhattans that everyone loved at the time. In order to do this properly, he needed crushed ice. I remember when the cocktail hour was at he neighbor's house, they crushed the ice by placing cubes in some kind of wall-mounted grinder that looked like a can opener. Out came chopped ice.

Our household didn't hold all the bells and whistles of other households. In order to get the crushed ice he needed, my father wrapped ice cubes in a hand towel and vigorously banged the towel against the bricks of the living room fireplace. Six or seven whacks against the bricks, and there was enough crushed ice in the towel to get the evening going.

So, my father never did work on icebreakers for the the U.S. Navy. But he did have his own domestic version that did help chop up the ice around a Manhattan.

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