Trans-Atlantic Crossing

I remember reading something Russell Baker wrote years and years ago about an ocean crossing. I think it was in one of columns, but more likely in his Pulitzer Prize winning autobiography 'Growing Up,' when he reminisced about taking an ocean liner across the Atlantic, taking five days to reach your destination, and the formality of having to wear a tuxedo to First Class dinners. It was an elegant journey. It certainly beat "hurling through space in a tin can with strangers" he would go on to write.

Mr. Baker passed  away in 2019, born in 1925, which would make him just under 100 years old at 97 if he were still alive today. And that's how old you need to be to remember the era of formal dinning and the unhurried pace of ocean crossings that took five days to reach the opposite shore across the Pond.

In the '60s I would deliver flowers to the West Side piers. Cunard was Pier 90 at 50th Street (You arrived at the intersecting street by subtracting 40 from the pier number.) Cunard of course sailed The Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth, three stacks vs. two. The S.S. France and the S.S. United States were also nearby.

I remember two things about the S.S. United States. The ship held the speed record for crossing the Atlantic (which direction I do not know), and there was nothing on the ship that was made of wood other than the musicians' instruments. The things you remember.

People will get on a plane these days with maybe a knapsack, but in the era of ocean liners there was such a thing as a steamer trunk that served to hold all the clothes you needed. NYC cabs, at least the Checker cabs, were big enough to get you to and from a ship with a trunk. But a sign on the meter warned you; Trunks 50¢ Extra. 

At the flower shop we had array of enclosure cards at the desk for the different occasions for sending flowers: Get Well, Births, Birthdays, and Bon Voyage cards. In this era, the Bon Voyage card would be for a cruise, although I think there is still a once-a-year ocean crossing on the QE 2.

As always, I was reminded of all this when I read the NYT obituary for Doris Grumbach, Author Who Explored Plight of Woman who has just passed away at 104.

At 104 she was old enough to have survived the Spanish flu when she was born in 1918, (same year as my mother) and then Covid-19. The obit, written well in advance by Robert McFadden, tells us Ms. Grumbach was as prolific as she was versatile. She wrote seven novels, six! memoirs, a biography of the writer Mary McCarthy, and contributed book reviews and essays to numerous publications.

In the next to last paragraph of the obit Mr. McFadden tells us Ms. Grumbach wrote of what she saw as simpler times, when shopping involved going to a bakery, a butcher, and a greengrocer, all places I can recall going to with my mother in the '50s.

Ms. Grumbach "described the sheer enjoyment of wasting time, and mourned the passing of leisurely  Atlantic crossings on ocean liners." You have to be as old as her and as old as Russell Baker would be  today to miss those things.

Mr. Baker's description of flying through space in a tin can with strangers will get even more frantic when Boom Airlines starts flights to Europe in 2029 or so on flights that exceed the speed of sound several times over. You'll be able to hear Big Ben chime away in person faster than it takes to ride the NYC subway from Van Cortlandt Park to Coney Island.

Of course, the compression of flight time will still bring the perils of being with the public in small spaces (Hell is other people.) as I once encountered on a flight when I was told I couldn't have my selection of a packet of cashews because someone in front of me (how many rows I never knew) was allergic to peanuts.

I didn't argue that cashews weren't peanuts. Maybe all nuts are peanuts to nuts. I just got the pretzels. I bet that didn't happen on an Atlantic ocean liner crossing.

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