By James Heinz
(Steinbrenner Story – Chapter Ten)
By 1957 Kinsman Transit was in serious financial trouble. According to Madden, this was due to competition from steel company fleets. Golenbock reports: “(Henry II) said to him, ‘Come back and get going or we’re going to get out of the business like some of the other independents.’ George III returned and for the next six years he and his father locked horns.”
A 1988 article in Fairplay magazine explained how Great Lakes shipping operated: “Almost from its inception, Great Lakes shipping has been dominated by major shippers who owned or controlled their own fleets…Like the jackals that come after the lions have eaten, smaller, non-affiliated companies, the ‘independents’ – like Kinsman, competed fiercely for tonnage that was left over. It made sense to employ the independents – as long as business was good. They were able to handle unanticipated traffic surges. And in certain cases it was cheaper chartering an independent than using the steel company’s own boats.”
The root cause of their conflict was that Henry II was running a sort of mom and pop shipping operation. He had four old freighters. Henry was content with his place in the world and had no trouble making a low six figure annual income when most people made $6-7 thousand a year.
Golenbock explains: “The way the business worked, the fleet owner depreciated the boats like any other piece of machinery and twenty years down the line he would sell the boats to another shipping company…and then (the new shipping company) would depreciate the boat, and they would then sell their old boat to Henry, and Henry would depreciate the boat all over again. This is how all the shipping companies made their money.”
The other essential to running a small, independent shipping line was to keep costs down, which Henry, as a tight fisted micromanager, had no trouble doing.
One of those four freighters was the 1908 built JOHN SHERWIN, which Henry II bought in 1959 (as the SATURN) and renamed GEORGE M. STEINBRENNER I and renamed KINSMAN VENTURE in 1969. From 1970 to 1973 she and two other bulkers were filled with stone and sunk end to end as a temporary breakwater to protect the construction site of a new electric power plant built at Nanticoke, Ontario. When the plant was finished in 1973, she and the other ships were pumped out and sold for scrap.
Another ship Henry II owned had been built as the UMBRIA in 1904 in Cleveland for the Hawgood line. She was 4,803 gross tons and 420 feet long, and 50 feet wide. The year after she was launched, she almost met with disaster. The UMBRIA was the identical twin of another ship, ordered, built and launched in the same years at the same ship yard for the same shipping company.
The other twin ship was the EDWIN F. HOLMES. And that would prove prophetic.
On Dec 1, 1905, the Gales of November were a day late for the UMBRIA. On that date in Lake Superior, she was caught in a bad storm, into which she headed in order to take the seas over her bow and prevent the ship from being broadside to the waves.
The storm was so bad that a wave carried away the pilot house and the compasses and smashed the forward wheel, leaving the injured and blinded crew staggering as the waves washed over the deck. The out of control ship wallowed broadside to the waves, the one place the crew did not want her to be. She was in danger of being rolled over and sunk by the storm.
Captain C. M. Seph immediately sprang to the rather aptly named hurricane deck, and bellowed orders at his crew. The first and second mates and the rest of the forward crew made their way aft across the deck, swept off their feet by waves in the same way as the crew of the HENRY STEINBRENNER I was swept by the waves, clinging to ropes as they went. Great Lakes ships built later had a tunnel at the bottom of the hold that enabled crews to transition from one end of the ship to another without going on deck, but the UMBRIA did not.
The mates and crew made it to the stern of the vessel, where the emergency steering wheel was located on the deck outside and behind the cabin. However, the emergency wheel had to be coupled to the steering gear. This was difficult to achieve on a pitching and rolling deck that was continually swept by waves. The crew “was swept liked chimps to the ropes” until they could regain their footing.
After six minutes of struggle, “which must have seemed like hours to the crew”, they were able to make the couplings to the wheel and regain control of the ship. The struggle was not over for the crew, who had to remain at their posts for the next 36 hours, swept by icy water.
In the rather purple prose of the Milwaukee Sentinel it was “daring that mocked at wind and wave, coolness sublime in the face of death, and endurance that beggars conception alone saved the steamer.”
But the UMBRIA would in years to come take her place in the annals of the Great Lakes in an incident that would prove to be déjà vu all over again.
In 1916 UMBRIA was renamed MACGILVRAY SHIRAS, which sounds like a Scottish wine, and was sold to the Acme Transit Company, which sounds like the company that Wile E. Coyote bought his rocket powered roller skates from, and then to the Pittsburgh Steamship company, until she was bought by Kinsman in 1943.
On January 21, 1959, the SHIRAS was moored in winter layup in the Buffalo River in Buffalo, New York. She was moored at the Continental grain dock about three miles upstream from the Michigan Avenue lift bridge. About 150 feet of the ship extended upstream beyond the dock.
It was unusually warm and the temperature combined with heavy rains caused the river to develop unusually strong currents. It also caused two ice dams to break up and drift downstream. Where ice chunks 20 feet wide and 2 feet thick and large amounts of river debris dislodged by the rains, including large tree trunk, became lodged between the SHIRAS and the river bank. These objects exerted pressure away from the bank against the ship’s hull.
Unfortunately, a “deadman” to which the ship was moored had been improperly constructed, a fact never revealed since it had never been inspected. The deadman pulled completely out of the ground, and the remaining mooring lines snapped. The ship keeper tried to drop the anchors but either panicking or not familiar with the process, he failed to release the devil’s claws’ before doing so, leaving the anchors in place.
The SHIRAS began drifting stern first down the river, off on her own Excellent Adventure, making a break for freedom. Along the way she collided with the bow of the similarly moored MICHAEL K. TEWKSBURY of the Midland Lines. The SHIRAS released the TEWKS from her winter confinement by ramming her, causing the TEWKS’ mooring lines to break. The TEWKS took off down the river, followed by the SHIRAS.
You might have expected the TEWK’s ship keeper to take some sort of action to save his ship, but it was later determined that at this moment of crisis he was ashore watching TV with his girlfriend, a fact neither the Midlands Line nor the ship keeper’s wife appreciated when they found out about it.
You might expect that two unmanned ships would not be able to navigate the twists and turns of the Buffalo River without quickly coming to a stop. And you would be wrong. Before striking the TEWKS, the SHIRAS had navigated three right angle bends in the river while going backwards before striking the TEWKS, a remarkable feat of seamanship for ships that had no seamen aboard and which reminds me of the famous dancer Ginger Rogers’ remark that she did everything her partner Fred Astaire did, only backward and in heels.
The two ships together showed remarkable navigational abilities for two inanimate objects propelled only by the raw force of Mother Nature. Both ships successfully negotiated a sharp turn in the river at Ohio Street, a turn for which a ship with a crew required the assistance of two tugboats fore and aft to accomplish. The Ohio Street bridge turn was described as the most hazardous turn ship captains had to make on the Great Lakes, and the two ships making this turn all by themselves were described as “doing the impossible.”
Bystanders tried to alert the bridge tender at the Michigan Street lift bridge of the impending doom headed their way, but the tender and his assistant could not be reached. Both men claimed that they were in a windowless machinery space below the bridge where they could not see the downbound disaster coming, but subsequent inquires revealed that the machinery space was actually the nearby oldest tavern in Buffalo, a fact that city did not appreciate when they found out about it.
The TEWKS kept moving until she struck the middle of the bridge stern first at 11:17 pm. Two men working on the bridge suffered non-fatal injuries. The 200 foot tall south tower immediately collapsed and the TEWKS came to a stop, grounding on the wreckage of the bridge that had collapsed into the river, with her bow resting against another moored ship on the south bank of the river.
The SHIRAS, tagging along behind her fellow escapee, wedged herself between the TEWKS and the north bank of the river. The two ships and the collapsed bridge formed not an ice dam in the river, but a steel dam in the river that caused massive flooding of 18 square blocks of South Buffalo.
The next day the north tower collapsed, and instead of evacuating other people like it normally does, the Buffalo Fire Department had to evacuate itself, abandoning its fireboat station #20 in the shadow of the bridge when the north tower fell on top of it and another building. One of the station #20 occupants described the crash as “a sickening, scratching crash like an auto accident magnified a million times.” The fireboat EDWARD M. COTTER was itself was trapped by the bow of the TEWKS.
And what calm, reassuring authority figure did an anguished community have to turn to in its hour of crisis?
George Steinbrenner.
Yes, THAT George Steinbrenner, THE George Steinbrenner, the one and only George Steinbrenner III, who by coincidence was in Buffalo at the time of the incident. For George III, who was described in court documents as “then only 28 years old and without maritime studies or experience”, it was his baptism of fire.
Because, as noted above, as if we didn’t have enough tragedy, now the lawyers got involved. Again.
The City of Buffalo estimated it would cost $51 million to replace the 20 year old bridge. A total of 40 claims for a total of $15 million were filed by various entities and it took over a decade to resolve them all. And just about everyone was found to be at fault.
Continental Grain was found at fault because its deadman was neither properly designed, constructed, nor inspected. The court decided that Continental had to pay Kinsman, Midland, the flooded homeowners, owners of the ship struck by the TEWKS, and the City of Buffalo.
The city of Buffalo was at fault because the bridge tender did not open the bridge in time as required by federal law because he was too busy opening a can of beer at Buffalo’s oldest tavern. The City of Buffalo had to pay Kinsman and Midland.
Kinsman was liable because the SHIRAS’ shipkeeper could not drop the anchor. Kinsman had to pay Midland, the flooded homeowners, the owners of the ship the TEWKS struck, and the City of Buffalo. The amount of Kinsman’s liability was limited to the $77,000 value of the SHIRAS and its cargo of grain because Henry II had relied upon another company to inspect and approve the docking space.
About the only entities not found to be at fault by the court were Midland Lines and the ship keeper’s girlfriend, but the ship keeper himself was no doubt found to be at fault by his wife.
The SHIRAS was found to be at fault by Kinsman, who decided not to repair her and scrapped her in the same year she made her desperate bid for freedom.
The case went to the appellate court where it made history by significantly increasing the amounts of damages recoverable in a court case. It was described at the time as the most expensive maritime disaster in dollar value in the history of the Great Lakes.
NEXT: GEORGE III SAVES KINSMAN TRANSIT
Photo at top of page: JOHN SHERWIN #202910
Photo credit: Great Lakes Marine Collection of the Milwaukee Public Library and Wisconsin Marine Historical Society
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James Heinz is the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society’s acquisitions director. He became interested in maritime history as a kid watching Jacques Cousteau’s adventures on TV. He was a Great Lakes wreck diver until three episodes of the bends forced him to retire from diving. He was a University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee police officer for thirty years. He regularly flies either a Cessna 152 or 172.
GEORGE STEINBRENNER, GREAT LAKES SHIP OWNER – Chapter One
THE WRECK OF THE WESTERN RESERVE – Chapter Two
NUTTY PHIL AND THE WRECK OF THE ONOKO – Chapter Three
SOPHIA MINCH AND THE WRECK OF THE SOPHIA MINCH – Chapter Four
HENRY STEINBRENNER I, GORDON LIGHTFOOT, AND THE WRECK OF THE HENRY STEINBRENNER I – Chapter Five
THE WRECK OF THE ANNA C. MINCH – Chapter Six
HENRY STEINBRENNER II AND THE SHIPWRECK THAT BECAME A SHIP AGAIN – Chapter Seven
AN OLDIE BUT A GOLDIE: HENRY STEINBRENNER II AND THE J. B. FORD – Chapter Eight
HENRY III AND GEORGE STEINBRENNER III: LIKE FATHER LIKE SON – Chapter Nine
KINSMAN TRANSIT IS IN TROUBLE – Chapter Ten
GEORGE III SAVES KINSMAN TRANSIT – Chapter Eleven
GEORGE III SAVES AMERICAN SHIPBUILDING – Chapter Twelve
