Figure 1.  The Material Service in the Cal-Sag Channel, a photograph probably taken between 1931 and 1934,  from the 104th Street bridge, almost three miles from the terminus of the Cal-Sag Channel with the Sanitary and Ship Canal.   Clearly,  given the mounds of gravel protruding from her hatch openings,  she is on her way eastbound from Lockport to the Material Service dock at 92nd Street on the Calumet River.  Note the narrowness of the channel as well as the clearance above water of the fixed bridge in the distance;  the bridge carried the  tracks of the Chicago & Alton Railway.    William Lafferty Collection.

Introduction

        It might appear that the first number of Lake Michigan Maritime Marginalia contradicts my intentions for the website:   The Material Service was both highly innovative and met a grisly end, and as such achieved a high amount of notoriety which endures even to today.   However, given the vessel’s popularity as a dive site in the Chicago area, I reason that using her as the first installation of the website might attract a larger number of readers than would a more obscure vessel, and that, if those found this installment of interest, they might return for others.

        I became fascinated with the Material Service over twenty years ago, about the time Chicago-area divers were becoming fascinated in earnest with her submerged form off the Calumet Harbor light.   I first realized her existence from the back of a 1963 edition of Merchant Vessels of the United States, under the section entitled "Mortgaged Vessels, Lost, Abandoned, or Otherwise Subject to Removal from Documentation."   I was amazed to learn that the Material Service Corporation had actually operated a freighter, and was more amazed to learn that, even though the Material Service had succumbed off South Chicago forty years before my interest had been piqued, she remained an officially documented vessel within the American registry.   I had been familiar from an early age with the ubiquitous red-and-yellow towboats of the Material Service Corporation that traversed the various waterways around Chicago, probably from when, as a mere tyke, I fleetingly glimpsed the firm’s lovely sternwheel towboat Gravel Gertie 251318 [a U. S. E. C. Gouverneur] as the family Chevy passed over the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal on the Mannheim Road bridge.    My subsequent research into her career developed into an investigation into the remarkable career of her designer, builder, and operator, Leathem D. Smith of Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin.   For those so inclined, a précis of Smith’s career, especially his singular involvement in popularizing self-unloading technology on both the lakes and oceans, can be found in my chapter "Technological Innovation in Great Lakes Shipping:  Leathem D. Smith and the Rise of the Self-Unloader," in Victoria Brehm, ed., A Fully Accredited Ocean: Essays on the Great Lakes (Ann Arbor:  The University of Michigan Press, 1998), pp. 155-198.   Also, since my aunt had been the executive secretary of a Chicago building suppliers association, I had heard many stories of the legendary Crown family that had founded the Material Service Corporation, a family the philanthropy of which was quite visible at one of my alma mater, Northwestern University.

        While still a graduate student at Northwestern, I assembled what I had learned of this innovative vessel and published the results in Telescope, the journal of the Great Lakes Maritime Institute, in 1979.   Less than six years later, the same article, with the same photographs from my collection (which had never been returned), and with text, at best, only vaguely paraphrased, appeared again in that journal, authored by one Kenneth E. Johnson.    That initial and dramatic brush with abject plagiarism resulted not only with my complete avoidance of the Great Lakes Maritime Institute, but gave rise to a profound jealousy concerning my intellectual production that endures today, both professionally and otherwise, as evidenced by the agreement you, gentle reader, have acceded to to gain entry to this point.       

        What follows is a vastly expanded version of my original Telescope article, including never-published photographs and much more information concerning the history of this unique vessel.

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©William Lafferty, 1998.