Lake Michigan Maritime Marginalia, Volume 1, Number 3

        The inaugural issue of Lake Michigan Maritime Marginalia discussed the Leathem D. Smith Dock Company at some length in its survey of the career of the Material Service.   By 1930, the yard had constructed four vessels, a crane barge and dredge for the Army Corps of Engineers and two fish tugs; it is worth noting that all four are still afloat.   The fates of the two fish tugs proved as different as night and day.   Launched in January 1926, the Chambers Bros. appeared the very model of modern design, with a fully enclosed, almost streamlined hull form graced by a small raked funnel.   She would rescue sixteen survivors from the Wisconsin foundering in 1929, survive the 1940 Armistice Day storm unscathed, and establish a reputation as one of the lake’s premier fish tugs; today, as the dive boat Recovery, she and her owner Roger Chapman search the lakebed off Port Washington for the lost Linda E.

 

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A Tale of Two Fish Tugs

Figure 11, at left above, shows the fine lines of the Chambers Bros. in January 1928 before her launch, lines similar to those of the Jolene  in Figure 5.  Lloyd Chambers specified that her hull form follow that of the Burger-built wood tug Bon Jour  226206 of Chicago, built two years before;  both vessels bear a striking resemblance, not only in their hull lines.  William Lafferty Collection.    Figure 12 at the right shows the first Jeka at her delivery in August 1928;   her  appearance strongly resembles that of the Comet of Figure 3, with its grafted-on houses forward and aft.  Like the Comet, it is clear  that she was intended initially as a towing tug, a service she would enter two years later (and remain in to this day).  William Lafferty Collection.

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The second tug, though, is another story.    Apparently on speculation, hoping a buyer would materialize, Smith began construction of a steel towing tug in early 1928.   On the ways, she was converted to a steam fish tug for the pioneer Jones Island fishing family Jeka of Milwaukee. For such a progressive as Smith, the conversion seems particularly retrograde:    Like earlier towing tug conversions, the yard merely added a housed in stern and bow to the existing hull, making the new tug look remarkably like the very old Comet   shown in Figure 3.   The resulting vessel, the Jeka, proved singularly inadequate for fishing, returning to the yard soon after her August 1928 delivery for a number of revisions, none of which improved her performance.    The Jekas turned her back to the Leathem D. Smith Dock Company, which built for them another fish tug, also named Jeka, designed from the keel up expressly for fishing, and which proved markedly more successful.  The yard reduced the first Jeka to her original configuration, installed the salvaged Kahlenberg engine from the one-time steam barge O. E. Parks  155208 (lost in 1930), and today she still sails as a towing tug, the Karl E. Luedtke, out of Frankfort.  Ironically, the second Jeka eventually became a towing tug, too, still afloat as the George W. Roper II out of Rockland, Maine.

        Design and construction of the Rodal’s new tug would be directed by the yard’s supervisor, Fred Peterson, who had also been responsible for the design of the Chambers Bros.    Peterson began his boat-building career in the eighth grade, working for his father Martin, founder of the Peterson Boat Works and an experienced boatbuilder who had worked for the Racine Boat Company, among others.   When the Peterson yard burned to the ground in 1918, Fred Peterson came to work for Leathem Smith, then in the midst of his World War I wooden tug building program for the Emergency Fleet Corporation.    Peterson stayed with Smith for almost a dozen years, leaving his employ just after he had completed the drawings for the Rodal fish tug.  

 

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The Jean R. Takes Shape

Figure 13.   The hull and framing for the superstructure are completed sometime during the spring of 1930;  if one looks closely, the various accessories of arc welding, including tanks and lines, can be seen around her construction site.   The J. E. Savage  127583 [a Thomas Britt, c Robert J. Paisley] received a Smith Patented Tunnel Scraper Unloading System during the winter of 1929-1930.  William Lafferty Collection.  Figure 14, below, shows the Jean R. nearing completion, with her superstructure sheathed.   Note the welding being conducted on her lower starboard bow.  Aside her, in the first throes of construction, is a portion of the USCGS Gilbert [b A. W. Wood, c R & I Tolmie  532237, d Redoubt];  it is interesting to note that she is being built in sections,  a type of construction that would dominate the Smith yard during its giant wartime building program for the Navy and Maritime Commission.  For those with a true penchant for detail:  The hull tied to the dock just beyond the Gilbert  is that of the old Morton Salt steam barge John Oades  76870, which Smith had reduced to a crane lighter for his quarry operations, while beyond that are the remains of the tug W. H. Meyer  81637, abandoned at that point in August 1923.   Beyond the Meyer   can be seen the old Goodrich boat Georgia  125873 [a City of Ludington] at the Sturgeon Bay Shipbuilding & Drydock Company yard;    she arrived there 21 November 1925 for a rebuilding that never  took place, and remained in various states of dishevelment until 1932, when she was sunk as a dock facing at Big Summer Island.  William Lafferty Collection.

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        Fred pursued a number of activities after leaving Smith's employ, none wholly successful, including the retail grocery business, insurance, banking, and even  mink-raising.   As  we’ll see,  though, the  Rodal’s tug  would provide, a few years later, one of the impeti for Fred Peterson to resurrect the family's shipbuilding business, and, ultimately,  to create Peterson Builders, Inc., until recently one of the nation’s most prolific and innovative shipbuilding enterprises.    

        The reputation of Peterson Builders was prefigured by Peterson’s keen interest in keeping abreast of the latest innovations in naval architecture, marine engineering, and ship construction.   During the late 1920s, the lake’s foremost builder of fish tugs, Burger Boat Company at Manitowoc, had been experimenting with the relatively new process of electric arc welding, and Peterson followed that yard’s experience with the technique with great interest.   Burger used welding as a means of sealing the joints between riveted pieces of lapped plates in the hull shell:    Peterson agreed in theory with this practice, but expressed concern that the heat generated during welded could compromise the plates’ riveted fasteners.   Peterson proposed that the hull’s plates be butt-jointed and welded, making for water-tight seams while alleviating the cumbersome process of drilling rivet holes into plates and the actual, time-consuming riveting.   Additionally, the smoother, butt-jointed hull, he reasoned, would have better sea-going characteristics.    The drawings for the Rodal’s craft, Hull Number 256 of the Smith yard, were prepared, then, with welding as a major aspect of its construction, a novel approach on the lakes at the time.   Although the world’s first completely electrically-welded self-propelled vessel was a product of the Great Lakes, the workboat Dorothea M. Gearey built in 1915 by the Gearey Boiler Works at Ashtabula, lake builders did not embrace welding in any great measure until World War II.   It should not be surprising, though, that the Smith yard readily embraced the process, since almost two decades before the Leathem & Smith Towing & Wrecking Company, out of which the Leathem D. Smith Dock Company evolved, had maintained an oxyacetylene welding outfit to effect small steel structural repairs.

        Throughout the winter and spring of 1930 Hull Number 256, which the Rodal family decided to name Jean R. in honor of Otto’s daughter, took shape on the yard’s wharf that extended into Sturgeon Bay from the bay’s north side, close to Sturgeon Bay’s business district.   The Jean R. shared the facility with Smith’s two other major projects, the conversion of the Valley Camp Coal Company freighter J. E. Savage into a scraper-type self-unloader and the construction of a survey boat for the Coast and Geodetic  Survey.   

 

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A Side Launch:  The Jean R. Hits the Water

Figure 15.  The Jean R. before her launch.  At the right is the former Jeka, one of the most unsuccessful fish tugs in recorded history.  At this point, though, she has re-emerged as a towing tug, renamed Betty D. and owned by T. L. Durocher of DeTour.  William Lafferty Collection.  Below, figure 16, the  Jean R. makes "the big splash."  This is an interesting photograph in that one can discern, right behind the Betty D. at the right, the Frances C. patiently waiting to yield her innards to the new queen of the Rodal fleet.  William Lafferty Collection.

        In  late July the vessel was launched, and her first enrollment, granting her official number 230036, was issued at Grand Haven on 13 August 1930.  After her launch, the Smith yard removed the power plant of the Frances C. and installed her twenty-one year-old steeple compound steam engine and boiler into the Jean R., making the new fish tug at once one of the most modern in design and construction and least modern in propulsion on the lake.  The Frances C. remained at the yard until sold some years later to Emil Corbisier, who had her repowered with another steam plant and fished her out of Sawyer, Wisconsin;    she was abandoned in 1945.  After successful trials, the Jean R. crossed the lake to Frankfort, where she immediately began her fishing duties for the Rodals.

 

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The Jean R. on her Trials, August 1930

Figure 17.  The Jean R. races down Sturgeon Bay on her pre-delivery trials during the second week of August 1930.   Evident in this view is a characteristic that would distinguish the vessel her entire career:  She has a narrow beam and fine hull, making her a quick boat, but not necessarily a good sea boat, as attested by at least two individuals I talked to who worked her, Ralph Cross's son and Everett Dalgord.  William Lafferty Collection.

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©1999, William Lafferty

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