Water Under the Bridge

Tuesday, March 17, 2020

Merchant Marine Casualties in World War II . March 19, 2020

March 19, 2020

Merchant Marine Casualties in World War II

This week we have a guest columnist, my brother Joe, with a column I wish I had written. In his words,

When men from our neighborhood perished while serving in the military during World War 2 and the Korean War it left a lasting impression on me. Since 2005 I have been involved in five projects that honor men and women who served our country in the military. In 2011 I published the book, “Almost Forgotten” which commemorates 116 men from the Bridgeville and South Fayette Area who perished while serving in the military. Now I have developed an interest in another area, namely the US Merchant Marines.

In recent years it has become a common practice during concerts for bands to honor the Army, Navy, Marine, Air Force, and Coast Guard veterans in attendance by playing the Armed Forces Medley. When their particular military hymn is played they are asked to stand and be recognized which they proudly do. This is so very appropriate and heartwarming, but I always wonder shouldn't merchant marine veterans be similarly honored. The merchant marines who perished during WW2 are especially forgotten.

Homer Hickham's book, “Torpedo Junction” discusses Germany's brutal attack on US merchant marine ships during the first six months of 1942. As they traveled up and down the east coast of the US, German submarines used the light of the east coast cities as a backdrop as, uncontested, they sank one ship after the other, tankers in particular. It was a contest to see which German submarine could return to port having sunk the most tonnage. At the time the US Navy was shorthanded in men and destroyers and was more interested in supporting the war effort in North Africa and supplying our European Allies. On October 31, 1941, before the US had officially entered WW2 a German submarine sank the US destroyer Reuben James off of the coast of Iceland with one hundred men perishing and only 44 surviving. One of the survivors was officer Hamilton Howe who commanding another destroyer gained revenge when finally in June 1942 it sank the first German submarine off of the coast of the US.

William Geroux's book, “The Mathews Men”, tells the story of a plethora of merchant marine men from Mathews County, Virginia, who served and in some cases died during WW2. This book confirms what is recorded in “Torpedo Junction” regarding the first six months of 1942. After reading it I decided to look into the merchant marine casualties during WW2 and attempt to commemorate these men who lost their lives in the war effort just like the men who served in the armed forces. I went to the internet site www.usmm.org/casualty.html and this is the profound information that I discovered. During WW2 243,000 men served in the Merchant Marines with 9,521 perishing in the process. Their casualty rate was higher than any of the branches of the military with percentages as follows: Merchant Marines 3.9%, Marines 2.94%, Army 2.08%, Navy 0.88%, and Coast Guard 0.24%. This was a huge surprise to me. More eye opening was the fact that 67 men from Western Pennsylvania lost their lives. I don't know whether you can call it fortunate or not but only one man from the South West Suburbs of Pittsburgh lost his life, that being Frank Tinnion Wilson from Oakdale. Seventeen of the 67 men from Western Pennsylvania perished during the deadly first six months of 1942.

I acknowledge that this is a feeble attempt to honor the merchant marines, particularly those who lost their lives, but it is a beginning. The merchant marines contributed mightily to the WW2 victory and they need to be given more credit than they ever received. Fortunately, some of the injustices which the WW2 merchant marines experienced regarding government benefits were corrected by the Veterans Program Enhancement Act of 1988 and the HR 154 Act of 2017.

The 67 WW2 casualties are listed as follows:

Name Ship Date Title Hometown

August Anderson Caddo 11-23-42 Messman Kane

George Lewis Bittel Meriwether Lewis 3-2-43 O.S. Pittsburgh

Robert Harry Black Robert Gray 4-22-43 Oiler New Kensington

Francis A Broslet Malanta 3-9-43 Radio Officer Coudersport

Fred West Brown Samuel J Tilden 12-2-43 Messman McKeesport

Dixie Burton West Portal 2-5-43 Chief Steward Pittsburgh

Stephen Paul Byers Azalea City 2-21-42 Radio Officer Indiana

James Paul Campbell American 6-11-42 F/W Aliquippa

Harry Davis Chase Henry Knox 6-16-43 Steward Homewood

Robert John Craig Fort Lee 11-2-44 F/W Fredonia Pa

George E Curma Robert Gray 4-22-43 Oiler North Braddock

Ray E Davis E A Bryan 7-17-44 F/W Cresson

Thomas J DeCesare Wichita 9-19-42 Messman Swissvale

Raymond W Enlow John A Poor 3-19-44 F/W Washington

Charles J Fisher Liberator 3-19-42 F/W Pittsburgh

Paul Richard Geyer Jacksonville 8-30-44 Pumpman Pittsburgh

Theodore R Gibson Samuel Heintzelman 7-9-43 Utility Fredonia Pa

Gilmore G Gifford Pan New York 10-29-42 Chief Engineer Munhall

George M Hamilton Puerto Rican 3-9-43 Jr 3^rd Mate Sewickley

Thomas L Hoffman West Portal 2-5-43 F/W Sharpsburg

James Arthur Hope Edward B Dudley 4-10-43 Engine Cadet Pittsburgh

John M Hotochen Harry Luckenbach 3-17-43 Wiper Monessen

Milford K Hallihen Halo 5-20-42 Messman Bradford

George W Hutton John Harvey 12-2-43 Utility Jeannette

Martin D Irvin Esso Gettysburg 6-10-43 F/W State College

Adam Koket Robin Goodfellow 7-25-44 Cook Meadville

Henry Joseph Krupa Samuel J Tilden 12-2-43 F/W Etna

George J Kulonis Coama 12-9-42 Pantryman Mt Oliver

Edward B Lafferty Harry Luckenbach 3-17-43 O.S Elizabeth

Homer R Landefeld Jacksonville 8-30-44 Wiper Irwin

John E Lawton Connecticut 4-23-42 O.S. Erie

Andrew C Liskay West Lashaway 8-30-42 O.S. Duquesne

William E Loucks Sun Oil 4-5-43 Wiper Youngwood

Robert E McCaffrey Henry R Mallory 2-7-43 F/W East Pittsburgh

James N McDonough Louisiana 8-17-42 F/W Charleroi

Walter F Meisner Meriwether Lewis 3-2-43 Messman Pittsburgh

Stephen Mihalik Henry R Mallory 2-7-43 F/W Pittsburgh

Wayne B Miller C J Barkdull 1-10-43 Messman Beaver Falls

Jacovas Monios Mary Luckenbach 9-13-43 F/W Monessen

Fabian D Moore Halo 5-20-42 Wiper Bradford

Joseph P Molchan W D Anderson 2-22-42 A.B. Unity

John Mrvan Jr John Harvey 12-2-43 F/W Braeburn

Steve John Paulo Gulfpenn 5-13-42 Wiper Sharon

James L Pennell Steel Age 3-7-42 Oiler Warren Area

John Quinlan Yorkmar 10-9-43 1^st Engineer Pittsburgh

John J Radosh J N Pew 2-21-42 Pumpman Trafford

William V Robbins Jacksonville 8-30-44 Wiper Pittsburgh

James G Ropose Joseph M Cudahy 5-5-42 F/W Johnstown

Frank Peter Sage Dan Beard 12-10-44 A.B. Holsopple

William J Secunda John Straub 4-19-44 3^rd Engineer Butler

Edward H Shearer John L Motley 12-2-43 3^rd Engineer New Kensington

Joseph H Steinberg Syros 5-26-42 Messman Pittsburgh

John Supancic Atlanta Sun 2-17-43 O.S. Boswell

Herman W Swogger Dorchester 2-3-43 A.B. Brownsville

Steve J Sikora Coama 12-9-42 Wiper St Benedict

Richard W Todd Kahuka 6-15-42 A.B. Meadowlands

Philip Turi Quaker City 5-18-42 A.B. Scalp Level

Joseph C Turzak Robin Goodfellow 7-25-44 O.S. Braddock

George A Urpin Charles Pinckney 1-28-43 Deck Engineer Gallitzan

Charles M Vickerman Velma Lykes 6-4-42 Radio Officer Farrel

James E Walker Harry F Sinclair Jr 4-11-42 O.S. Franklin

Eugene W Walters Louise Lykes 1-9-43 Dock Cadet Brownsville

Edwin C Ward Mary Luckenbach 9-13-42 Radio Officer Espyville

Francis H Weber Samuel Huntington 1-29-44 Cook Pittsburgh

Frank T Wilson Jacksonville 8-30-44 Messman Oakdale

Clifford L Wilson Sun Oil 4-5-43 Junior 3^rd Mate Blandsburg

George L Zeis Lake Oswego 2-20-42 Messman Smock

*footnotes

A.B. Able Bodied Seaman

O.S. Ordinary Seaman

F/W Fireman/Water Tender

My thanks to Joe for this information and for his continuing commitment to memorializing our local members of “the Greatest Generation”. The original, longer version of this column, including a tabulation of Western Pennsylvania mariners who died in World War II, will be archived on “bridgevillehistory.org” under menu heading “Water Under the Bridge” and on my blog site, mywutb@blogspot.com.

Monday, March 16, 2020

"Pop" Ferree's Workbooks . January 30, 2020

January 30, 2020

“Pop” Ferree’s Workbooks

The Bridgeville Area Historical Society recently acquired a curious set of workbooks with no record of their donor nor any explanation of their origin. I was able to borrow the first one in the series and have enjoyed going through it.

The worksheets are 8” by 10 ½”, some typed, some filled with meticulous hand calculations, and some containing scaled plots of land surveys. Each book has a return address label on it, giving the name of Joseph A. Ferree and his address on Chestnut Street.

Book One is entitled “Bridgeville, 1786 – 1846. There are more than three hundred individual sheets in the book, most of which are blank on the back. I have gotten to page 400 and September,1821.

The first entry in the book is a typed page with the heading “February 8, 1786, from Warrantee Atlas”. It then describes the property “Water Inclosure”, that was patented to Thomas Redman on that date. The rest of the page records the twenty line courses of its survey, “copied from the Atlas”. The property included 208 acres of land bounded (“inclosed”) by the large loop Chartiers Creek makes north of Bridgeville.

The next sheet is a carbon copy of the first, with penciled notes reporting that the property was subdivided on September 16, 1786, with 107 acres going to James Cristy and the balance to Daniel Herbert. The next six pages (three sheets front and back) are immaculate pencil calculations of the components of each course, followed by a scaled plot of the survey.

Then comes a similar treatment of Thomas Ramsey’s “Purity”, 102 acres south and west of Redman’s property, and Benjamin Rennoe’s “Widow’s Portion”, 342 acres south and east of Redman’s (and east of Ramsey’s). These are followed by a chronological sequence of land transactions in the Bridgeville area.

It appears that someone (probably Mr. Ferree) took on the project of recording and plotting the history of property changes in this area, utilizing information from the Allegheny Recorder of Deeds Department and the Allegheny County Warrantee Atlas.

Joseph Ferree began teaching at Bridgeville High School in 1910 when it consisted of two grades and a total of nineteen students. He was still going strong in the early 1950s, a completely different environment. Our class referred to him as “Pop” Ferree and, as a sign of respect, “the Old Sage”.

We know he was a member of the “Historical Book Committee” for Bridgeville’s Golden Jubilee Celebration in 1951. The precision of the calculations and plotting in this work book certainly is representative of my memory of him; I am convinced it was his project.

In addition to his being my mathematics teacher in high school, our family had several other ties to the Ferrees. His son, Origen (better known as Gus), coached my brother’s Knee Pants League baseball team. When my mother volunteered at the Bridgeville Public Library, she became close friends with Gus’ wife, Ada.

I was particularly interested in the surveys recorded in the original warrants. In the early days surveys were a record of the landmarks which defined the boundaries of the property; the azimuths and distances were merely recorded to provide the approximate location of the next landmark (corner).

For example, the survey for Rennoe”s “Widow’s Portion” begins at a white oak tree that is a corner of Henry Evault’s adjacent property and proceeds North 68 degrees west, 98 perches to a “linn” on the bank of McLaughlin Run. “Linn” is a Scotch word for steep ravine or gully; our landmark was the point where a prominent gully intersected McLaughlin Run.

We were instructed to begin at the white oak and aim our compass 68 degrees west of north. A “perch”, also known as a pole or a rod, was sixteen and a half feet long. If we marched 98 perches (1,617 feet plus or minus eight feet three inches) in the proper direction we should find the desired “linn”.

The approximations of both angle and distance were acceptable as long as we could use them to locate the corners (landmarks). As a general check and to evaluate the error of these approximations, the surveyor would then calculate the true components of each course and add them to determine his “error of closure”.

For this survey Mr. Ferree calculated an error of closure of nearly eighteen perches (nearly three hundred feet). This seems like a lot until you realize that the survey consisted of twenty-five courses totaling nearly four miles.

By the time I was learning surveying, instrument precision had improved by an order of magnitude. We would read angles to the nearest fifteen seconds and distances to fractions of an inch. An acceptable error of closure in those days for a survey of this length would have been well under five feet.

We are fortunate that Pop Ferree took on this project and has provided us with so much relevant information. As I continue to investigate it, I will report on the earliest days of our community.

Bridgeville High School Class of 1946 . January 23, 2020

January 23, 2020

Bridgeville High School Class of 1946

The Bridgeville Area Historical Society recently received a valuable collection of memorabilia related to the Bridgeville High School class of 1946, from alumnus Paul Schmidt’s widow via fellow classmate Ed Chabala.

A very young Paul Schmidt is portrayed in a photograph on page 90 of the Society’s Images of America book, “Bridgeville”, helping his mother make apple butter in an outdoor kitchen. Paul was a member of Boy Scout Troop 245 in 1943 when I joined it, and preceded me through high school by three years.

After Paul grew up and left Bridgeville he maintained contact through his boyhood friend Ed Chabala, punctuated by frequent class reunions. Eventually Ed began mailing him copies of my “Water Under the Bridge” columns. At some point I added Paul to the mailing list for the original unedited versions of the columns. A few years ago I was saddened to learn that he had died.

Recently his widow forwarded to Ed two file folders filled with documents from Paul’s high school days. Leafing through them generates waves of nostalgia from an era seventy-five years ago.

The prize of the collection is a copy of the 1945 BHS Yearbook, a yearbook I did not know existed. We believe there were yearbooks in 1925 and 1926 and that the tradition was then suspended, with the exception of a home-made mimeographed version in 1939. Apparently the Class of 1945 elected to resurrect the tradition, and produced a handsome paperback Yearbook, called “The Bridge”.

The Yearbook was dedicated to the BHS graduates serving our country in World War II. It begins with an Honor Roll of BHS servicemen and women. Included are ten young men from the Class of 1945 who went into the service just before graduation. There are 292 men and women on the Honor Roll, including twelve who had lost their lives. The war years were difficult times for Bridgeville.

A closet door is opened,

An eloquent statement by Dr. Colton acknowledging the debt current students owe to their predecessors is followed by three pages of photographs of the thirty members of the faculty, headed by Joseph “Pop” Ferree. There are eighty-eight Seniors pictured, including among others, Sammy David, Tom “Dreamer” Lytle, and Gerre Harmuth.

“Senior Class History”, “Class Prophecy”, and “Senior Class Will” follow; appropriate for their time, they seem trite today. There are excellent sections on the underclassmen and on the various clubs and activities. I was especially pleased with the portion covering the basketball team – my all-time favorite. Their 34 to 32 loss to Avalon in WPIAL semi-finals was a major disappointment.

The page devoted to the Junior Play that year, “Mr. and Mrs. North”, brought back many memories. Bob Rothermund had a minor part in the play, as a corpse. Early in the play a closet door is opened, exposing a corpse which then falls straight forward face down on the stage. When we asked Bob how he could pull that off, he told us to “Watch the hands!” He then demonstrated how he could cushion his fall with his hands.

The night of the play we were eager to see him pull it off. “Watch the hands!” When the door opened we were shocked to see that he had both his hands in his pockets. Not to worry, the show must go on. Bob took one for the team, smashing into the floor without a cushion. By coincidence, among the artifacts in Paul Schmidt’s collection is a photograph of Bob on the floor being examined by the doctor, played by Bill Sweeney, and the policeman, played by Benton “Red” Williams.

As is always the case, the collection of advertisements by sponsors is an excellent record of the businesses active in Bridgeville at the time. Of particular interest to me is one for the Hop Shoppe, a soft drinks night club for teenagers with dances Wednesday and Saturday evenings.

This yearbook is a valuable addition to the Society’s collection, as are three copies of the “Bridger”; November 1945, January 1946, and March 1946. A puzzling comment in one of the “Water Under the Bridge” gossip columns is “Kitch misses Don Toney an awful lot”. I must ask Don which one of his conquests was known as “Kitch”.

The March “Bridger” reported that the Class of 1946 had determined that publishing a Yearbook like the one the previous year was too expensive and that they would, instead publish an expanded “Bridger” with most of the same content. They would print two hundred copies and sell them for ninety cents a copy.

Sure enough, Paul package included a copy of the 1946 “Bridge” and it does indeed contain a large amount of relevant information. There were eighty-seven graduates in the class; for me it will always be “Rum” (Bob Rothermund) and “Slugger” (Bob Bailey)’s class, but it was filled with people important to me.

Almo Pruner was Class President; Louis “Skp” Colussy, Vice President. Helen David was Secretary; Ralph “Butch” Schneider, Treasurer. Patty Patton was Social Chairman; I recently learned from Mary Weise, another proud member of the class, that Patty died recently. In addition to Paul Schmidt and Ed Chabala, the class included Charles and Sheila Banks, Frank “Cutter” Cortazzo, Jimmy Delphus, George Deep, Norman “Nimmy” Kreiger, George “Hipper” McCoy, Carleton “Curly” McKee, Teresa Pennetti, and Alice Pesavento.

Among the photographs in Paul’s package of artifacts is a glamour shot of a beautiful young girl, seated on a stool. On the bottom of the photo someone has written Evelyn “Babe” McElhaney. I have a distinct memory of being infatuated by Evelyn McElhaney and Dorothy “Dot” DeGrosky after watching them do a dance routine “By the Sea”, dressed in Gay Nineties bathing suits, at Class Night in 1946. To a naive ninth grader, they were easily as glamorous as movie stars.

We are fortunate that the 1946 Class chose to record its history with this document. It deserves a place with the professionally produced Yearbooks that followed it.

Most classes start out with ambitious plans for reunions; this class followed through much more extensively than most. Paul’s collection included seven formal pictures of class reunions beginning with number fifteen in 1961 and ending with number fifty-five in 2001. There is also a picture of a gathering of seventeen classmates in 2011. I think Ed told me he still gets together with six of them occasionally. This collection warrants a folder of its own at the History Center. Perhaps we can persuade Ed and Mary Weise to identify the folks in some of the pictures.

We are indebted to Mrs. Schmidt and Ed Chabala for their thoughtfulness in making certain this collection of artifacts has found a home.