From The Grand Rapids Press:
Posted by mholland December 30, 2007 19:28PM
PORT COLBORNE, ONTARIO - Killer and Cane, two menacing junkyard dogs, guard the gates to the afterlife for a Great Lakes freighter and regular Bay City visitor called the Calumet.
For many of its 78 years, the 603-foot Calumet http://www.boatnerd.com/pictures/fleet/calumet.htm hauled iron ore for the steel that girded the United States' prosperity. It helped make the steel of the World War II victory effort, the steel of Buicks and bridges, and the steel bones of the nation's great skyscrapers.
In this windswept International Marine Salvage yard in Ontario, the Calumet will complete the cycle of its life.
The 5,800-ton ship will become what it once hauled - a raw material to be made into new steel.
''She has finally come to the end of her useful life, and that's why she's here,'' said Wayne Elliott, who owns the salvage yard that Cane and Killer oversee.
The worn-out boat, owned by Grand River Navigation Co., was due for retirement late this winter, but the end came prematurely last month. On one of its 50 or so annual visits to Cleveland, the boat cracked into a concrete wall at the Cuyahoga River's mouth and split a side.
With so little time remaining in the shipping season, it was cost-prohibitive to do a full-fledged repair allowing the Calumet to reload with bulk cargo. So welders slapped on a patch secure enough to let the ship waddle up the lake on Nov. 18 to die in peace, or at least in pieces.
This month, a salvage crew hired by the Calumet's owners started stripping everything that may be useful to another ship or that has collectible or historical value.
Soon, Elliott's sons and hired hands will attack the bulkheads, decks and hull with cutting torches, reducing the ship to recyclable rubble - 2-by-4-foot plates that can fit into the charge box of a steel mill's blast furnace.
Great Lakes history torn asunder
The Calumet was a frequent plyer of the Saginaw River, having visited Bay City 18 times in 2006 and at least a dozen times this year. Her last visit was on Nov. 8, when she unloaded at the Wirt Stone dock before heading back out to the bay.
And as she dies, so too does another piece of the shipping heritage of the Great Lakes. For that reason alone, maritime buffs are morose.
''It's one of my favorite boats because it has classic lines and it had a good, proud history to it,'' said Todd Shorkey, who reports locally on Saginaw River shipping traffic for www.boatnerd.com.
Shorkey wishes the Calumet, and every ship, could be made into a museum, but he knows that's not possible.
''These boats are little pieces of history that are slowly fading away, because as they reach the end of their useful life they're sent for scrap and there are no new boats being built.''
Each season from the 1920s through the 1960s, in the heyday of the region's heavy industry, 300 or more American and Canadian freighters worked the Great Lakes. They moved back and forth from ore mines to steel mills and from coal docks to limestone quarries, loading and unloading 100 million tons or more of commodities in each 10-month season.
With the Calumet's demise, fewer than 140 freighters remain.
Those vessels, and the hundreds that have gone before them, draw a cult following of boat watchers - such as Shorkey - to the water's edge, or onto the lakes themselves, to chase the great freighters and photograph them.
Even the midsized ships like the Calumet hold enough cargo to fill a train more than a mile long. The biggest - the 1,000-footers with 68,000-ton cargo holds - carry the equivalent of seven 100-car trains.
The great ships' appeal is ''almost magical,'' said George Wharton, a Canadian shipping historian who travels to Cleveland occasionally to see freighters.
''When you see one, it's just this awesome mass of power,'' said Wharton, of Strathroy, Ontario. ''And when you envision what's inside and relate that to, say, your own body mass, it's just astronomical. And yet they go gliding by with hardly any noise at all.
''To me, these things all have a personality,'' he added. ''Some logical person would say, 'It's only a hunk of steel.' But when you get all the elements of that hunk of steel and put them together, it takes on a personality.''
It plied the waters with swagger
The Calumet slid from its construction berth in Detroit in 1929.
The newcomer was one of the biggest and grandest lake freighters. It entered service as the flagship of the booming U.S. Steel Corp. fleet.
At christening, the boat took the name Myron C. Taylor, honoring the company's newest board member, who went on to become U.S. Steel chairman and chief executive.
As flagship royalty, the Taylor had a unique profile: Other freighters' forward superstructures were two-deck affairs, with sleeping quarters below the pilothouse. But the Taylor sported an extra level of guest quarters just below the pilothouse, appointed with fine oak paneling and other luxuries.
Captains of industry and their friends and families enjoyed summertime pleasure cruises aboard the Taylor as it steamed from mines to mills and back, laden with 12,500 tons of bulk cargo - enough to fill 120 railroad cars.
But it was a Cinderella existence in reverse: Newer and better boats came along quickly. The Myron C. Taylor lost its flagship status in 1938 and went from being a princess to just another workaday servant.
In 1956, it drew attention by being one of the first ships retrofitted into a ''self-unloader.'' Conveyor belts ran below the cavernous holds, feeding a 250-foot-long cargo-moving boom that could swing to either side. That let on-board crew members unload the ship without help from shore-side machinery or workers.
The ship survived World War II, staying on fresh water while German torpedoes sank fellow Great Lakes ships pressed into wartime service in the Atlantic Ocean. It survived the 1980s collapse of the rust belt economy, when other freighters were being towed to scrap yards. It survived collisions and mishaps.
Yet it almost didn't survive the turn of the century. Its owners, now called the USS Great Lakes Fleet, were set to scrap the Taylor and two others.
Second life in a new century
Then, in 2001, Grand River Navigation bought the boat and repainted the maroon hulls gray. Grand River, an affiliate of a Canadian firm called Lower Lakes Towing Ltd., gave the Myron C. Taylor a new name: the Calumet.
It operated for most of seven seasons under its new handle, mainly carrying limestone and doing the dirty work of hauling steel-eating salt from Cleveland's Cargill mines.
That's where it was headed on Nov. 15. The Calumet had just dropped a load of limestone at Ontario Stone Co. in Cleveland and had pulled back into the harbor to turn around and back up to Cargill's docks. A strong gust of wind blew the ship's starboard side into a concrete wall near the old Coast Guard station.
Five days later it was moored in Port Colborne at the salvage yard of second-generation ship breaker Wayne Elliott.
Elliott expects the Calumet to yield 4,800 tons of steel and iron, give or take, by the time the four- to six-month scrapping process is done.
That translates to gross revenue approaching $1 million, at $200 per ton. But from that, he must subtract the cost of buying the boat, removing and disposing ''many tons'' of asbestos and other hazardous materials according to regulations and paying the employees who deconstruct and market the ship.
Elloit confesses to holding the great old ships in reverence even as he shreds them for a living.
''I love them all - the old ships,'' said Elliott, a big man with a longish silver mane peeking out from his hard hat. ''It gets in your blood.''
He looked out the Calumet's pilothouse windows where the oak-spoked captain's wheel once stood, and he took a drag from a smoke.
''Can you imagine 80 years ago, standing on this when it was brand new? There's a lot of history in these.
''But all metal is infinitely recyclable,'' the pragmatic romantic said.
''This may have been railway spikes in its last life. By next year, this could make 5,000 new cars.''
That, in addition to the millions it already helped make.
- Times Writer Patti Brandt contributed to this report.
Ship fans mourn scrapping of the Calumet
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