Ecuperating - Chapter 9

This last is important, for it set the stage for my future at sea. No other profession, I think, would have accepted me so readily should they have known my age. Of course, the merchant marine may not have accepted me either had they been aware of just how old I was. Circumstances were such that it became unwise to divulge that age when it came time to do so, and I allowed all concerned to believe I was much older than I actually was.

Be that as it may, I have gone somewhat astray from this record, as I certainly want to do, being cursed with this disorganized mind of mine. Please forgive this wandering. Let us return to my young life with my father.

In 1935, having successfully completed grammar school, I entered grade 7 at the tender age of eleven.

By the end of that school year, (which for me was in April, for I had to leave each year to assist my father in his commercial fishing venture) I had read every book worth reading in the library, from Zane Grey through Kenneth Roberts. An avid reader, I would finish a novel in hours rather than days. Being well read stood me in good stead in the years to come.

I look back at those years with a great amount of longing. Father and I became very close from the time I was about nine. We hunted and fished the streams and swamps for weeks on end, vying for the biggest fish, the biggest deer, the most grouse, and the most rabbit.

While others may have been hungry during those lean years of the Great Depression, the Tanners were always good for a meal of wild meat, and willing to share our good fortune with others in need.

With our background of navigation at sea, it was always a laugh when those less able would exhibit concern to my father of my being traversing such great tracts of land on the mainland. Except for the times I was learning to use a sextant, a compass and a watch is all I ever used at sea or on land, and was never lost. I got turned around once in a while, to be sure, but always able to find a good port in any storm.

Father and I did fairly well during the fishing seasons of 1936 and 1937. 1938 was another matter. The weather that year began sour and continued throughout the entire year. Fishing was bad and we were barely making ends meet. Though the glass was way down the day before Labor Day that year, we found it necessary to set to sea to lift nets, contrary to our common sense.

By five in the afternoon we found ourselves in gale force winds from the northwest with still two gangs to lift. I looked up at my father in time to see him throw up his arms and fall over the nets in the bilge. I tied the wheel and jumped to see him. To no avail. My fathers’ heart had burst. He died immediately. I cut all lines and nets and headed home.

It took me six hours to beat upwind with our little 90 horse Gray Marine. The 41 ft. wood hull vessel was taking waves over the house on almost every crest. I ran compass all the way in, and arrived within sight of the harbor at midnight. I quartered the last of the 15 ft seas to enter the harbor as if I had been doing it all my life.

Which, in a way, I had. Father had me doing it for years. Father’s funeral was held two days later during a cold and wet afternoon. Being well thought of, the entire town came out for the event. Mother was devastated, and her catching a cold that night waiting for us to appear did not do her much good. She took to her bed two days later, having contracted pneumonia. She died on my birthday. I was 14.

The county authorities had their hearts in the right place, I am sure now, but at the time it was not my nature to be taken care of by anyone other than my own. So when it was suggested that I enter the local orphanage I rebelled strenuously. Especially when they were about to take my only means of support away from me and put it up for sale. God knows where the money from the sale of the boat would have gone.

Before the end of November, I put everything I owned into the boat and headed for Munising, another small town 30 miles to the west. There I sold the vessel and nets for $300 cash, jumped a boxcar heading for Chicago and left that part of the country behind.

Frank “Butch” DeBrauer was a butcher in Chicago who had befriended my father some years earlier. Butch would come up sport trolling several times each summer. Father would take him out when the times would not detract from his own business. They would often come home with several hundred pounds of trout.

I would then ice them down, put them in wooden boxes built for 25 to 50 pounds per box and ship them by rail off to Chicago. There Butch would either sell them in his market or give them to friends.

I appeared on Butch’s doorstep on December 5th, 1938. He took me in and I stayed for a week. One day we sat in the kitchen having coffee. “What do you want to do, kid?” he asked me. “Hell! What can you do? At your age you can’t even get a decent job!”

“I know the sea, Butch. That’s all I know.” Butch got me some identification that showed me to be 22 years old and sent me to New Jersey to ship out on his freighter the Sea Princess.

I shipped with the Sea Princess out of Newark on Jan 3rd as an ordinary seaman. By the time we landed in Liverpool I was 2nd mate. The first mate was stupid and lazy. By the time we landed in Newark again in mid February, I was firmly ensconced as first mate.