My family moved to East Boothbay in 1952, the same year the Hasch family came to the region. My father, Dexter Rumsey, and Buck Hasch became friends while working together at Goudy & Stevens Shipyard in East Boothbay. It was then combined with Hodgdon Brothers, located nearly next to it, for bonding reasons related to navy work. They partnered for World War II Navy work and 1950s minesweeper building for NATO. In 2014, I wrote four articles for this column on 1950s minesweeper days at Goudy's; these are more. Buck was an animated talker; taping him in 1985 for a school project with my younger son, Jackie Hartford, was easy duty. Most of Buck's remarks were addressed to him. Buck died in 2002. –Barbara Rumsey

Buck's Memories

I always said it was one of the best jobs I ever had. Basically we were doing something of value. I had been an engineer—one of the things we did as engineers was sit behind a desk, and it is pretty silly to sit behind a desk because you don’t accomplish anything. You pile a lot of papers and write a lot of numbers. So when I got to work in the shipyard I could see things going up from the keel laid out. You could see it work up every day, four or five more ribs, then you start to put the planking on, and it was just like something that makes you grow like a man. Building something is probably what a man really wants to do. It wasn’t a very comfortable life working in the shipyard, as a matter of fact it was very uncomfortable; mainly it was cold. We didn’t have the fleece clothing like we have now.

The Lumper Crew

One of the things that I did not tell anyone when I first went to work there in 1952 or 1953 was that I was an engineer, because I would not have got the job. Some people at that time—you couldn’t get a job as an educated man. Your grandfather was probably the exception—no one could feel any pain with Dexter around—he was just Dexter. Give him a chain saw and this grandfather of yours was the smartest dude I have ever known. No one would ever think of sawing wood to dimension with a chain saw. He did and he did it beautifully, the guy was a genius.

My first job when I got in the shipyard was for $1.05 an hour as a lumper, a guy who just lugs. The one who ran the crew was a guy by the name of Bully Luke, a little short guy, but a big, stocky, short guy. His job was to bull stuff around the shipyard, because they had no means to do anything except by manpower—muscle power and their backs. There were no kinds of lifting mechanisms to raise things, just your backs. If you couldn’t lift it, you put some wedges under it and used a hammer to pound it up. Bully Luke was the kind of guy that said okay. There was nine or ten of us in the lumper gang, and he would say, "Okay, lift that." You went over there and whatever it was, it got lifted, you lifted it up. Then he’d say, "Okay, come this way, and now put it down. Don’t do it that way, you dummies!" and then we would get it put down right. Bully was a very good guy to get things done. He was a marvelous guy.

I lasted on the lumper gang quite a while until someone found out I could read blueprints. That was a rarity in that shipyard, an extreme rarity. They generally built the ships by looking at the architect’s rendering of the ship. They would build the ship to look like the rendering. They didn’t use blueprints, they measured out how long and how wide it was supposed to be and that was it. I don’t think there were three guys in the whole shipyard who knew how to loft anything. With Goudy's combined with Hodgdon's, Jim Stevens did most of it and Sonny Hodgdon did a great deal. There was another guy but I can’t think of his name, but they were the only three guys who knew how to loft.

The Toilet and Heat

You know when you have to go to the bathroom in anyplace nowadays, there is always a nice bathroom. You can take a newspaper in and waste a lot of time, because you have to be there anyway. But no one wasted a lot of time in the bathroom in the shipyard because it was clear out to the end of the dock. And the wind whistled down that river about 400 miles an hour, and below the hole in the john was nothing but wind and sea running back and forth. It was cold. So you didn’t waste a lot of time in the john. You roared in and roared right back out again.

When it was cold, even 10 degrees below 0, we were still working outside. Nobody stopped working, nobody stayed home. You had to occasionally roar into someplace and warm your hands over one of the four or five yellow drum stoves they had around — they would just throw in the chips they had around. Nobody ever bought any wood, they just used the leftovers that they had around. and they kept those things going. The first thing you did in the morning when you came in was to light the stoves. Cold, boy it was cold, and if you handled metal it would stick to your gloves. That was something boy. Extremely cold.

Next time: A second article, this one on Buck and Dexter jiggering the ship saw to turn out gusset plates.