If the Aerial Lift Bridge could talk

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When a cargo ship disastrously struck a bridge in Baltimore harbor in March, my mind was swept back 50 years to the Duluth harbor and an incident in the shadow of the famed Aerial Lift Bridge.

I was a 19-year-old crewman on the Alva C. Dinkey, a handsome old Great Lakes ore carrier in the U.S. Steel fleet. Like many working ships with a long history, the Dinkey had acquaintance with mayhem. A couple of years after its launch in 1909, a wheelsman was shot to death on board by a fellow crew member. Two years after that, in the deadly “Big Blow” of 1913, only extraordinary seamanship — and luck — kept the vessel from catastrophe while sailing blind for 30 hours straight in blizzard conditions on Lake Superior. Two decades later the Dinkey collided with another laker in Michigan waters; it was patched up and continued sailing.

Now, on a beautiful morning in July 1974, danger or even mishap seemed impossibly remote. I was on deck with Gordy Montgomery who, at age 18, was a year younger than me. We were working to remove the ship’s hatch covers in preparation for loading taconite at the West Duluth ore dock. Receiving the Aerial Bridge’s welcoming horn signal, we entered the Duluth Ship Canal and had just sailed beneath the span.

The ship was about to begin its left haul to sail through the harbor and up the St. Louis River estuary to the dock. We noticed that we had drifted quite close to the canal wall. Unbeknownst to us, and without warning, our ship’s steering chain had broken. We were in tight surroundings without a rudder, meaning we had no ability to steer.

The captain dropped a front anchor. The anchor chain’s huge links hurtled out so fast that they caused a shower of sparks, which started a small fire in the room where the chain was stored. Gordy and I ran with others to take up fire hoses. We extinguished the blaze, then hosed down the links until they stopped shuddering out of the Dinkey’s hull.

With our vessel out of commission, Gordy and I were placed on “summer leave.” It was an unexpected vacation pleasantly filled with water skiing and beer drinking to pass the time as we wondered if and when we’d be sailing again.

We were called back in early August. The Dinkey’s new steering chain was housed in a metal trough in the upper reaches of the engine room in the callipygian stern. It required lubrication, so we were issued 5-gallon buckets of thick grease and instructed to crawl up to the trough and slop it on by the handful. The task was so filthy that afterward I threw away my clothes. Later that day, having whistled our goodbye to the Aerial Bridge (one long, two short), we sailed out of the Duluth Ship Canal, downbound with 12,000 tons of taconite destined for the South Chicago steelworks. As if nothing had ever happened.

In recent years I’ve searched for documentation of this episode. There must have been reports, log entries or other records. If so, they’re beyond my reach.

The Dinkey was destined to sail for only a few more months. It was too small, too slow and too expensive to operate compared to newer ships coming on the scene. These included the first of the thousand-footers, so enormous that they could carry in a single load what the Dinkey needed five trips to accomplish.

I’ve often wondered whether our captain knew this would be his ship’s last season. He showed a tolerance for crew behavior that seems unimaginable in today’s age of eager trial attorneys and nervous insurance companies. One hot day, while anchored in Lake Michigan awaiting entry into the Chicago harbor to unload, he allowed us younger crew members to literally “jump ship.” We could plunge overboard from the ship’s deck into the water, he allowed, as long as we all wore life jackets and someone stood by with ring buoys. Gordy did backflips off the railing. I’ll never forget having to wait for an adequate swell of the lake in order to reach the bottom rung of the wooden ladder hung from the forward starboard side.

A paper trail of what happened on a sunny July day 50 years ago in the Duluth harbor may not exist. But if the Aerial Bridge could talk …