THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 5, 1995 TAG: 9502030041
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: LYNN FEIGENBAUM
LENGTH: Long : 104 lines
It was something out of a nightmare only it was worse, because you knew you were awake.
It is one of the biggest, heaviest ships in the world, but it seemed like a ghost ship. And the hundreds of men, dwarfed by her bulk, the men who labored so valiantly to liberate their ship from her sand prison, they were more like ghosts than like men.
- From a Feb. 1, 1950, news story by Harry Nash
If you read the corrections that run on Page A2, you might remember the one last week about the battleship Missouri. It explained that the Navy ship ran aground off Norfolk in 1950 (not 1947, as the story said) and that it was headed out to sea, not toward Hampton Roads.
A simple correction perhaps, but one that rose from readers' colorful, first-hand experiences. Nearly a dozen called to set us straight on the Missouri after a front-page story Jan. 27 on Norfolk's interest in converting a mothballed battleship into a tourist attraction.
All the callers had some personal memory of the Mighty Mo's two-week ordeal on a shoal in the Chesapeake Bay. Several readers were involved in the rescue, one covered the story for the Associated Press, another was on shore when the 57,000-ton vessel ran aground.
It was almost worth getting the date wrong to be able to talk to folks like Herbert ``Buddy'' Fleear.
A teenager then, Fleear was working at Hickman's Boathouse in East Ocean View when the Missouri's misadventure began on Jan. 17, 1950.
``I could actually see the Missouri sitting out in the Bay,'' he said. ``I don't remember if the captain was on the bridge, but whoever was in control of the ship cut the channel short and ran aground.''
Kenneth Guthrie was aboard the Mt. Olympus, a communications ship, that day.
``We were right behind the Missouri and we threw a tow line,'' said Guthrie, then an engineman third class, ``but there was no way we could have pulled that ship out because we didn't have the power. And we didn't realize how deep the Missouri was stuck. It took several weeks before tugs could get it out.''
Edgar Inks Jr. also had a good reason for remembering the incident. He has a Navy commendation for the two weeks he spent aboard the grounded Missouri as part of a repair team, cleaning out fuel tanks to lighten the load.
``They tried everything to try to refloat it,'' recalls Inks, then stationed aboard the repair ship Amphion. ``They tried tugs, planes, bombs, TNT, everything.''
What finally worked were heavy steel cables wound around the Missouri's winches, their ``long fingers'' anchored in the bottom of the Bay while tugs strained to pull the ship from ``that hated shoal.'' That's how former AP writer Harry Nash recalls it, though the quotes come from yellowed clippings of the stories he wrote back in 1950.
As AP's man on the scene, Nash covered the Missouri story ``from the day she went aground to the day she was refloated,'' plus subsequent courts of inquiry and courts-martial.
It was Nash, too, who told us that the ship wasn't entering Hampton Roads, as our story said, but leaving its pier for exercises around Guantanamo Bay. ``If she had stayed in the channel, as she was supposed to do, she would not have run aground,'' said Nash.
There's plenty more to the Missouri saga but, after all, I'm just in the corrections business - and lucky, 45 years later, to have so many experts at hand!
MENDING FENCES. Yes, readers can help make the newspaper a learning experience. Take last weekend's editorial, ``Fence out Palestinians?''
The editorial began, ``Good fences make good neighbors - in poet Robert Frost's world maybe, but not in the Middle East.''
Denny Clark, an English teacher at Deep Creek High School in Chesapeake, saw red - not about the Palestinians or the Israelis, but about the injustice done to Robert Frost's famous 1914 poem ``Mending Wall.''
``Frost didn't say good fences make good neighbors,'' said Clark. ``He was quoting his neighbor, whom he considered to be kind of a dinosaur. . . . It was a tradition that Robert Frost was questioning.''
I dug out my old book of American verse and found the poem. As Clark said, it was the neighbor, not the narrator, who said, ``Good fences make good neighbours.''
And it's the narrator, Frost, who responds:
`` `Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence,
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.'. . . ''
3 PAPERS IN 1. If you're one of those readers who checks out details, you might have noticed - as M. Vernon Taylor Jr. of Norfolk did - that the ages of these newspapers vary.
It's right there in the front-page masthead: The Virginian-Pilot is 130 years old while The Ledger-Star is in its 119th year. Fine. But why, asked Taylor, is the weekend paper only 18 years old?
Here's why: Under postal regulations, the weekend paper - the combined Virginian-Pilot/Ledger-Star - is a separate entity from either the morning Pilot or the afternoon Ledger. It doesn't matter that all three papers are owned by the same company, Landmark Communications Inc., and produced by the same staff.
That's also why the fine print on Page A2 states that The Pilot and The Ledger are published weekdays, except for nationally observed holidays. Yes, of course a newspaper is published on weekends and holidays - but it's the Pilot/Ledger on those days.
Confusing, I know, but rules are rules.
by CNB