Tag:

Cold War

The Rise and Fall of the Fore River Shipyard

The Fore River Shipyard started out as a farm in East Braintree, Mass., when Thomas Watson bought it.

Watson had loaned money to his boss, Alexander Graham Bell, to help him develop the telephone. He was the same Watson who Bell had summoned through the phone with the words, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.”

Thomas Watson

Bell repaid his assistant with a 10 percent share in what would become the Bell Telephone Co. Watson sold the shares and bought the farm, where he started work on marine engines. His company, the Fore River Engine Company near the Weymouth Fore River, would give birth to one of the largest shipyards in the country, if not the world.

Fore River Shipyard

Under Watson’s leadership, the company’s reliable, high-quality engine acquired a reputation that spread throughout the Eastern Seaboard.

The depression following the Panic of 1893 turned out to be a godsend for the fledgling yard. The U.S. Navy awarded two contracts to build two destroyers, the USS. Lawrence (DD-8) and the USS Macdonough (DD-9). This boondoggle was augmented with an award to build the U.S. lightship LV-72. These would be the last ships constructed in East Braintree. In 1901, the yard moved to Quincy Point.

USS Rhode Island, ca. 1904

In 1902, the keel was laid for the USS Rhode Island (BB-17). Launched in 1904, the Rhode Island took part in the two- year around-the-world cruise of the Great White Fleet. The USS Vermont (BB-20) was also built there and launched in 1905.

Fore River Submarines

John Philip Holland, an Irish engineer, developed the first submarine officially commissioned by the U.S. Navy. The Navy launched his sub, called the USS Holland, in 1900. However, the boat needed improvement. Its storage batteries gave off toxic fumes that killed the crew.

John Holland in one of his submarines.

Nonetheless, the Imperial Japanese Navy entered into a licensing agreement with Holland and contracted with the shipyard to build five submarines. After completing the subs, the yard then disassembled them to ship to Japan, presumably for use in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05).

Submarines for the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Fore River Shipyard.

Holland worked on improving his first designs, and came up with the USS Octopus (SS-9), launched in 1906.

The Octopus was the first American submarine built in the yard, but not for John Philip Holland. The Electric Boat Company had purchased the Holland Torpedo Boat Company. However, EB didn’t have a yard of its own, so it subcontracted with Fore River to build what turned out to be 69 American subs up until 1922.

Electric Boat, now a subsidiary of General Dynamics, today has a shipyard in Groton, Conn., a fabrication plant in Quonset, R.I. and a design and engineering facility in New London, Conn.

Pre-World War I

We jump ahead to the pre-WW I years. The thriving Fore River Shipyard built and launched destroyers, submarines, merchant ships and four battleships. Bethlehem Steel, the main supplier for the yard, finally bought it to protect its interests in 1913.

Joseph P. Kennedy ca 1914

The yard then began to ramp up production in anticipation of entering World War I. In 1917, a 28-year-old Irish-American named Joseph Kennedy started working as an assistant general manager at the yard now known as Bethlehem Fore River, later Bethlehem Quincy.

In that job, Kennedy got to know Franklin D. Roosevelt, assistant secretary to the Navy. Roosevelt later appointed him ambassador to the United Kingdom.

World War I

In 1918, the Bethlehem Fore River Shipyard built an impressive 18 destroyers, 10 submarines and six merchant ships. Altogether, the yard built 71 destroyers during World War I, more than all the other U.S. shipyards combined.

Bethlehem Fore River even built a destroyer, the USS Reid, in a record-breaking 45.5 days.

The Roar Turns to a Whimper

During the Roaring ‘20’s and then the Depression years, the Quincy yard produced a whole series of naval ships: submarines, destroyers, cruisers and aircraft carriers, as well as merchant ships. Among them, the “Queen of Flattops,” the USS Lexington (CV-2) in 1927.

“Lady Lex” started out as a battlecruiser, but the Washington Naval treaty of 1922 ended the construction of all new battleships and battlecruisers. So the Navy converted the ship into one of the first aircraft carriers. When a drought in late 1929 caused hydroelectricity shortages in Tacoma, Wash., Lady Lex’s turbo-electric propulsion system supplemented the city’s electricity.

The launch of Lady Lex.

During the Great Depression, the yard built the USS Wasp (CV-7) and a few other ships. But business slowed, and employment dwindled to 812 by 1931.

World War II

The specter of World War II brought a surge of construction that started in 1938.

Employment reached 17,000 in 1941. By 1943, the payroll at the Fore River Shipyard reached–in today’s dollars– $1.63 billion.

James J. Kilroy worked as an inspector at the Fore River Shipyard during World War II. He said he used the famous phrase, “Kilroy was here,” to mark rivets he had inspected as ships were built. Later, sailors would find the phrase in places like sealed hull spaces. Kilroy later won election as a Massachusetts state representative, and the phrase was engraved on the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Another interesting employee joined the shipyard as a welder in 1942: 20-year-old Florence “Woo Woo” DiTullio. The nickname Woo Woo developed because groups of men would holler out “Woo Woo!” when she walked by. She paved the way for 2,000 women who would work at the yard during the war. She came to be known as Winnie the Welder.

Over the course of the war, some 32,000 people worked at the Fore River Shipyard. They built and launched many destroyer escorts and landing ships from the yard.

They built a second USS Lexington (CV-16) to replace the first, sunk early in World War II.

Fore River Shipyard workers eventually built 71 destroyers during the war, more than any shipyard in the country. To support this output they built a boiler plant at Fields Point in Providence, R.I.

USS Massachusetts in Battleship Cove.

They completed and launched the USS Massachusetts (BB-59) in 1941. Her crew called her “Big Mamie.” She can still be toured today at Battleship Cove, at Fall River, Mass., a testament to the quality of the work at Fore River. One of the welders who worked on the Massachusetts and the aircraft carrier Lexington came from Barrington, R.I.–Leo Caisse, my father, who learned his trade while serving in the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Fore River Postwar Years

The postwar years were not kind to the Fore River Shipyard. The world had too many ships. In 1954, the yard did win orders for five destroyers, five tankers and a fleet oiler.

However, in 1955 the shipyard bid on some of the Forrestal-class aircraft carriers, but lost them to the Newport News and New York naval yards. The navy, however, awarded Fore River contracts for the building of four frigates as a consolation prize.

After the war, shipbuilding continued and included some noteworthy ships, including the USS Bainbridge (DLGN 25) and the USS Long Beach (CGN 9), both nuclear-powered guided missile ships. Fore River also built destroyers, frigates, the liner Independence and the supertanker Manhattan, among the first ships to traverse the Northwest Passage.

A Texas Tower

Interestingly, the Fore River Shipyard built two radar towers in the 1950’s, Texas Tower 2 and Texas Tower 3. These were U.S. Air Force Air Defense Command platforms, similar to oil drilling platforms, placed along the East Coast to detect Soviet bombers. Texas Tower 4, built in Maine, tragically collapsed in a winter storm in 1961, killing all 28 men off the coast of Long Island.

Sister Yard

In 1964, the General Dynamics Corporation purchased the Fore River Shipyard. It became the sibling shipyard to Electric Boat. General Dynamics invested heavily in the yard, including a 1,200 ton crane nicknamed Goliath capable of lifting up to a thousand tons.

During its tenure in Quincy, General Dynamics built all kinds of naval support vessels and civilian merchant ships as well as several nuclear submarines. Then it shifted all that work to Electric Boat. From the 70’s to the 80’s, 10 liquefied natural gas tankers were built in the yard. Many of them are still in service today.

The yard built and delivered five (MPS) Maritime pre-positioning ships to the U.S. Navy between the years 1985-86. From two miles at sea, these vessels could deliver and support, with all their supplies, 4,000 Marines for 30 days.

Return of the Salem

By the 1980s, the U.S. simply had too many shipyards, and Quincy failed to win any contracts. That led to the closure of the Fore River Shipyard that year.

USS Salem

Eventually, General Dynamics sold off the equipment, and none of the efforts to reopen Quincy as a shipyard succeeded. On a brighter note, the USS Salem (CA-139) returned to its birthplace to become the main attraction for the United States Naval Shipbuilding Museum at the former Quincy yard in 1994.

With thanks to the Haze Gray and Underway Naval History Information Center, http://www.hazegray.org/navhist/.

About the author of this story: Leo Caisse of East Providence, R.I., passed away in 2020. He published the book, The Civilian Conservation Corps: A Guide to Their Works in Rhode Island. He also published a number of historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. Leo earned a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College.

This story was updated in 2022.

1 comment 4.4K views

Lona Cohen – The Russian Spy Who Kept Her Cool Even in the Desert

The year was 1945 and 32-year-old Lona Cohen from Adams, Mass., was in the New Mexico desert. Americans had perfected the nuclear bomb and used it to end World War II. In the Los Alamos desert the security around the nuclear labs was intense. The Soviet Union desperately wanted to build their own nuclear weapons, and Communists had persuaded a young physicist, Theodore Hall, to smuggle secrets from the lab and deliver them to the Soviets.

Hall handed off a trove of documents to a crafty courier, Lona Cohen, and she immediately boarded a train to New York. From there her contacts could get the documents to Russia. Lona was stunned to see military police board the train and begin searching passenger belongings. Cool and polished as ever, Lona folded the secret documents into her newspaper.

When police arrived at her seat, she asked the soldier if he would mind holding her newspaper while she opened her bags for him. He happily complied and returned the newspaper when he had verified that Cohen didn’t smuggle any nuclear secrets in her bags.

The Legend of Lona Cohen

Lona Cohen became a legend in the Soviet KGB that day. And the Soviets would develop their first nuclear bomb based on the plans she carried out of Los Alamos that day.

So how did a small-town girl from Adams, Mass., get to become a Soviet spy funneling state secrets from West to East for more than 25 years? Historians don’t know the details.

Lona was born Leontine Petka in 1913 in Adams into a large Polish Catholic family. Her father worked in a cotton mill. The family moved to Taftville, Conn., in 1923, and at 15 Lona left home to move to New York City.

Lona had a front row seat to watch the collapse of the economy and the misery brought on by the Great Depression. Disenchanted with America’s ruling elite, she joined the Communist Party and married Morris Cohen, who fashioned himself a Communist intellectual.

Morris Cohen

As early as 1938 Morris affiliated with Russian intelligence, eavesdropping and couriering information to Russia. In 1940, Morris was drafted to serve in World War II. Lona took on more responsibility, which led to her dramatic trip to Los Alamos.

Cold War

As the Cold War heated up, so did the search for Russian spies. The Morrises knew Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and their arrest in 1951 shook them. Panicked by news that the FBI was on to them, but clever as always, Morris and Lona escaped detection. The Soviets brought them to Mexico and then Russia.

In Russia, the Soviets developed new identities for Lona and Morris. They became Peter and Helen Kroger – antiquarian bookdealers from New Zealand who had resettled in London. In London, they became central players in a spy ring operating in England for seven years. They had a secret radio tower built in their house, which they used to relay messages to Russia.

The “Kroger” house in London

While in England, the Morris’ belonged to the Portland Spy Ring, sending British naval secrets to Russia. The leader of the ring drew suspicion on himself with lavish spending and drunkenness. The Morris/Krogers, meanwhile, were not exactly discreet.

In her book The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, author Helene Hanff told the story of how the couple was nearly outed at a New Year’s Eve party by their host. She remarked on Lona/Helen’s exquisite black dress: “‘Helen, you look like a Russian spy!’ she said. And Helen laughed and Peter laughed and a few months later we picked up the morning paper and discovered that Helen and Peter Kruger were Russian spies.”

Lona tried one last clever move as police raided her home. Could she, she asked, stoke the boiler to keep the house warm before leaving with police? This time her captors were a step ahead of her. They followed her to the basement and stopped her from tossing secret stolen documents into the furnace.

Freedom

In 1961, Lona and Morris were convicted and sent to prison. After eight years, the British exchanged them for a British citizen imprisoned in Russia. The KGB gave them a hero’s welcome.

Lona and Morris Cohen, just released from prison.

Lona died in 1992 and Morris in 1995. He received a hero’s funeral. Despite their arrest, the two had kept their secrets.

The identity of Theodore Hall, the physicist who handed those atomic secrets to Lona in the desert all those years ago, was not revealed until after Lona and Morris had died – long after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Soviets decorated Lona with the Honor of The Red Banner and the Order of Friendship Peoples. The Russian government issued a commemorative postage stamp bearing her likeness.

This story was updated in 2022.

Images: Cohens’ home in London By Russell Trebor, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12409365.

11 comments 2.4K views

Al Marder, The Oldest Living Communist Victim of the Red Scare

Al Marder in 2021 attended a ceremony celebrating the return of the Amistad replica to New Haven Harbor. At 99 years old, he had played a big part in bringing the Amistad story to the public’s attention.

He had still served as president of the Amistad Committee at the age of 94. He chaired of Connecticut’s Freedom Trail. And he was one of the last surviving Communists persecuted during the Red Scare of the Cold War Era.

Al Marder at James Hillhouse High School

Al Marder

Marder grew up in New Haven during the Great Depression, the son of Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine. They ran a small grocery store in a poor neighborhood of African-Americans, Germans, Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Italians, Lithuanians and Irish railroad workers.

“As a boy it became very evident to me how people were living and scraping along,“ he recalled in a 2016 interview with The New England Historical Society. “The store was near the railroad yards, and I saw men getting off the cars, looking for work or something to eat. If it snowed, everyone went down to City Hall to get a job shoveling snow…There was the sheriff sitting in the store collecting receipts because my parents couldn’t pay the bills.”

During the desperate years of the Great Depression, many Americans questioned capitalism and turned toward communism as a solution to the country’s despair. Within a decade, America’s communist allies became enemies. Led by Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy innocent people were accused of espionage, imprisoned, thrown out of work.

Al Marder was a victim of the anti-communist hysteria. So was another Connecticut resident, Arthur Miller, who compared it to the Salem witch trials in his play The Crucible.

Marder was indicted in 1954 for plotting to overthrow the U.S. government. His lawyer, Catherine Roraback, later became famous for arguing the Griswold v. Connecticut trial, which legalized birth control in Connecticut and paved the way for recognition of the right to privacy.

Al Marder, Activist

At James Hillhouse High School, Al Marder got interested in the political ferment that was all around him. Some of his fellow students were Socialists like their parents. Young women wore leather jackets and berets to show their support for the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War.

Al Marder, still active after all these years.

Marder organized a peace council at Hillhouse to discuss politics, and before school he sneaked out of the house to distribute handbills for the New Haven labor movement. The garment workers didn’t really need him, he said, but he leafleted the workers at Sargent’s and New Haven Clock before the 7 a.m. shift.

By 1954 he had graduated from the University of Connecticut, served in Europe during World War II, married, had several small children and become a journeyman printer. He also faced prison, charged with advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.

Marder had never abandoned his activism. As a young man he had campaigned successfully for the state to make college accessible to working-class students by offering night school, now Southern Connecticut State University. He organized a scholarship campaign for African-American students at UConn and the first integrated amateur drama club in Connecticut called the Unity Players. He went to meetings of the Wobblies, and told the Shoeleather History Project he met Elizabeth Gurley Flynn several times.

Al Marder also belonged to the Communist Party.

The Trial

The Communist Party of Connecticut didn’t survive the Red Scare. Al Marder got his union card and went to work for Donnelly Bros. in Bristol. He heard that all Connecticut Communists were to be arrested, so he took off for New York and assumed the name Ken Green. That job didn’t last, but he got another one in Stamford. One day he was walking to lunch and heard a woman shouting, “Spies, there are spies here!” She had belonged to the Young Communist League with them as a student. The police picked them up but had no grounds for arrest and released them.

The 1940 Smith Act, however, had made it a crime to advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government. Al Marder was finally arrested and charged under the Smith Act, along with six other New Haven Communists. Police swept them up with 125 other Communists in 11 U.S. cities, including Boston.

Al Marder, 2016

Marder’s task was to find a lawyer. He sent 100 mimeographed letters to lawyers throughout the state and one agreed to take his case. Catherine Roraback was fresh out of Yale Law School. Her uncle, J. Henry Roraback, had controlled the Republican Party in Connecticut.

She was bright, committed and took full advantage of her name, recalled Marder. “Volunteering to be a lawyer for a Communist when the entire country was embroiled in anticommunism — it took courage.”

The trial lasted seven months and made headline news. Marder was acquitted and the cases of the others were thrown out due to insufficient evidence. “They were just ordinary people looking for a better society,” he said. The judge and jury knew they were expected to convict them – but didn’t.

Aftermath

Before the trial began, Marder had gotten a job as a printer in New York City under his assumed name. The night he was acquitted, he got a phone call at home from his old boss who said, “Al, if you need a job come back.”

“He called me in, said ‘I knew who you were from the morning you walked into the place’,” Marder recalled. The FBI had said to fire him. His boss said he couldn’t because he had a union contract, and the only way he could fire him was if he was incompetent during the 90-day probation or if he did something in the shop.

Marder for years worked on the Amistad Committee, bringing to light the story of the slave revolt and the court decision that upheld freedom for the captured Africans. Picture here: the Freedom Schooner Amistad.

Marder wound up working in the horticulture industry, representing growers – and spending the rest of his life working for peace and justice.

In 1957, the U.S. Supreme Court severely restricted the Smith Act, ruling it violated the U.S. Constitution.

Mary Donohue profiled Marder in her article, “A Life of Conviction” in the Spring 2016 edition of “Connecticut Explored,” the magazine of Connecticut history. To find out how to subscribe, click here.

This story last updated in 2022.

Images: Freedom Schooner Amistad By Rhvanwinkle, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36402773

11 comments 1.7K views

The Tragedy of Texas Tower No. 4

In the dark, early morning hours of Jan. 15, 1961, the little Navy vessel AKL-17 plowed through monster waves toward Texas Tower No. 4, bucking and heaving in the teeth of a fierce nor’easter. The coastal freighter had supplies for the 28 crew members on board the huge radar platform. Most of the men on Texas Tower No. 4 were New Englanders stationed at Otis Air Force Base.

The tower’s commanding officer, Capt. Gordon Phelan, had radioed Skipper Sixto Mangual of the AKL-17 to ask him to stand by. He hoped his men could be saved from the lurching radar platform. Mangual would end up trying to save his own ship in the teeth of 80 mph winds and towering waves.

The radar platform resembled Gulf of Mexico oil platforms, thus the name ‘Texas Tower.’ The Air Force planned five of them. It had already built Nos. 2 and 3 on the rocky ledges off Cape Cod and Nantucket. Texas Tower No. 4 was built twice as deep as the others in mud and sand 80 miles off the coast of New York. The Air Force planned Nos. 1 and 5 for the coasts of New Hampshire and Nova Scotia. But after what happened to Texas Tower No. 4, the military scrapped plans for the remaining two.

The radar surveillance towers belonged to the Cold War. They comprised a ring of early-warning beacons in case Soviet bombers approached the East Coast. Fifty men lived and worked in each of the towers high above the sea’s surface. They functioned as virtual cities with sleeping quarters, hobby shops, galleys, infirmaries and control and generator rooms.

Early Trouble

Texas Tower No. 4 was built in Portland, Maine, and plagued by problems from the start. As a ship hauled it out to sea in 1957 it encountered a storm that tore off two legs. In 1959, Hurricane Daisy forced its evacuation and $500,000 worth of repairs. The next year, Hurricane Donna pounded the tower, weakening its legs. By then Texas Tower No. 4 had a nickname: Old Shaky. Its crewmen half-joked they shouldn’t shave with a straight razor.

In November 1960, the Air Force tried more repairs. The tower still bucked and heaved so violently that workers fell to the floor of the platform. Welder Vincent Brown called his wife to say the tower swayed too much to work on it. “Air Force boys were forever kneeling and saying their rosaries,” he said. “The horror of it was awful.”

Capt. Gordon Phelan repeatedly asked to evacuate Texas Tower No. 4, but Air Force brass refused. They didn’t want to ‘just walk off and leave millions of dollars of radar equipment lying around untended.’

Texas Tower No. 4

Collapse of Texas Tower No. 4

The storm had such ferocity that January morning that the AKL-17 couldn’t hope to reach the doomed tower.

The men on Texas Tower No. 4 tried to reach their loved ones. At 7:30 a.m., one crewman called his wife. She recalled,

You could hear an awful clanging, metal against metal. You could hear them screaming and yelling.

At 10:30 am an underwater support broke loose with a loud bang. Capt. Phelan asked his superiors to evacuate the tower. They refused. At 1 pm he called his wife to tell her the tower was gyrating. She asked if it would float if it collapsed. He said no, it would go down fast and no one would survive.

At 2 pm came another loud bang and cracks appeared above the water. Texas Tower No. 4 was beginning to come apart in the 80 mph winds.

Finally at 4 pm the Air Force granted an evacuation order. Capt. Phelan ordered the helicopter pad cleared, but the howling winds didn’t allow the choppers to launch.

At 6 pm, Capt. Phelan called his wife. Above the clanging metal and shrieking winds, he told her the tower was collapsing. He said he didn’t know so many of his men had religion because so many were praying.

USS New Bedford

At 7 pm two Coast Guard cutters and a Navy destroyer tried to make their way through the roiling seas. On the storm-tossed USS New Bedford/AKL-17, Skipper Mangual watched the pip on the radar screen that showed the tower’s location. At 7:28 pm, the blip disappeared. Texas Tower No. 4 disappeared.

Aftermath

Rescuers had no hope. They found none of the 28 men that night. After two days of searching, they found the body of only one crewman, Master Sgt. Troy Williams.

A Senate investigation found serious errors and lapses in judgment along the entire chain of command. The regional commander in charge of the tower, Col. William Banks, was court-martialed. But then he received an acquittal.

In 2011, President Obama officially recognized the men’s sacrifice in formal letters to their families.

Watch a short documentary about the collapse of Texas Tower No. 4 here. This story was updated in 2022.

2 comments 4.5K views

No, JFK Did Not Say ‘I Am a Jelly Doughnut’

Critics of President John F. Kennedy, popularly known as JFK, claimed his eloquent 1963 speech before 400,000 people in West Berlin included an embarrassing gaffe. When he said, “ich bin ein Berliner,” he meant, “I am a Berliner.” But he really said, “I am a jelly doughnut” in German. Or so they claimed.

JFK in Berlin

Kennedy’s point was to defend the ideals of democracy and self-government when both were threatened in Berlin.

After World War II, Berlin, like all of Germany, was divided into the democratic west and the communist east. Located in the heart of East Germany, it was an isolated satellite of West Germany.

From 1952, the border was closed between East and West Germany — except for Berlin. Hundreds of thousands of East Germans escaped to the West through West Berlin, which drained East Germany of labor and threatened its economic collapse.

Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev called West Berlin ‘a bone in my throat’ and threatened to ‘eradicate this splinter from the heart of Europe.’

In 1961, the Soviet-backed East German government began building the Berlin Wall between East and West Berlin and to plug the biggest hole in the Iron Curtain. The wall itself was a concrete monstrosity with watchtowers, barbed war and machine gun emplacements.

In 1963, Berliners feared a takeover by East Germany. Kennedy feared conflict in Berlin would spark a nuclear war.

Kennedy’s address to the people of West Berlin. Photograph by Robert Knudsen, White House, in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

JFK, Berliner

In a previous speech, Kennedy called civis romanus [“I am a Roman citizen”] the proudest boast one could make. He then adapted those words for the speech he delivered in Rudolph Wilde Platz on June 26, 1963. He told the huge crowd,

Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is “Ich bin ein Berliner!”…

All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words “Ich bin ein Berliner.”

Those words ranked up there with “Ask not what you can do for your country.”

Twenty years later, British fiction writer Len Deighton published a spy novel, Berlin Game. In it, he wrote that Kennedy had mangled the German language during the speech and actually said, ”I am a jelly doughnut.”

The New York Times picked up the mistake four years later in an op-ed. The Guardian, MSNBC, CNN, Time magazine and several books subsequently repeated Deighton’s accusation. They are wrong.

As the Atlantic explains,

…it would be suggested that Kennedy had got the translation wrong—that by using the article ein before the word Berliner, he had mistakenly called himself a jelly doughnut. In fact, Kennedy was correct. To state Ich bin Berliner would have suggested being born in Berlin, whereas adding the word ein implied being a Berliner in spirit. His audience understood that he meant to show his solidarity.

Rudolph Wilde Platz was later renamed John F. Kennedy Platz. To listen to the 9-minute speech, click here.

John F. Kennedy was by no means new to Europe. He spent the summer of 1945 there as a reporter. JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 by Fredrik Logevall examines Kennedy’s pre-White House years. This story was updated in 2023.

10 comments 3.7K views

The Great Northeastern Blackout of 1965

At dusk on Nov. 9, 1965, 11-year-old Jay Hounsell was walking down the road in Conway, N.H. He was on his way home for supper, swinging a stick. As he passed a telephone pole he whacked his stick against it. Instantly, the light on the pole went out. Jay looked around and saw lights go out all over town. Terrified by the blackout, Jay Hounsell ran all the way home.

His mother remembered, “His eyes were sticking right out. I wasn’t sure he hadn’t done something, but I told him it didn’t seem possible that a whack on a telephone pole could put out the whole gizmo.”

Areas affected by the Northeast Blackout of 1965.

Areas affected by the 1965 Northeastern Blackout.

‘The whole gizmo’ included eight Northeast states – New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York and parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania – and the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec. Power stayed on in Maine and part of New Hampshire.

More than 30 million people over 80,000 square miles had no electricity for as long as 13 hours. It was the largest blackout ever.

Rush hour traffic snarled, and 800,000 people got stuck on subways in New York City. Many were trapped inside office buildings. Railroads halted and airplanes circled darkened airports before finding emergency runways. Some landed at the naval base at Quonset, which had switched to an emergency generator.

Nearly all of the television stations in the six hardest- hit blackout states lost power, and nearly two-thirds lost power for the duration of the blackout. The dearth of information caused some people to panic, thinking Communists or a UFO were responsible for the power outage.

The 1965 Northeastern Blackout

Jay Hounsell did not cause the Great 1965 Northeastern Blackout. Maintenance workers did. They set a protective relay too low on a power line to Ontario, which then tripped the relay. It then sent power to other lines, overloading them.

Some towns escaped the blackout because they had their own electric utilities. Holyoke, Taunton, Peabody and Braintree did in Massachusetts, and so did Hartford, Conn.

blackout-news

Fran Rensbarger had gone to the Boston Public Library after her college classes. She stood n Copley Square Station when the lights dimmed. Unlike New York, where the subways stopped, Boston’s T kept running underground. The T stalled at Kenmore Square, the last tunnel stop, and the passengers got out to walk the rest of the way.

Rensbarger, in an interview for the Blackout History Project, recalled their surprise at finding the lights out in Brookline and Boston.

Streetlights and traffic controls were dark, and people were directing traffic with flashlights. Even the Prudential Tower was dark.

Communist Plot?

West Springfield power plant, not much good on Nov. 9, 1965.

Fran Rensbarger lived in an apartment with a university professor and his family, helping out with the children. The neighbor downstairs learned on his car radio the blackout covered the entire Northeast and told them.

Willie, the mom, started throwing canned food, medical supplies and liquor (for sterilizing, she said) into boxes to escape to their summer home northeast of Boston. …Many people, including this family, feared the blackout was part of a communist plot. We were still in the height of the Cold War, and nothing seemed too absurd at the time. By the time we were ready to flee, the true source of the blackout was beginning to be suspected, then confirmed. We unpacked, and went to bed. The lights came on sometime after midnight.

Abbey Hamilton was 16 and working at W.T. Grant’s office in the Mattapan neighborhood of Boston. She lived in the Dorchester section of town. Fifty years later she recalled,

WALKED home! (ahhh, to be 16…!) Fascinating, everything dark, scary but interesting, you know? My Mum waited with an enormous flashlight at the corner of our little street and Dorchester Ave shining the light into passers-by faces hunting for me, making sure I wouldn’t “miss” the turn! As if!

Baaad Repute

Hamilton, with very low vision, said there were fewer cars and people to bump into that night.

The T did send some busses to Mattapan Square supposedly to replace the trolleys to Ashmont but (the T was in baaaad repute just then…) I was afraid I’d wind up in Springfield or Woburn, or some place far, far away like that – grin – so the only default choice was walking.

It was a wondrous night for me – Mum was a very old-fashioned Yankee, obvious emotion was not generally allowed; but that night I received a big, warm hug. (for years I wondered if she had thought the Russians – or the Aliens – had “got” me! -grin – she was that scared.)

A Boston T in 1965.

A Spot of Trouble

Vermont’s Lt. Gov. John Daley was eating dinner by candlelight when the phone rang. Daley was in charge as Gov. Phil Hoff was in Europe. At the other end of the line was President Johnson, telling Daley to let him know if he needed any help.

Throughout New England, people generally stayed calm, with some exceptions. A few incidents of looting were reported in Springfield, Mass., and the inmates in the maximum security section of the Walpole State Prison rioted for three hours. They rampaged throughout the building, smashing windows and tearing up everything they could get their hands on. State troopers quelled the riot with tear gas, and the next day the inmates had to mop up the mess.

Massachusetts Gov. John Volpe called out the National Guard, but the guardsmen did little patrolling. In Providence, Mayor Joseph Doorley considering sealing off the city to incoming traffic. He decided against it, but wondered, “How the hell could something like this happen in this day and age?”

That question preyed on many minds. Clearly, a single act of sabotage could wipe out power to 30 million people. Though power was restored by morning, electricity consumers – that is, nearly everybody – suddenly felt more vulnerable. They began keeping flashlights, candles and matches in their homes.

With thanks to The Night the Lights Went Out by the staff of the New York Times. 1965 Northeastern Blackout by 08OceanBeach SD. Licensed under Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons. West Springfield Power Plant By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17379403. This story last updated in 2023.

51 comments 5.5K views