vigor - us environmental protection agency

Brian Carr Assistant Regional Counsel New York/Caribbean Superfund Branch Office of Regional Counsel

VIGOR INDUSTRIAL

February 19,2013

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region II 290 Broadway, 17'" Floor New York, NY 10007-1866

Re: Gowan us Canal Superfund Site, Brooklyn, Kings County, New York

Dear Mr. Carr:

This is in response to your October 18, 2012 Request for Information. Most of the information provided

is from the book Every Kind of Shipwork, A History of Todd Shipyards Corporation, published in 1981.

Relevant excerpts have been provided. What little other information was found was in the Company's

archives. Discovery continues to determine ifthere is additional information available.

a. Todd Shipyards Corporation ("Company") was originally incorporated in New York in 1916

and was re-incorporated in Delaware in January, 1991 after exiting a Chapter II Bankruptcy

proceeding. All outstanding shares of the Company were purchased by Vigor Industrial LLC,

an Oregon limited liability company through an acquiring subsidiary, Miles Marine, Inc, an

Oregon corporation, in February 2011. The Company changed its name in 2011 to Puget

Sound Commerce Center, Inc. The Company's registered agent in Delaware is CT

Corporation, 1209 N Orange St, Wilmington, DE 1980 I. The company does not do business

in New York and has no registered agent in New York.

b. The CEO is Frank Foti- 1801 16'" Avenue SW, Seattle, Washington 98134

c. Shipbuilding and Ship Repair

d. Puget Sound Commerce Center, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Vigor Industrial LLC,

an Oregon limited liability company. The CEO is Frank Foti (see above). The company's

registered agent in Delaware is CT Corporation. The company does not do business in New York and has no registered agent in New York.

Other affiliated entities are; Cascade General, Inc. Miles Marine, Inc., Shipyard Commerce

Center LLC, US Fab LLC, Vigor Industrial LLC, Vigor Machine LLC, Vigor Marine LLC,

Specialty Finishes LLC, and Washington Marine Repair LLC. All are either incorporated in

Oregon or are Oregon limited liability companies. The registered agent for each is National

Registered Agents, Inc., 325 13'" NE, Suite 501, Salem, Oregon 97301. U S Fab LLC has a

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registered agent for New York. It is National Registered Agents, Inc., PO Box 12432, a: 1-UJ ::J 0

phone 206.623.1635 I fax 206.442.8505 I Vigor'lndustrial.cono z P.O. Box 3806, Seattle, WA 98124 1 1801 16th Avenue SW Seattle, WA 98134

Newark, NJ 0710 I. No other entities are registered in New York. Frank Foti is the Chief

Executive Officer of all of the above stated entities (see (b) above).

2. Vigor Industrial LLC is the sole owner of Puget Sound Commerce Center, Inc., f/kla Todd Shipyards

Corporation. The entity set forth in Definition 6 is Vigor Shipyards, Inc. f/kla Todd Pacific Shipyards

Corporation which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Puget Sound Commerce Center, Inc. Vigor

Shipyards, Inc., f/kla Todd Pacific Shipyards Corporation, never owned property in the vicinity of

Gowanus Canal. (For simplicity purposes the responding entity will be referred to as "Todd

Shipyards Corporation", "Todd" or "Company" in this response as that was the entity that once

owned property in the vicinity of Gowan us Canal.) Todd Shipyards Corporation entered into Chapter

11 under the U.S. Bankruptcy laws on August 17, 1987 and emerged from Bankruptcy in December,

1990. The bankruptcy or<)er is provided with this response.

3. In or about 1916 Todd bought the Tebo Yacht Basin at the foot of 23'd Street in Brooklyn. A

description of the operations is found in press release dated February 8, 1948 (provided). Todd also

bought the "old Poillon Yard" at the foot of Clinton Street in Red Hook in 1918 which was

incorporated as Clinton Dry Docks in March 1919. Clinton Dry Docks repaired and overhauled

marine vessels both in drydock and pier side (answers for Clinton follow the answers for Tebo

below).

Tebo Yacht Basin:

a. The Company operated the facility until 1939 when it was leased to Sullivan Drydock &

Repair Corporation.

b. The Company owned the property until approximately 1948 when it was put up for sale.

c. Sullivan Drydock & Repair Corporation- A copy of the lease could not be found.

d. Documents could not be found.

4. No information responsive this request was found.



7. No infonnation responsive this request was found.


9. No information responsive this request was found except for four photographs involving the Tebo

Yacht Basin Facility (provided). (Source: Every Kind ofShipwork, A History of Todd Shipyards

Corporation, published in 1981)

I 0. No information responsive this request was found.

II. No information responsive this request was found.




2




18. Please see #3 above.

19. No

20. No

21. The Company does not have insurance for potential liability at the Site.


23. None of which we are currently aware.

24. Todd has been unable to locate any current or former employees who have information that would

enable us to provide a response to this question. The response to the Request for Information was

prepared by:

Michael G. Marsh Secretary and General Counsel Puget Sound Commerce Center, Inc. 1801 16'" Avenue SW Seattle, Washington 98134 206-442-8501

25. No one we contacted had personal knowledge of the answers to any of the questions posed by

EPA. The only person who assisted or was consulted in preparation of the response to the Request

for Information was: Charles R. Blumenfeld, Senior Counsel, Perkins Coie LLC, 1201 Third Avenue, Suite 4900, Seattle W A 9810 I.

26. Provided

As to Clinton Dry Docks:

a. The Company ceased operations at the facility in 1933 when its personal property and

equipment were transferred to the Tebo site and to the Company's shipyard in Hoboken, New

Jersey. The Clinton property was sold in 1939 to Ira S. Bushey & Sons.

b. See (a.) above.

c. No documentation of any lease of the Clinton property found.

d. Documents could not be found.






3


I 0. No information responsive this request was found.

II. No information responsive this request was found.







18. Please see #3 above.

19. No

20. No

21. The Company does not have insurance for potential liability at the Site.


23. None of which we are currently aware.

24. Todd has been unable to locate any current or former employees who have information that would

enable us to provide a response to this question. The response to the Request for Information was prepared by:

Michael G. Marsh Secretary and General Counsel Puget Sound Commerce Center, Inc. 1801 161

h Avenue SW Seattle, Washington 98134 206-442-8501

25. No one we contacted had personal knowledge of the answers to any of the questions posed by

EPA. The only person who assisted or was consulted in preparation of the response to the Request for Information was: Charles R. Blumenfeld, Senior Counsel, Perkins Coie LLC, 1201 Third Avenue, Suite4900, Seattle WA 98101.

26. Provided

Sincerely,

Michael G. Marsh Secretary & General Counsel

4

CERTIFICATION OF ANSWERS TO REQUEST FOR INFORMATION GOW ANUS CANAL SUPERFUND SITE

State of Vv(lj,S\ii f\c~/loY\

County of-'~---'1-'-(\"'\~--

I certify under penalty of law that I have personally examined and am familiar with the information submitted in this document (response to EPA Request for Information ) and all documents submitted herewith, and that based on my inquiry of those individuals innnediateljr responsible for obtaining the information, I believe that the submitted information is true, accurate, and complete, and that ·all documents submitted herewith are complete and authentic unless otherwise indicated. I am aware that there are significant penalties for submitting false information, including the possibility of fme and imprisonment. I am also aware that my Company is under a continuing obligation to supplement its response to EPA's Request for Information if any additional information relevant to the matters addressed in EPA's Request for Information or my Company's response thereto should.become known or available to the Company.

NAME (print or type)

Srt'(QfC\¥~ ~ \7Q\\Q'(O..\ CouYI\Q.,\ TITLE (print or type)

#~.d~ SIGNATURE

Sworn to before me this ~day of fetL, 20J3

By:

PROSKAUER ROSE GOETZ & MENDELSOHN Co-Counsel to Debtors 1585 Broadway New York, New York 10036 (212) 969-3000

RAVIN, SARASOHN, COOK, BAUMGARTEN FISCH & BAIME

Co-Counsel to Debtors 103 Eisenhower Parkway Roseland, New Jersey 07068 (201) 228-9600

---------------------------------x In re:

TODD SHIPYARDS CORPORATION, TODD PACIFIC SHIPYARDS CORPORATION,

Debtors. ---------------------------------x

UNITED STATES BANKRUPTCY COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF NEW JERSEY

(Chapter 11) case Nos. 87-5005 WT

87-5006 WT

NOTICE OF ENTRY OF ORDER CONFIRMING DEBTORS' THIRD AMENDED JOINT PLAN OF REORGANIZATION

PLEASE TAKE NOTICE, that the within is a true copy of

the ORDER CONFIRMING DEBTORS' THIRD AMENDED JOINT PLAN OF

REORGANIZATION made herein on December 14, 1990.

Dated: New York, New York December 17, 1990

Yours, etc., PROSKAUER ROSE GOETZ & MENDELSOHN Co-counsel to Debtors and

Debtors-in-Possession

RAVIN, SARASOHN, COOK, BAUMGARTEN, FISCH &•BAIME

co-counsel to Debtors and Debtors-in-Possession

.,

••

PROSKAUER ROSE GOETZ & MENDELSOHN Co-counsel to Debtors 1585 Broadway New York, New York 10036 (212) 969-3000


co-counsel to Debtors 103 Eisenhower Parkway Roseland, New Jersey 07068 (201) 228-9600

-,. r . ·-

·-··~- ... .J·


-----------------------------------x In re:


Debtors.

: . . • • • • . • • • . . . . • •

-----------------------------------x

(Chapter 11) case Nos. 87-5005 WT

87-5006 WT

ORDER CONFIRMING DEBTORS 1 THIRD AMENDED JOINT PLAN OF REORGANIZATION

This matter having been opened to this Court upon the

application of Todd Shipyards Corporation and Todd Pacific

Shipyards Corporation, debtors and debtors-in-possession

(jointly, the "Debtors") dated June 22, 1990 for an order,

pursuant to Section 1129 of Title 11, United States Code, 11

u.s.c. S 101 gt ~(the "Bankruptcy Code"), confirming a plan

of reorganization filed by the Debtors: and upon the Debtors'

Third Amended Joint Plan of Reorganization dated October 26, 1990

(the "Plan") (all capitalized terms not defined herein shall have

.,

.. the meaning ascribed to them in the Plan): and upon the Debtors•

Third Amended Disclosure Statement (relating to the Plan) dated

October 26, 1990 (the "Disclosure Statement") which was approved

' as containing "adequate information", as such term is defined in

Section 1125 of the Bankruptcy Code, by Order of this Court

entered on October 30, 1990 (the "Disclosure Statement Approval

Order•): and the Debtors each having filed a voluntary petition

for reorganization under Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code on

August 17, 1987 and having continued in the operation of their

businesses and management of their properties as debtors-in

possession pursuant to Section 1107 and 1108 of the Bankruptcy

Code: and the Disclosure Statement Approval Order having, inter

~: (i) directed the Debtors to solicit acceptances or

rejections of the Plan: (ii) approved the forms of ballot to be

transmitted with the Disclosure Statement and Plan for voting

purposes; (iii) scheduled the hearing on Confirmation of the Plan

for December 14, 1990 at 11:00 o'clock in the forenoon or as soon

thereafter as counsel can be heard (the "Confirmation Hearing"):

(iv) directed that objections to confirmation of the Plan be

filed and served pursuant to Bankruptcy Rule 3020(b) such that

they would be filed with the Court and served on certain

specified parties no later than ten (10) days prior to the

confirmation Hearing; (v) approved the form of notice to be

provided by the Debtors respecting the voting process and the

Confirmation Hearing; and (vi) directed that all ballots must be

received on or before the close of business on December 5, 1990

2

• to be eligible to be counted in determining whether the Plan is

accepted or rejected; and the Debtors having served (i) copies of

the Disclosure Statement and the Plan and (ii) a ballot as

required pursuant to the Disclosure Statement Approval Order; and

the Debtors having published a notice respecting the Confirmation

Hearing once in the Wall Street Journal (national edition) and

once in the New York Times (national edition) in accordance with

the Disclosure Statement Approval Order; and affidavits of

service and publication having been filed with the Clerk of this

Court with respect thereto; and a Declaration of Claudia D. King

certifying the Ballots Accepting and Rejecting the Plan having

been filed with this Court; and the acceptances and rejections of ·~

the Plan of those holders of Allowed Claims that voted having

been duly received and tabulated; and it appearing that the

solicitation and tabulation of acceptances having thus been

accomplished in a proper and fair manner satisfactory to this

Court: and one objection to confirmation of the Plan having been

initially received but subsequently withdrawn; and it appearing

that the Plan has been duly accepted by the creditors and

interest holders whose acceptance is required in accordance with

the provisions of Section 1126 of the Bankruptcy Code; and upon

the entire record of the Debtors• Chapter 11 cases, the

arguments of counsel, and the testimony of witnesses and

introduction of evidence at the Confirmation Hearing; and after

due deliberation; and sufficient cause appearing therefor; and

3

J:T HAVING BEEN FOUND AND DETERMINED by this Court,

that:

A. The Plan complies with the applicable provisions of

the Bankruptcy Code.

B. The Debtors, as proponents of the Plan, have

complied with the applicable provisions of the Bankruptcy Code.

c. The Plan has been proposed in good faith and not by

any means forbidden by law.

D. Any payment made or to be made by the Debtors or

any person issuing securities or acquiring property under the

Plan, for services or for costs and expenses in, or in connection

with, these Chapter ll cases, or in connection with the Plan and

incident to the Chapter ll cases, has been approved by, or will

be subject to the approval of, the Court as reasonable.

E. The Debtors have disclosed the identity and

affiliations of those individuals proposed to continue to serve,

after confirmation of the Plan, as a director, officer, voting

trustee or insider of the Debtors pursuant to the statement filed

by the Debtors respecting officers and directors and the terms of

their employment, and the continuance in such office of each such

individual is consistent with the interests of creditors and

equity security holders and with public policy.

4

F. There are no rate changes provided for in the

Plan, with respect to which rates, a governmental regulatory

commission has jurisdiction over the Debtors after confirmation.

G. (1) The Plan properly classifies Claims and

Interests and properly designates such Classes in accordance

with Section 1122 of the Bankruptcy Code;

(2) The Plan specifies the classes of Claims and

Interests which are impaired or not impaired under the Plan: and

(3) With respect to each impaired Class of Claims

and Interests, (i) each holder of a Claim or Interest of such

Class has accepted the Plan, or will receive or retain under the

Plan on account of such Claim or Interest property of a value, as

of the Effective Date of the Plan, that is not less than the

amount that such holder would so receive or retain if the Debtors

were liquidated under Chapter 7 of the Bankruptcy Code on such

date, and (ii) there are no holders of Allowed secured Claims who

made elections under Section 1111(b)(2) of the Bankruptcy Code.

H. Each Class has accepted the Plan or is not impaired

under the Plan.

I. Except to the extent that the holder of a

particular Claim bas agreed to a different treatment of such

Claim, the Plan provides that:

(1) With respect to a Claim of a kind specified in

Sections 507(a)(l) or (2) of the Bankruptcy Code, as soon as

5

practicable after the Effective Date, the holder of such Claim

will receive on account of such Claim, cash equal to the allowed

amount of such Claim:

(2) With respect to a Class of Claims of a kind

specified in sections 507(a)(3), (4), (5), or (6) of the

Bankruptcy Code, each holder of a Claim of such Class will

receive cash as soon as practicable after the Effective Date,

equal to the allowed amount of such Claim: and

(3) With respect to a Claim of a kind specified in

Section 507(a)(7) of the Bankruptcy Code, the holder of such

Claim will receive as soon as practicable after the Effective

Date, on account of such Claim, Cash equal to the allowed amount

of such Claim.

J. At least one Class of Claims that is impaired

under the Plan has accepted the Plan, determined without

including any acceptance of the Plan by any insider holding a

Claim in such Class.

K. confirmation of the Plan is not likely to be

followed by the liquidation, or the need for further financial

reorganization, of the Debtors or the Reorganized Debtors.

L. The Debtors have paid or shall pay on or prior to

the Effective Date all amounts due under 28 u.s.c. § 1930.

6

M. The Plan provides adequate means for the Plan's

implementation, and is otherwise in compliance with

Section 1123(a) of the Bankruptcy Code. The Debtors will have

sufficient funds on hand as of December 17, 1990 to make the

cash disbursements provided for in the Plan including the

prepayment of the principal of the Confirmation Obligations

otherwise payable 360 days after the Confirmation Date.

o. The Plan provides, pursuant to Section 8.3

thereof, for the continuation of retiree benefits in accordance

with Section 1129(a)(13) of the Bankruptcy Code.

P. The substantive consolidation of the Debtors•

estates for the purposes of effectuating the Plan is appropriate.

IT IS ON THIS li 'ih DAY OF If 111:1 \.if 'l'HEREFORE ORDERED that:

1. The Plan is hereby confirmed, having met the

requirements of section 1129(a) of the Bankruptcy Code.

2. The record date for the purpose of determining

those holders of debt and equity securities entitled to

distributions under the Plan shall be as of the close of business

on December 14, 1990.

3. Solely for the purposes of distributions to be

made under the Plan, the Effective Date of the Plan shall be

December 17, 1990.

7

4. On December 17, 1990, all of the property of the

estates shall be vested in the Debtors and shall be free and

clear of any and all Claims of the Debtors• creditors and equity

security holders, and any and all liens and encumbrances which

have not been expressly preserved under the Plan shall be deemed

extinguished as of such date.

s. Chemical Bank ("Chemical"), as Escrow Agent

pursuant to an agreement (the "Escrow Agreement") dated as of

October 26, 1990 between Chemical Bank and Todd heretofore

approved by this court shall, on December 17, 1990, disburse the

funds in the escrow account it is holding (the "Escrow Account")

as follows:

a. With respect to payments to be made under the

Plan to Whitmore Capital, L.P. ("Whitmore"), the sole Class 4

claimant, Chemical is hereby authorized to disburse such funds

directly to Whitmore as soon as practicable on or after the

later of the Effective Date or the date of surrender to Todd of

the certificates representing the Notes held by Whitmore (or if

such certificates have been stolen, lost, or destroyed, in lieu

thereof (i) a lost security affidavit and (ii) a bond if

reasonably required by Todd), in accordance with written wire

instructions received from Whitmore prior thereto.

b. With respect to the balance of the funds

held in the Escrow Account, on the Effective Date, Chemical shall

8

disburse such funds to DRX, Inc., the Debtors' disbursing agent

(the •Disbursing Agent").

6. The Debtors are hereby authorized to provide the

balance of the funds required to implement the Plan, including

such funds as are required to prepay the Confirmation Obligations

otherwise payable 360 days after the Confirmation Date, to the

Disbursing Agent on December 17, 1990.

7. on December 17, 1990, interest at the rate of 11%

per annum shall stop accruing on the amounts payable under the

Plan to holders of Claims in Class 3, Class 5 and Class 6.

8. The Disbursing Agent shall disburse all funds

received from Chemical and from the Debtors and securities

received from the Debtors only in accordance with the terms of

the Plan and this Order, as soon as practicable on or after

December 17, 1990, except that (i) the Disbursing Agent is hereby

authorized to prepay the principal amount of the Confirmation

Obligations otherwise payable 360 days after the Confirmation

Date and (ii) with respect to those funds to be paid to claimants

in a manner other than wire transfer, the Disbursing Agent shall

hold such funds in an interest bearing account at Chemical Bank

(the "Disbursement Account") and shall disburse (a) such funds,

including interest earned on the Disbursement Account through

January 23, 1991, and (b) securities, to such creditors or

holders of interests on or about the later of January 23, 1991 or

the effective date of the Merger, or as soon thereafter as the

9

necessary information is received from such creditors by the

Debtors.

9. The Disbursing Agent is authorized to make

payments to creditors by wire transfer as provided for under the

Plan as soon as practicable on or after December 17, 1990.

10. The Debtors are hereby authorized and directed to

take all steps necessary to effectuate consummation of the Plan

including but not limited to the mailing of letters of transmit

tal to holders of Claims or interests seeking the surrender of

documents representing such obligations and interests, and the

information required by the Debtors in order to be able to comply

with applicable law respecting distributions made under the Plan

to holders of such claims and interests.

11. Except as otherwise expressly provided in

section 1141 of the Bankruptcy Code or the Plan, the distribu

tions made pursuant to the Plan will be in full and final

satisfaction, settlement, release and discharge as against the

Debtors, of any debt that arose before the Confirmation Date and

any debt of a kind specified in Section 502(g), 502(h) or 502(i)

of the Bankruptcy Code and all Claims and interests of any

nature, including, without limitation, any interest accrued

thereon from and after the Filing Date, whether or not (i) a

proof of a Claim or interest based on such debt, obligation or

interest is filed or deemed filed under Section 501 of the

Bankruptcy Code, (ii) such Claim or Stock Interest is allowed

10

under Section 502 of the Bankruptcy Code or (iii) the holder of

such Allowed Claim or Stock Interest has accepted the Plan. This

discharge shall include the extinguishment of any and all liens

and encumbrances which have not expressly been preserved under

the Plan.

12. In addition, in consideration for past and future

services, and other valuable consideration, all of the Debtors•

present and former officers, directors, agents, employees, and

counsel shall be deemed discharged and released from any and all

Claims asserted or assertable by any person, firm or corporation

arising in any way out of such person's relationship with or work

performed for the Debtors on or prior to the date hereof.

13. The discharge set forth in the above decretal

paragraphs shall not include:

a. administrative expenses representing

liabilities incurred in the ordinary course of business by the

Debtors as Debtors-in-Possession, or liabilities arising under

loans or advances to the Debtors as Debtors-in-Possession, or

liabilities arising under post-petition agreements or

stipulations entered into by the Debtors as Debtors-in

Possession, which liabilities shall be paid by the Debtors in

accordance with the terms and conditions of any such agreements

or stipulations and the Plan, except as otherwise provided in the

Planr

11

b. administrative expenses due to Professionals

representing allowances of compensation and reimbursement of

expenses allowable pursuant to Section 330 of the Bankruptcy

Code;

c. The Claims filed by the United States

relating to response costs incurred by the Environmental

Protection Agency with respect to the Harbor Island site, as well

as any costs incurred in the future and any future injunctive

obligations with respect to the Harbor Island site, as

contemplated by Article 8.5 of the Plan, and such exclusion from

discharge shall apply irrespective of whether a stipulation and

agreement to settle and compromise environmental Claims of the

United states of America shall be filed with the Court prior to

the Confirmation Date;

d. All of the obligations relating to

indemnification and exculpation existing in favor of Todd's, and

its subsidiaries•, respective present or former directors,

officers, employees, fiduciaries, agents, attorneys or

controlling persons as arise under applicable law or as provided

in any of (i) Todd's certificate of Incorporation in effect prior

to or as of the date hereof, or (ii) Todd's by-laws in effect

prior to or as of the date hereof, or (iii) each agreement

identified in the Disclosure statement or (iv) the articles of

incorporation, by-laws or similar documents or agreements of any

of Todd's subsidiaries as in effect prior to or as of the date

12

hereof, in each case with respect to matters occurring on or

prior to the Effective Date, which obligations shall be assumed

by Reorganized Todd1

e. Retiree Benefits coverage (other than death

benefits coverage) for all eligible Todd retirees who elected to

retire on or before May 31, 1988 and for their eligible spouses

and eligible dependents which, pursuant to Article VIII of the

Plan terminates (a) when the appropriate maximum lifetime benefit

bas been exhausted by claims, or (b) when the eligible Todd

retiree becomes covered, or is eligible to be covered, under a

program with another employer providing similar benefits or (c)

when the eligible spouse or eligible dependent of an eligible

Todd retiree ceases to be such an eligible spouse or eligible

dependent under the terms of the applicable plan, fund or

program. Under the Plan, Retiree Benefits consisting of death

benefits shall also be provided post-confirmation in the amount

and under the terms of the applicable plan, fund or program.

Retiree Benefits shall be provided at the applicable level

established on or before May 31, 1988 to the extent, and for the

period, the Debtors are contractually or otherwise legally

obligated to provide such benefits. Any plan, fund or program

for the provision of retiree benefits may be amended or

terminated at any time according to the terms of such plan or

program. Nothing herein contained shall be deemed to change,

alter or amend any rights eligible Todd retirees or their

respective eligible spouses, dependents or beneficiaries may have

13

to any Retiree Benefits. The Reorganized Debtors shall also

continue all their Defined Benefit Pension plans and resume

contributions to these plans in each case to the extent required

by the plans and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of

1974, 29 U.S.C. 1001 n ~ ("ERISA"). In the event that the

Reorganized Debtors seek to terminate their defined benefit

pension plans, they shall do so pursuant to Title IV of ERISA.

No distributions of the benefits due under these defined benefit

pension plans may occur except to the extent that such

distributions are consistent with Title IV of ERISA:

f. The death benefits of certain Todd retirees

approved by Order of the Bankruptcy court dated April 6, 1988

which shall be paid in full, in cash, upon the death of the Todd

retiree by Todd, its successors and/or assigns; and

g. The Claims of the individuals listed on

EXhibit D to this Court's previous Order dated February 22, 1989

entitled Order Granting Debtors' Objection to Allowance of Claims

in accordance with the terms of such Order.

14. Except as otherwise provided under the Plan or

under order entered by this Court, any judgment at any time

obtained, to the extent that such judgment is a determination of

the liability of the Debtors with respect to any debt discharged

under this Order and pursuant to the Plan and Section 1141(d)(1)

of the Bankruptcy Code, shall be null and void and of no force

and effect, regardless of whether a proof of claim therefor was

14

filed or deemed filed and all Claimants holdinq Claims aqainst

the Debtors and holders of equity interests of the Debtors shall

be precluded from assertinq aqainst the Debtors, or any of their

assets or properties, any other or further Claims or interests

based upon any act or omission, transaction or other activity of

any kind or nature that occurred prior to the Confirmation Date,

and this Order shall permanently enjoin said Claimants and

holders of equity interests, their successors and assiqns, from

enforcinq or seekinq to enforce any such Claims or equity

interests.

15. In addition, except as otherwise provided in the

Plan or under Order entered by this Court and with respect to the

Debtors' obliqations under the Plan, the commencement or

continuation of any action, the employment of process, or any

act to collect, recover or offset any debt discharqed under this

Order and the Plan and pursuant to Section 1141(d)(1) of the

Bankruptcy Code as a liability of the Debtors, or from property

of the Debtors, is forever stayed, restrained and enjoined.

16. The Court shall retain jurisdiction of the

Debtors• Chapter 11 cases with respect to (i) motions pendinq

before this Court as of the date of this Order, (ii) approval of

the terms of sale of any assets located at the Debtors' Galveston

shipyard, (iii) approval of the terms of any settlement of the

Debtors' outstandinq dispute with cunard respectinq the M.V.

Saqafjord and (iv) approval of the terms of a settlement between

15

the Debtors and the EPA respecting the Queens City Farms, Wycoff

Eagle Harbor and the Dutchtown Superfund sites including any

terms of such settlement which provide for the barring of third

party claims against the Debtors or newly organized Todd relating

to these Superfund sitesf provided, however, that in the event

the Debtors and the EPA fail to execute an agreement within three

(3) months of the Confirmation Date, then the proofs of claim

filed by the EPA with respect to these three sites shall be

governed by the procedures set forth in Paragraph 6.6 of the Plan

for the resolution of Disputed Claims, except that the Debtors

shall not be required to reserve any funds, nor make any payments

respecting such claimsf and matters provided for in Article X of

the Plan.

17. For purposes of and solely to the extent set forth

in the Plan, the Debtors• estates are hereby consolidated, and

the assets of the Debtors are to be pooled and the liabilities of

the Debtors are to be satisfied from the resultant common fund,

as follows:

(i) all intercompany Claims by and among the Debtors

will be eliminated; (ii) all assets and all proceeds

thereof and all liabilities of the Debtors will be

merged or treated as though they were merged for

purposes of the Planf (iii) any obligation of any

Debtor and all guarantees thereof executed by either of

the Debtors will be deemed to be one obligation of the

16

consolidated Debtors: (iv) any Claims filed or to be

filed in connection with any such obligation and such

guarantees will be deemed one Claim against the

consolidated Debtors: (v) each and every Claim filed in

the individual case of any of the Debtors will be

deemed filed against the consolidated Debtors in the

consolidated case: and (vi) for purposes of determining

the availability of the right of set-off under Section

553 of the Code, the Debtors shall be treated as one

entity so that, subject to the other provisions of

Section 553 of the Code, debts due to any of the

Debtors may be set off against the debts of any of the

Debtors. In addition, and in accordance with the

terms of the Plan, all Claims based upon guarantees of

collections, payment or performance made by one Debtor

as to the obligations of the other Debtor shall be

discharged, released and of no further force and

effect.

18. The Debtors are hereby authorized and directed to

deposit $5,000,000 (the "Funds") into an escrow account, which

Funds shall be available solely for the payment of the final

allowance of professional fees in the amounts to be subsequently

determined by the Court pursuant to appropriate notice and

hearing.

17

..

19. The Debtors are hereby authorized to pay, in the I

ordinary course and without further application to this Court,

all professional fees and expenses for services rendered after

the date hereof.

20. The Debtors shall pay any amounts due under 28

u.s.c. § 1930 within ten (10) business days of notification of

the amounts thereof by the Office of the United States Trustee.

21. Upon the entry of this Order, all rights, duties

and obligations of the Indenture Trustee respecting the Notes and

the holders of such notes shall cease and become null and void.

22. Each and every federal, state and local

governmental agency or department is hereby directed to accept

any and all documents and instruments necessary and appropriate

to consummate the transactions contemplated by the Plan.

23. Notice of entry of this Order, substantially in

the form annexed hereto as Exhibit "A" which is hereby approved,

shall be, and hereby is, deemed sufficient (a) if served by

first class mail upon (i) all persons having filed a notice of

18

..

appearance herein within 20 days from the date hereof, and (ii)

together with the distributions to be made under the Plan to all

holders of allowed claims and interest"s and (b) if published once

on or before 20 days from the date hereof in the national

editions of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

UNITED

19

f('/r. " ·--;;-;:; ~ ~ ~;Jl~'"'i r /v_· ·

- --- -·- ------ ---Exhibit A '

..

.. By: __ ~--~-------------Alan B. Hyman

ABH6655

PROSKAUER ROSE GOETZ & MENDELSOHN Co-Counsel to Debtors 1585 Broadway New York, New York 10036 (212) 969-3000

RAVIN, SARASOHN, COOK, BAUMGARTEN FISCH & BAIME -

co-Counsel to Debtors 103 Eisenhower Parkway Roseland, New Jersey 07068 (201) 228-9600


-----------------------------------x In re:


Debtors.

. . • • : • • • • • • . • • • • •

-----------------------------------x

(Chapter 11) Case Nos. 87-5005 WT

87-5006 WT

NOTICE OF (i) ORDER CONFIRMING DEBTORS' THIRD AMENDED JOINT PLAN OF REORGANIZATION. AND Ciil DISCHARGE OF DEBTS

TO ALL CREDITORS, HOLDERS OF EQUITY INTERESTS AND OTHER PARTIES-IN-INTEREST:

NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN of the entry, on December 14 ,

1990, of an order (the "Confirmation Order") of the United

States BankrUptcy court for the District of New Jersey

confirming the Third Amended Joint Plan of Reorganization of

Todd Shipyards Corporation and Todd Pacific Shipyards

corporation dated october 26, 1990 (the "Plan") (all

capitalized terms not defined herein shall have the meaning

ascribed to them in the Confirmation Order and the Plan)

..

.. pursuant to Section 1129 of Title 11, United States Code, 11

u.s. c. s 101 n ~· (the "Bankruptcy Code") I which

Confirmation Order provides, among other things, that:

1. The Plan is confirmed as having met the

requirements of section 1129(a) of the Bankruptcy Code, and

solely for purposes of distributions under the Plan, the

Effective Date shall be set as of December 17, 1990.

2. Except as otherwise expressly provided in

Section 1141 of the Bankruptcy Code or the Plan, the dis

tributions made pursuant to the Plan will be in full and

final satisfaction, settlement, release and discharge as

against the Debtors, of any debt that arose before the

Confirmation Date and any debt of a kind specified in Section

502(g), 502(h) or 502(i) of the Bankruptcy Code and all

Claims and interests of any nature, including, without

limitation, any interest accrued thereon from and after the

Filing Date, and shall include the extinguishment of any and

all liens and encumbrances which have not expressly been

preserved under the Plan (all as set forth in the

Confirmation Order and the Plan).

3. In addition, in consideration for past and

future services, and other valuable consideration, all of the

Debtors• present and former officers, directors, agents,

employees, and counsel shall be deemed discharged and

released from any and all Claims asserted or assertable by

2

' .

'. any person, firm or corporation arising in any way out of

such person's relationship with or work performed for the

Debtors on or prior to the date hereof.

4. The discharge set forth in the above decretal

paragraphs shall not include:

a. administrative expenses representing

liabilities incurred in the ordinary course of business by

the Debtors as Debtors-in-Possession, or liabilities arising

under loans or advances to the Debtors as Debtors-in

Possession, or liabilities arising under post-petition

agreements or stipulations entered into by the Debtors as

Debtors-in-Possession, which liabilities shall be paid by the

Debtors in accordance with the terms and conditions of any

such agreements or stipulations and the Plan, except as

otherwise provided in the Plan;

b. administrative expenses due to Professionals

representing allowances of compensation and reimbursement of

expenses allowable pursuant to Section 330 of the Bankruptcy

Code:

c. (i) All of the obligations relating to

indemnification and exculpation existing in favor of Todd's,

and its subsidiaries•, respective present or former

directors, officers, employees, fiduciaries, agents,

attorneys or controlling persons, (ii) retiree benefits

3

coverage, (iii) death benefits of certain Todd retirees,

(iv) Claims filed by the United States related to certain

response costs incurred by the Environmental Protection

Agency, and (v) Claims of the individuals listed on Exhibit

D to the Bankruptcy court's Order dated February 22, 1989

entitled Order Granting Debtors' Objection To Allowance Of

Claims (all as set forth and to the extent provided for in

the Confirmation Order and Articles 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5 and

8.6 of the Plan).

5. Except as otherwise provided under the Plan or

under Order entered by this Court, any judgment at any time

obtained, to the extent that such judgment is a

determination of the liability of the Debtors with respect to

any debt discharged under the Confirmation Order and pursuant

to the Plan and Section ll4l(d)(l) of the Bankruptcy Code,

shall be null and void and of no force and effect (as set

forth in the Confirmation Order and the Plan) and holders of

equity interests of the Debtors shall be precluded from

asserting against the Debtors, or any of their assets or

properties, any other or further Claims or interests based

upon any act or omission, transaction or other activity of

any kind or nature that occurred prior to the Confirmation

Date, and the Confirmation Order shall permanently enjoin

said Claimants and holders of equity interests, their

successors and assigns, from enforcing or seeking to enforce

any such Claims or equity interests.

4

). -,

.. 6 • In addition, except as otherwise provided in

the Plan or under Order entered by this court and with

respect to the Debtors' obligations under the Plan, the

commencement or continuation of any action, the employment of

process, or any act to collect, recover or offset any debt

discharged under the Confirmation Order and the Plan and

pursuant to Section 1141(d)(l) of the Bankruptcy Code as a

liability of the Debtors, or from property of the Debtors, is

forever stayed, restrained and enjoined.

NOTICE IS FURTHER GIVEN that the Bankruptcy Court

shall retain jurisdiction of the Debtors' Chapter 11 cases to

the extent set forth in the Confirmation Order and as

provided in Article 10 of the Plan.

Dated: New York, New York December 14, 1990

PROSKAUER ROSE GOETZ& MENDELSOHN co-Counsel to Debtors

By: s/Alan B. Hyman Alan B. Hyman ABH6655

A Member of the Firm

-and-


co-counsel to Debtors

5

EVERY KIND OF SHIPWORK

A History of Todd Shipyards Corporation

1916- 1981

by

c. BRADFORD MITCHELL

\Vith the Advice and Research Collaboration

of EDWIN K. LINEN

Maps, Charts, and Diagrams by FRANK CRAM

New York 1981

The new acqmsJtwn (leased at first, then purchased two years later) was the Quintard Iron Works, one of the last and most famous of Manhattan's foundry and machine shops, at 12th Street on the East River. Like Delamater, it had turned out engines for Civil War gunboats, and had crossed Todd's wake at least once before when, in 1888, it designed and built those for the USS Maine. It was lying virtually idle when reactivated under the Todd lease April I, 1917, but within three months it had shipped the first four Canadian engines, and before year-end the entire order had been completed. By then, new work was already laid out for it within the war-reoriented Todd complex.

This new work was the manufacture of triple-expansion machinery, with propellers, shafting, and all heavy metal work, for ten 188-foot minesweepers now on order at the Tebo yard. As mentioned above, the declaration of war had sharply altered plans to use Tebo as a supplementary repair plant while continuing its traditional function of yacht storage and maintenance. In the words of Todd's 1919 deposition, "About May, 1917, at the urgent request of the Navy Department, the whole idea of the plant was changed and the property was improved, developed and equipped for construction work."

After extensive site clearance, rearrangement, and construction of buildings, docks and shipways, the first minesweeper, the USS Lapwing, was launched March 16, 1918.

(Despite the disenchantment with which he looked back on this crash construction program in 1919, Todd never stinted his enthusiasm or support while it was officially regarded as an essential component of the nation's war effort. Its progress was fully reported in the new house organ The Keel, established in August, 1918, and morale was kept high by involving the yard workers and their fami1ies in all ceremonial occasions. For example, at the launching of the sixth vessel, the Auk, September 28, 1918, Todd and a Supreme Court Justice sawed through one of the holding ways, while the teen-age daughter of Tebo's boss carpenter waited to christen the ship, the newly-organized Tebo Band played, and an army plane circled above dropping Liberty Loan leaflets.)

32

i i l ~ I j ! §

I ' ff !

i I I I I ' i ~ * !

I !

I ~ ! !

i I ' I ' !

I I I

Almost simultaneously with the leasing of Quintard, the expanding· Todd "family" added another Manhattan-based subsidiary which, after the war, would evolve into its most important sideline and a potent means for making the Todd name internationally known, both afloat and ashore. This newcomer was the White Fuel Oil Eng-ineering Corporation, then of 601 vVashington Street but destined to move into and absorb the Quintard Plant, once Todd's wartime engine-building commitments were discharged.

White's specialty was the manufacture, sale, and installation, under patent, of automatic burners for fuel oil. In 1917, coal still fired the overwhelming rna jority of the world's power plants, but a quiet transition was already underway in ships' boiler rooms, and Todd, cannily anticipating its postwar acceleration, purchased both the company and its patents. Under these in the next half-century his firm would equip whole fleets of ships and innumerable shore-based steam generators with Todd Oil Burners.

One other acquisition remained to complete the Todd wartime establishment in the New York area. At the foot of Clinton Street in Red Hook, near the Robins Plant but facing directly on Gowan us Bay just about opposite the Tebo Yacht Basin, was what was known as the "old Poillon Yard," abandoned since 1901 and in a state of considerable decay. Responding to Shipping Board pressure for increased drydock capacity in the port, and to ease its own overcrowding (at this stage of the war, Todd wrote, all subsidiary plants were working "at about 200';70 of what would ordinarily be considered their capacity") , the Corporation's directors voted February 13, 1918, to purchase this yard from the Poillon executors. Demolition, dredging, and construction were promptly undertaken (the latter including an 8,800-ton floating· drydock) ; but the war had ended before this rehabilitation could be completed. The restored yard was incorporated as Clinton Dry Docks in March, 1919, and the first ship to occupy the new dock, the freig-hter Buckhorn, lifted in mid-June.

33

These satellite plants, limited and specialized though most of them were, contributed significantly to easing the burden on the rna jor yards when war pressures were heaviest. By the fall of 1918, Tebo, besides its construction program, was using its piers for the engining, fitting-out, and camouflage-painting of a score of Shipping Board freighters built elsewhere. Clinton, even though unfinished, could be used, ante the dredges completed their work, for storage space and floating· repairs. Quintard furnished engines not only to Tebo but to the Navy for vessels under construction at Baltimore and to another Maryland yard for wooden tugs it was building for Todd. Perhaps the best instance of this coordinated Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance system came just at the war's end when the small tanker Manuel Rionda, ordered by Sinclair Navigation, was constructed at Tebo, engined by Quintard, and fitted with oil burners by White Fuel Oil Engineering.

The heaviest burden of war work fell, of course, on the Corporation's three oldest and largest components, Robins, Tietjen & Lang, and Seattle Construction, plus of course the latter's major offshoot at Tacoma, Washington. The fact that the great bulk of repair surgery was performed by the eastern yards, the major construction entirely by the western, gave the latter the lion's share of publicity and glamor. Even in peacetime, repair work has little claim on press or public interest; in wartime, when it has largely to be performed behind a veil of censorship, it is likely to go unnoticed except by those actually engaged in it, or officially cognizant of its magnitude.

Its magnitude was enormous, and constantly growing. By early I 917 a second layer of miscellaneous war casualties had been superimposed on the standard base of routine repair and overhaul. To this, the President's March 12 Executive Order authorizing armament for United States merchant ships added a third layer, almost immediately topped, as American entry into

34

the war became a certainty, by a layer of major conversions. As Todd himself described it, the New York harbor yards "converted ships into transports, minelayers, hospital ships, etc. They installed a large majority of the gun mounts and other war devices upon merchant vessels and ... also kept the ships running during the whole course of the war by general and emergency repairs."

One enormous special service rendered by both the Red Hook and Hoboken yards was thus described by the Corporation's founder: "Todd Shipyards Corporation and its subsidiaries repaired and refitted a large rna jori ty of the damaged German and Austrian vessels interned at the Port of New York, doing approximately 70% of all such work and at least 80% of all done outside the Navy Yard." Among the score or more of major transatlantic liners thus made available for transport and other services were the great Leviathan (ex-Vaterland), George Washington, Mt. Vernon (ex-Kronprinzessin Cecilie), Agamemnon (ex-Kaiser Wilhelm II), President Lincoln, President Grant, and Covington (ex-Cincinnati). The restoration of these seven ships to operable condition, in itself, added approximately 165,000 gross tons to available allied sealift.

All these classes of work, with a steadily rising volume of war damage repair, continued to preoccupy Todd's major and minor New York area facilities up to and beyond the war's abrupt termination.

Huge and vital as this eastern activity was, to the public eye Todd's most conspicuous war service, as already suggested, was rendered on Puget Sound. There, for all to see, months before this country's entry into the war, the newly acquired Seattle Construction and Dry Dock Company was building or preparing· to build over a dozen ships, many of them directly or indirectly connected with what was going on in Europe and on the high seas. These included the submarines N-1, N-2, and N-3, the United States Destroyer Gwin, and a number of dry-cargo vessels, most of them large for their day. Over two-thirds of the latter were of the 7 ,500-dwt. design which was to be the proto-

35

the month. But despite her auspicious debut the Kennecott was ill-starred. Through no fault of her still-novel propulsion system, she was wrecked in British Columbia waters while still new, February 20, 1923, and so lost whatever lasting influence she might have had on the engining of American ships of the future. Her construction stands, however, as an innovative milestone for Todd.

The Kennecott's launching, just 65 days after her keel was laid, came between those of two other ships which had been on Todd's order book almost four years. These, of course, were the scout cruisers Omaha and M ilwauhee, which at last splashed into Commencement Bay December 14, 1920, and March 24, 1921-to be followed two months later by their "afterthought" sister Cincinnati. Such deliberate construction of combat ships has always been routine in peacetime, but to have moved so slowly under the conditions prevailing in 1917 and 1918 is a little surprising. It has been said that the Navy itself set the slow pace of wartime work on the trio-which, if true, suggests a remarkably enlightened high-level strategic decision that to fight what might be a long war the nation had more imminent and urgent need for thirty cargo carriers than for three warships unsuited to convoy duty.

Be that as it may, it would be 1924 before the last of the Omahas was commissioned. But Todd had completed the basic construction work and got the entire class afloat before its own fifth birthday. An interesting· aspect of all three launchings was that the hulls were sent down the ways bow first, the first naval craft to be so launched on the west coast.

Completing· these vessels, and shifting their hulls back and forth between Tacoma and the Bremerton Navy Yard, would provide some work for the Todd Dry Dock & Construction Corporation, but the scarcity of new business for that yard seemed to bear out the dim view William H. Todd held of ship construction as a continuing and self-sustaining line of work. For a time in late 1920 there was flickering hope that a government order might be obtained for what was referred to in board meetings as "Naval Transport No. 2," but nothing came of it.

58

There would ultimately be two more orders, but it was plain that Todd's first venture in the building of major new tonnage had virtually run its course-until the next emergency.

All signs pointed, on the other hand, to reinforcement and consolidation of its ship repair position. At Tietjen & Lang, echoing Tebo's preoccupation with electric propulsion, Dry Dock No. 6 was converted from steam to electric power in August, 1920. At Harbor Island, "Big Bill" was manfully reinforcing the plant's initial docking capacity. And for its New York area, in the spring of 1921, the Corporation provided three additional drydocks, distributed between Tebo, Clinton, and Tietjen & Lang. On a nationwide basis, this gave Todd a total of 23 dry docks-21 floating and two graving-and gave it a position of leadership in the ship repair business of the Atlantic and Northwest Pacific Coasts.

As 1920 merged into 1921, the old cordial familial ties of a Red Hook industrial plant which was also a community rallying point remained strong. At the end of October the Sponsor's Club, "composed of the young ladies who have officiated at the launchings of the minesweepers, oil tankers, freighters, lighters, tugboats, and dispatch boats at the yards of the Todd Shipyards Corporation," held their first annual luncheon and reception at the Astor. On vVashington's birthday the Volunteer Firemen's Association marched through Brooklyn's snowbanked streets, with a delegation from Wilmington "led by Battalion Chief William H. Todd." And on April 26 the William H. Todd Corporation, now a fraternal organization, marked its sixth anniversary with a dinner at the Hotel Bossert, attended also by "the Ladies Auxiliary, of which Mrs. William H. Todd is president."

These pleasant neighborhood-style functions would continue for years to come, in Brooklyn and in Hoboken; but a change had already begun, as an inevitable consequence of the decision of Todd himself to expand from an essentially community-based organization to a large and necessarily more impersonal working part of American industry. It would be a working part which never-at least in its first 65 years-lost touch with its roots; but

59

as it tapped into other roots along thousands of miles of coastline, it could never again be so singly and personally identified with its place of origin.

This transition was of course gradual and never tied, in the minds of the people involved, to a specific moment in time. But so far as such things can be dated, it is probably safe to mark May I, 1921, as the date when the tide turned. On that date Todd's corporate offifeS moved from 15 Whitehall Street to the II th floor of the newly completed Cunard Building at 25 Broadway. While this did not overtly change anything at Erie Basin or Tietjen & Lang, it marked for the five-year-old corporation the physical breaking point with its parentage. 15 Whitehall was John N. Robins' office and stood for all Robins had done to transmute a scattering of New York iron works into a single Brooklyn plant. But henceforth Todd, the corporation, was out of the shadow of Robins. The era of Todd, the national enterprise, had begun.

Gulf and West Coast Repair Yards of the Mid-Thirties: left page, upper, Todd Mobile Dry Docks, Alabama; lower, Todd Seattle Dry Docks, Washington; right page, Todd Galveston Dry Docks, Texas.

61

And well he might. Almost as soon as the world was at peace, a flood of demand for oil fuel conversions, coupled with White or Todd burner installations, set in so strongly that it was sometimes difficult for the production force at the old Quintard works to keep pace. In October, 1920, the Keel reported that Todd burners had been installed in over 30 vessels during the preceding quarter. This figure would have included the new Tebo-built fruiters and tankers, but it also covered at least one or two vessels of most of the still-numerous Atlantic coastwise lines. The United Fruit Company was already embarked on a program which would see the entire Northern Division of its Great White Fleet fired by Todd burners as of the beginning of 1923.

A distinguished convert to the Todd system which set a trend in the private pleasure craft field was the big J.P. Morgan steam yacht Corsair, converted at Tebo in late 1923. Even more gratifying was the rapid rise of demand from foreign shipowners. By 1922 both Furness-Withy and Canadian Pacific had specified Todd equipment for several vessels, including the exGerman liner Empress of Australia, largest passenger ship on the Pacific. Probably the greatest and most legitimate source of corporate self-satisfaction was the selection by Harland & Wolff of the Todd device over competing European products for their 1923 conversion of the White Star Liner Homeric.

These successes in the foreign market certainly influenced Todd's decision in 1924 to establish on Fenchurch Street, London, a corporate subsidiary, Todd Oil Burners, Ltd. This or a successor would continue to promote and market burners and other specialty equipment in Europe for over forty years to come.

It may be mentioned in passing that the Fenchurch Street subsidiary was not the sum total of Todd's foreign ventures in the twenties. For several years, starting in 1923, a sales office was maintained under the management of J. Irvine Milne on Avenida Rodrigues Alves, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil.

In 1924, obviously for purposes of clearer product identification, the White subsidiary was redesignated the Todd Oil Burner & Engineering Corporation. However, neither its title nor its

72

separate shop on East 12th Street, Manhattan, was destined to last very long. The reason, as explained by Todd himself at the annual meeting of June 15, 1925, was that "the general depression in the shipping business still continues .... In order to reduce expenses, your officers have completed arrangements for amalg·amating the Todd Oil Burner & Engineering Corporation plant with the ship repair yard of the Tebo Yacht Basin Company."

While this did not exactly describe the form the retrenchment move would take, it did accurately forecast that, as of the following September 19, the oil burner branch would be merged with both the Tebo and Clinton yards under the corporate name of Todd Dry Dock, Engineering & Repair Corporation, and be physically transferred to the former plant. It would remain a part of this rather illog·ical grouping for the next seven years. Meanwhile, before the 1926 annual meeting, the parent corporation would have sold the former Quintard property which had experienced such a brief but productive revival under its ownership.

If a consolidation had to be made, however, the physical tie with Tebo was not entirely devoid of sense. Since its acquisition by Todd, the old yacht basin had tended to have the most explicit technological orientation of the corporate subsidiaries. As the yard which, under the vice-presidential management of .James Strachan Milne, had engined war emergency hulls, pioneered electric drive conversions, and, alone among Todd's eastern plants, assembled complete seagoing vessels, it afforded a reasonably congenial workplace for the makers of oil-burning and other equipment.

The "other equipment" included a lengthening catalog of devices, most of them invented or developed in-house, and by no means restricted to boiler-room use. Oil-burners themselves came in a variety of modifications, including the variable capacity burner and a "steam burner," as did oil-burning ranges, automatic boiler feedwater control mechanisms, and the "Todd Guardian," which automatically cut off oil supply to boilers low on water. Eleven types of Todd Twin-Pole Arc Welders,

73

United Slates, Colonel E. H. R. Green's "steamship-yacht," at Tebo, 1923.

based on a patent purchased from James Holafield of Mobile, were in production in 1925. One of the most flourishing product lines in that pre-electronic era was the oil-fed high endurance Todd Lamp which, althoug·h widely employed on shipboard, for buoys, and in marine signals, found its primary market ashore, on railroads and highways.

Even though conversion to oil-burning and diesel was sweeping the marine scene, with Todd Shipyards Corporation in the thick of the fray, some owners were not yet ready to cast their lot with oil. To afford them an alternative, William H. Todd assigned his engineers the demanding task of perfecting systems and equipment for burning pulverized coal under ships' boilers. At the annual meeting of June 5, 1928, he was able to report: "Your Company has, for the last two years, been developing a pulverized coal burning system, which is now completed and we think the best in the market." A year later he reported

74

"highly successful" tests by the Shipping Board and Navy, and in 1930 said, "Arrang·ements are being made for the production and sale of this system in Great Britain and other countries."

But the Depression, and petroleum's swift conquest of the shipping world, overtook these enthusiastic beginnings, and there is no indication that there was further consideration of pulverized coal in Todd circles after the death of its chief proponent. Perhaps, in the long retrospect from 1981, it would be just as well if there had been.

Two concomitant developments to the Corporation's oilburning· activities warrant passing mention, since they display, apart from garden-variety profit motivation, a degree of social responsibility rather surprising for the times. One was the establishment in May, 1923, of the Todd Oil Burning School at the White plant on East Twelfth Street. Here five-day courses in the "comparatively new science of oil burning" were offered tuition-free to "engineers, firemen, both stationary and marine, in fact anyone interested in oil burning." Demand was strong enough so that night courses had to be added, and certificates were issued in the first year to 334 out of approximately 400 who attended, the Keel announcing that "the school has come

to stay." To those who think of environmentalism and pollution pre

vention as post-Toney Canyon developments, it may be a surprise that at the start of the year 1923 a Todd publication recognized pollution of harbors and beaches as an unwelcome byproduct of the economy and shipboard cleanliness achieved by the shift to oil fuel. The White engineers, it reported, had been working for some time on the problem of oily water discharge, and had already perfected, placed on the market, and installed aboard ship the Todd Bilge and Ballast Filter Tank to cope with the problem. The next year, carrying the process a step further, the Tebo yard constructed for the Asiatic Petroleum Company an "Oil Separator Barge" to cope with pierside discharges. A Keel photograph showed it at work in New York Harbor alongside a berthed liner.

75

The Tebo yard's production of the separator barge is a reminder that, while no longer a builder of even minor commercial ocean tonnage, it still had the facilities and skills to construct well found, efficient small craft of various types, and continued to do so through the twenties and early thirties. Two of its handsomest products, both delivered in 1922, were the steam pilot boat iVIaryland, for the Cape Henry station, and the twin-screw diesel cruising yacht Cynthia for Commodore Merrill Mills of Detroit. Both were of Cox & Stevens design, and they were of equally patrician appearance, thoug·h the former had been initially intended as a steam trawler. Tebo's not inconsiderable output of harbor craft also included ferries and fireboats for the City of New York and two flights of oil-burning steam tugs, Nos. 30, 31, and 32 for the New York Central Railroad and Socony 8 and 9 for the Standard Transportation Company.

Never forgetful of its original mission as a haven of refuge and refit for yachts, the yard also continued to shelter and service these toys of a society part of which was still affluent enough to keep them. Mention has already been made of Corsair's conversion to oil burning. A more elaborate operation was performed in late 1921 and early 1922 on Henry Putnam's 168-foot three-masted schooner Alcyone, one of the largest yachts then extant, when she was given diesel-electric auxiliary power in place of her original triple-expansion steam plant.

An even larger guest (or more properly resident) of the Tebo yard for several years of the decade was the 256-foot, twofunneled yacht-steamship United States owned by Colonel E. H. R. Green, son of the eccentric New Eng-land millionairess Hetty Green. The United States was doubly linked to Todd. Built in 1909 at Manitowoc, Wisconsin, as a Great Lakes passenger steamer, she had been purchased by Green in 1915 and consigned to the Robins yard for lengthening and a palatial interior rebuilding. But, after the briefest of yachting careers, she had been laid up at Tebo, where she languished until the Colonel sold her back into commercial service, and she left Brooklyn in 1923 for the Lakes once more.

76

Mongolia of the American Line, whose third-cabin accommodation was renewed and enlarged at Tietjen &: Lang after the war (during which she had been credited with the first hit on an enemy submarine).

-Courtesy Steamship Historical Society of America

The three-way merger of the \'\Thite, Clinton, and Tebo plants in 1925 made more logical sense as between the last two than as to the first. From the immediate postwar period, the former Poillon yard was almost perfectly designed to complement the facilities and services of the former yacht basin. Tebo had shipways and could build vessels; Clinton could not. But Clinton had a large drydock and could handle certain classes of repair work for which Tebo was not equipped. When the latter was converting· the Eclipse and her sisters to turbo-electric drive, the large re-engined vessels had to be brought across Gowanus Bay to Clinton for drydocking. While only Tebo could build a tug from the kee 1 up, in 192 3 Clinton could and did build and engine the Radio for Van Sciver of Philadelphia on the bare hull of the unfinished Shipping Board tug Cyclone. If a fireboat were to be built, Tebo had to do it; but Clinton installed and successfully tested (to Honorary Fire Commissioner Todd's delight) new and improved turbines and pumps on the New York Fireboats Thomas Willett and james Duane in 1922. Either yard had the expertise to install machinery, and in rush times job could be shifted back and forth between South Brooklyn and Red Hook.

77

Thus the merger of September, 1925, so far as these two plants were concerned, simply made for even more economical and less expensive cooperative arrangements than those already in being.

For the Corporation's main repair yards, at Erie Basin, Ho· boken, and Harbor Island, the 25 Broadway era began with an abundance of work (some of it still residue of the postwar backlog), continued prosperous until mid-decade, then gradually tapered off as the impending general Depression was heralded by slackening activity in shipping.

All three plants were still under the direction of the men Todd had selected in 1916: George J. Robinson at Robins, with the title of vice-president (raised to president in 1924), George G. Raymond as president at Tietjen & Lang, and C. W. Wiley as chairman of the two Puget Sound yards, with H. W. Kent under him as president at Seattle. Robins, and Red Hook, were still very much the Corporation's "old family homestead," with close ties, municipal, charitable, recreational, and religious, between shipyard and community. Todd's personal, unostentatious benevolence was an irnportan.t fact of life in an area which, though self-reliant, was already drifting toward overcrowding and poverty.

His own neighborly involvement was supplemented by the social and charitable activities of the William H. Todd Cor· poration and its ladies' auxiliary, as well as by those of the Mutual Aid Societies which existed at most Todd plants. Annual plant picnics and field days were held, a favorite resort being· Grant City on Staten Island. Athletics flourished, centering on Todd Field in Red Hook, early established for interdepartmental, interplant, and community sports competition.

The company, and Todd personally, also entered actively into Brooklyn ceremonials and parades, especially where the Fire Department or Volunteer Firemen's organizations were involved, always led by the Todd Band. The latter unit, organized during the war, was in demand both on and off the yard premises, as for example at the unveiling of the "Fig-hting Dough-

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Celebrity Yachting Party: Late in the twenties, William H. Todd (in cap, right of center) welcomes transatlantic flyers 'Viley Post and Harold Gatty aboard his steam yacht Saelmo.

-Courtesy William H. Todd, II

purpose of giving greater range to the vision of those in command of the manoeuvres of battleship squadrons," she was fitted with a clearly recognizable flight deck and, in addition to a 100-foot-long "balloon well," a shop for repairing "planes." Uncannily forecasting what would be one of the Corporation's chief preoccupations 21 years later, the Keel description concluded: "The airplane carrier of the future, according to those who predict that this type of vessel will be foremost upon the seas, will be considerably faster than the battleship, making from 30 to 35 knots."

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What may well have been the same yard's most brilliant dis

play of drydocking virtuosity was the "Case of the Bottomless Tanker." In the winter of 1921-22 the Standard Oil Company's F. D. Asche, barely afloat despite temporary repairs, was towed in after an ordeal on a tropical reef which had left her bottom plating, where it had not been ripped away, "completely out of shape." Before she could be placed in No. I Graving Dock, divers had to make measurements of her mangled bottom from which new plans of the hull could be drawn, on the basis of which the blocks could be set "at points safe for the support of the tanker." Yet the entire docking process was completed "before nightfall of the day in which she arrived at the Basin."

Not to be outdone by Erie Basin's conversion job on the Momus a few months before, Tietjen & Lang placed one of her chief competitors, the New York-Galveston Mallory Liner San jacinto, back in service as a Todd-equipped oil-burner on July 19, 1922. In addition to new Scotch boilers, she was given a double bottom for oil bunkerage. Rather quaintly, since this was a conversion from coal to oil, in her ne·w furnace fronts "provision was made ... so that they can be converted to coal burning"! The aftermath of this job also gives Todd a small footnote in the travel and resort history of the period since, on one of San jacinto's first subsequent southbound trips, she lay to off the boom town of Miami while company president H. H. Raymond (brother of Tietjen & Lang president G. G. Raymond) went ashore by tender to test whether that method of landing passengers would be feasible until a channel was dredg·ed to Miami's docks.

A casualty and repair job which involved both Hoboken and Red Hook in 1923 was the fire which broke out on the Atlantic Fruit Steamer Sagua while under conversion to oil burning at the former port, resulting in her spectacular blazing drift downstream, and her reconditioning at Robins after she was corralled and the fire extinguished. Considerable gratification was felt at 25 Broadway that the two most effective fireboats in controlling the blaze were the Thomas Willett and james Duane, so recently re-eq nipped at the Clinton yard.

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While Hoboken and Red Hook handled many types of work interchangeably, one function which pertained almost exclusively to Tietjen & Lang, dating back to a period before the founding of Todd Shipyards Corporation, was maintenance and repair of the fleets of major passenger steamboats-some of them vessels of four-deck superstructure and lengths of 450 feetwhich then plied in daytime and overnight services out of the metropolis on Long Island Sound and the Hudson River. During the spring outfitting season of 1923, for example, the Hoboken yard performed needed annual overhaul, repair, and refit on the still well-remembered Commonwealth, Priscilla, Providence, and Plymouth of the Fall River Line, the Washington Irving, Hendrick Hudson, Robert Fulton, and Albany of the Hudson River Day Line, the Iron Steamboat Company's fleet of Coney Island steamers, and numerous others. As long as coastal, sound, and river passenger services continued, this tie between Tietjen & Lang and the steamboat remained strong, and in the end both vanished almost simultaneously from the American maritime scene.

Also during 1923 and continuing into 1924, the Hoboken yard was engaged in a major improvement program on the New York-Jacksonville fleet of Todd's old friend the Clyde Line. Besides tbe carriage of passengers, these vessels performed a function now long since taken over by truckers: transportation from the south of huge quantities of potatoes, tomatoes, citrus, watermelons, and other produce. Starting with the steamers Lenape and Mohawk and working through the whole fleet, Tietjen & Lang installed a newly perfected cargo ventilating system to provide constant circulation of fresh air throughout the cargo spaces where these perishables were carried, a system stated to ensure delivery "to New York and other eastern markets in as perfect condition as when picked and packed in Florida."

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I I

I I I l I * ' ~ I I I I I

I I I 1

Service Station for Steamboats: The big Hudson River Day Liner Alexarrder Hamilton in drydock at- Tietjen & Lang.

-Courtesy Franklin B. Roberts

he had relinquished the presidency of Clinton-which he had held since the revival of that plant-to ]. Herbert Todd. But a vacation, as it turned out, was not enoug·h, and on May 22, after returning to work for a few months, he stepped aside in favor of his vice president, George Dawe.

Robinson's retirement was widely regretted, not only by his subordinates and colleagues in the Todd organization but by a legion of shipping and shipyard men in this country and abroad, to whose minds he had been virtually synonymous with Todd and Erie Basin. To Todd himself it was a heavy personal loss, for the two had been fellow workmen long· before there was a William H. Todd Corporation, let alone a Todd Shipyards. Robinson was in fact eight years senior to Todd in continuous service at the Red Hook plant, having started as a Handren & Robins passer boy in New York in 1884, and returned after a few years' service at the Navy Yard, in 1887. He continued after retirement as a director of the Corporation.

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Besides its already mentioned function of making Todd Oil Burner installations on the west coast, Todd Dry Docks at Seattle performed during these years a long succession of heavy repair and reconstruction jobs, along with the standard fare of cleaning, painting and maintenance. As the only Todd facility on its side of the continent once Tacoma was phased out, it had to be more versatile, in fact, than the Port of New York plants which, like Tebo and Clinton, and to a lesser extent Tietjen & Lang, tended to develop specialties. Harbor Island, by contrast, had to receive and serve all that floated to its gates, lame, halt, or healthy.

While New York was busy with third-cabin conversions, Seattle was amending the ills of the Shipping Board's passengercargo fleets on the Pacific. When the Admiral Line's Wenatchee was plagued by abnormal breaking-in problems, especially to her fuel pumping· system, on her maiden voyage from Seattle to the Far East early in 1921, she was taken out of service for a Todd overhaul so exhaustive that she was not back on berth until October 15. Her fleetmates Keystone State and Silver State subsequently underwent the same treatment.

The Seattle yard's "big" drydock was also one of the few in the northwest capable of lifting the "535's"-the larger of the Shipping Board's standard combination liners. The Presidents Madison, lvicKinley, Jefferson and Gi·ant of this class had all been routinely docked by March, 1923, the lVIadison (which was to provide Todd with a major headache a decade later) being the first of her class to enter any private shipyard facility on the Sound.

Seattle also had its share of collision repairs, as extensive as any of those handled at Robins. One of the earliest was replacing the stem of the Shipping Board freighter West Hartland, virtually demolished April I, 1921, in collision with the Admiral Liner Governor, which sank in Puget Sound with the loss of ten lives.

More spectacular, though miraculously fortunate in human terms, was the damage Harbor Island was called on to remedy in 1922 for the crack Admiral Liner H. F. Alexander, C. W.

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Wiley's old Great Northern. The renowned speedster arrived at Todd's August 9, crumpled, for 56 feet of her forebody, as pug-nosed as the Charlot when she shipped the polar bear. But not from ice: the Alexander, on her routine shuttle from San Francisco to Seattle with 300 passengers and almost as many crew, had collided in fog with Cake Rock, off the coast south of Cape Flattery. Without loss of life, she limped to sheltered waters, transferred her passengers and entered drydock.

Now began Todd's share of the miracle. The required work, by conservative estimate, would normally have taken 45 to 50 days. But speed was the life of the H. F. Alexander, in a day when most travellers still preferred the water to the rail route between California and Washington. She had a pace to sustain, and Todd a reputation. She was out of the yard, as good as new, in 19 days!

There were some, entirely without allegiance to either Harbor Island or 25 Broadway, who said no other yard in the country could have beaten that time.

A conversion in many ways comparable to that of the Wright by Robins was performed at Harbor Island in 1923 on a 5,210-dwt. war-built freighter, previously in Shipping Board service out of Seattle. The Todd yard was award~d a contract to make the necessary alterations in the Dellwood for her new function as a cable-layer of the military cable and telegraph service to Alaska then maintained by the Army Signal Corps. The job included installation of five tanks to hold 2,000 miles of cable, a 20-foot forward extension of the vessel's 321-foot length to accommodate cable sheaves, conversion from well to flush deck, and superstructure alterations including living quarters for a crew of more than a hundred.

Her delivery to the Signal Corps was not Dellwood's last contact with Todd during the time-span of this chapter-or her last Harbor Island conversion. By I 932, completion of a radiotelephone link with Alaska had ended the need for her cable-laying services, and she reverted to the Shipping Board, which sold her to Seattle salmon packers as a cannery transport. The $100,000

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The pattern was set in 1921 when a contract was accepted to alter the fifteen-year-old 175x34-foot steamer Whatcom into a drive-through automobile and passenger carrier. The procedure consisted in removing the vessel's entire superstructure, cutting down the main deck forward, sponsoning it to a maximum beam of 48 feet, and erecting a new house of 11 Yz-foot vehicular clearance with passenger accommodation above. Though doubleended for loading, the vessel was single-ended for operation. To cope with the necessity of working alongside some piers, where the tides had a range of 15 feet, a ten-ton vehicle elevator was mounted athwartships forward. Thus transformed, she returned to service under the new name City of Bremerton.

The success of this operation led to Todd's giving similar but enlarged treatment to the fast, two-stacked Seattle (ex H. B. Kennedy), which joined City of Bremerton as a running mate in May, 1924. Simultaneously, another passenger boat, the Sioux of 1910, was being converted to what was described as the "oceangoing-'' ferry Olympic. She left Harbor Island June 14, 1924, to take up service on the often-turbulent crossing from Port Angeles, Washington, to Victoria, British Columbia.

Seattle's passenger conversions were not, ho-wever, limited to small steamboats. In 1928, it delivered the 430-foot Ward Liner Havana fully converted, after years of service as the hospital ship Comfort, into a luxury cruise ship for her owners' service between New York, Florida, and Cuba.

This was the year in which C. W. Wiley, heretofore chairman of the now inactive Todd Dry Dock & Construction Corporation at Tacoma, with general authority over all Todd west coast activities, took over the presidency of the Seattle yard, on the resignation of H. W. Kent. He would hold this office for the rest of his life. James A. Eves, president of Tacoma, whose energy and dedication had made him the symbol of Todd ship construction on the Pacific, remained prominent in marine affairs on the Coast and served as a director of Todd Seattle Dry Docks, Inc., until his death in June, 1936, just ten months after Wiley's.

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Although business depression was already a very apparent and progressive condition to shipyard people by 1928, William H. Todd was still resolutely building for the future. Having taken rneasures to secure his economic flanks by merging his burner branch with Clinton and Tebo, selling the Quintard site, and closing Tacoma, he calmly announced to his 1928 annual meeting that, in addition to its substantial and continuing outlays on the Gulf, their Corporation was about to add as a crowning facility at the Robins plant "a large graving drydock" which would take more than a year to build. Indeed, work on this mammoth project (really a drastic reworking and enlargement of the old Graving Dock No. I of 1866) had actually started a month earlier. In a ceremony at Erie Basin that May, Borough President James J. Byrne, with a shovel, and Todd, with a drill, had formally broken ground for the new structure, which was to be the most capacious drydock in the New York harbor area, with "a clear length of 731 feet, enabling it to handle most of the large liners that come to this port." Todd was at pains to point out that, 1ike the recent improvements at Mobile, Algiers, and Tebo, this project was "financed out of funds of your Corporation available for the purpose, and no borrowing or issue of securities had been necessary." In a time of uncertainty, he was taking no chances with the firm's solvency.

While work on the graving dock moved forward, Todd refitters undertook a job which peripherally involved the Corporation in one of the century's great exploring ventures. And not for the first time: three years earlier the Keel had pointed out in a feature story, "Voyages of Adventure Start from Tebo's," that the 23rd Street yard had lately prepared the steam trawlers Foam and Spray to seek the gold cargo of the sunken Ward Liner Merida, that it regularly laid up the glass-bottomed Hirondelle which the then Prince of Monaco used for pelagic exploration, and that it had outfitted William Beebe's Arcturus for his celebrated Sargasso Sea and Galapagos Islands expedition, then in progress.

Now, Tebo was overhauling and preparing the square-rigged steam sealer Samson, to serve as flagship for Admiral Richard E.

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Byrd's first expedition to Antarctica. Renamed City of New York, the old ship sailed from Brooklyn, August 25, 1928.

Work on "the larg·est privately owned modern drydock on the Atlantic Coast" continued for over a year more until, on December 7, 1929, when the Wall Street crash had already raised the curtain on depression, William H. Todd's massive vote of confidence in the future was officially cast and recorded. As the crowd attending the opening ceremonies watched, the new dock was flooded and its first occupant, the Munson Liner Southern Cross, floated over the blocks. Big as she was, pictures show her seemingly shrunken by the size of the basin in which she stood. It was not until the following July 12 that the new dock's capacity was fully utilized, and Todd's planning vindicated, when Graving· Dock No. I was entered (and filled) by the George Washington, second-largest American-flag ship, and heretofore unable to find private drydock service in New York.

Despite his confidence in the Corporation's soundness and future progress, Todd was realistically aware of the worsening economic climate and the difficulties ahead. As early as the 1925 annual meeting, when he announced a one-third cut in the quarterly dividend, from $1.50 to $1.00 per share, he said, "The general depression in the shipping business still continues ... and has resulted in a falling off of the earnings of your company. How long this condition may continue is problematical." In both the next two years' reports he alluded soberly to "the uncertainties sti11 obtaining in the shipping business."

Although the new graving dock and the coal pulverizer enabled him to report in a somewhat more optimistic vein at the 1928, I929, and I930 meetings, the monthly financial status resumes g·iven in the board minutes tell the real story, indicating that between early 1927 and late I 929 the Corporation's current assets were cut almost in half: from $7.3 million to just over $4 million. After a slight rebound in early I 930, the decline set in again. By August, I93I, the officers were authorized to borrow up to $800,000 and, by September, up to $I,OOO,OOO more. At the end of I93I, the balance, net of borrowings, fell to $I Y2 million.

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Admiral Richard E. Byrd's City of New York in Antarctic ice afer fitting out at Tebo in 1928.

-Author's collection

In the face of these losses, the dividend could not survive intact, even as reduced in 1925. On November 27, 1931, the quarterly dollar was halved. The same amount was voted at the meeting of February 25, 1932; but then Todd himself was not present.

In his Annual Report of May 21, 1931 (which incidentally was the first he had so captioned, all preceding reports having been called simply "Balance Sheet"), he had been as nearly pessimistic as his nature ever allowed him to be, concluding with the sentence, "As might be expected wi<h the current depression, the volume of work on hand is below normal, but your Company is in excellent financial and physical condition to benefit fully from the country's business revival."

In succeeding months his health failed steadily, and the last meeting he was able to attend was that of .January 28, 1932, when it was voted to repay $200,000 on the recent Brooklyn Trust Co. note, reducing the loan to $500,000, an action which must have pleased him. But he attended no more meetings, and

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went to his death on May 15, 1932, perhaps unaware that his officers were already considering discontinuance of the Clinton yard, or that in another ten days the quarterly dividend would fall to 25 cents.

On May twentieth, at a special board meeting, resolutions of tribute and sorrow were adopted. The William H. Todd Cor· poration also adopted its own, which were read July 21 at a memorial service held in Brooklyn's Kismet Temple. The officiating clergyman was Dr. Charles Roeder, and the gathering was chaired by United States Senator from New York William M. Calder. Recalling that he had first met Todd "nearly forty years ago," the Senator said,

There was a side of William Henry Todd's life not gen· erally known by those unacquainted with his business career and that was the real comradeship between him and the men in his employ. They were a great happy family, all deeply interested in their work and greatly concerned for each other's welfare. No one will ever know of the times without number when his helping hand saved his old employees or their families from dire distress.

His charity was boundless and without regard to race, color, or creed. He gave without stint and did not boast about it.

Others who spoke included Supreme Court Judge John MacCrate, Chairman T. V. O'Connor of the U.S. Shipping Board, representatives of the National Council of American Shipbuilders and the American Steamship Owners Association, and his dear personal friend of many years, former Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York. In his valedictory tribute, AI Smith said:

Real friendship is not readily available. William Henry Todd was never content with an expression of sympathy to a friend in his hour of distress. His invariable question was: "What do you want me to do?" and he meant that and he did it.

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While tribute was also paid to Todd's financial acumen, his industrial statesmanship, and his patriotic stance on maritime issues, the underlying consensus was that it was through complete personal integrity, utterly fair dealing with his colleagues and subordinates, a keen perception of the fruitful directions for corporate effort, and a jealous regard for corporate solvency that he had brought the organization he had created through the first onslaught of depression to the point where he could relinquish it to others. Though he died at just about the lowest point in its economic fortunes to date, he left it solvent in spite of reluctantly incurred debt, in the hands of a group of officers who were not only colleagues but chosen friends and confidants, and with a three-coast establishment which had been carefully planned and frugally pruned. His successors knew and shared the general objectives he had in view. Now it was a matter of waiting and holding on until the time was ripe.

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J. Herbert Todd, son of the Corporation's founder and an officer or director until 1916.

tables for a William H. Todd. His blend of self-confidence, industrial democracy, uninstitutional benevolence, and what one of his eulogists described as perennial boyishness would not even be comprehensible to the corporate world of a very few years later. That harder world would call for more singleminded concentration on the achievement of defined competitive goals, for resignation to the purported inevitability of labor-management conflict, and for cool, clearsighted perception of the means by which survival and further expansion must be achieved.

Reilly seems to have recognized from the first that it was under the conditions and within the parameters imposed by such a world that he must plan and execute any strategy to ensure

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the Corporation's survival and renewed growth along the lines he and Todd had envisioned. To do so might well require a somewhat higher degree of personal detachment than had been customary heretofore from the daily domestic affairs of any single part of what was now a large Inultiregional organization. Though this detachment never approached that of the recluse tycoons of film and fiction, it is fairly clear that his relations with his corporate family were less casual and intimate than Todd's. It may be safe to say that the differences between the two men in this respect are epitomized in the nickname, half cynical, half affectionate, by which Reilly was known (and still is) to those who worked with and under him: "The Boss."

Elected with Reilly to serve as chairman of the executive committee was the founder's son, ]. Herbert Todd, who then headed the Todd Dry Dock, Eng·ineering & Repair plant at 23rd Street, Brooklyn. Also named to the committee, and elected executive vice president in charge of operations, was George Dawe, already president of Robins. George Raymond, president of Tietjen & Lang· and a Todd vice president, completed the central group.

There was no question what subject had first claim on the new administration's attention. The Depression was biting ever more deeply into the physical and economic wellbeing of the Corporation, financially sound though it still might be. The same annual report which announced Todd's death and the new officer hierarchy divulged that since the previous year net profit had dropped to $695,415, i.e. ,by exactly one-fourth. It also noted that the quarterly dividend had been pared to twenty-five cents (the lowest level that it would reach, incidentally, for forty years).

The slide continued. In the 1933 report, the first over his signature, Reilly cited an even steeper percentage drop, to a net profit of $402,693, noting in apparent understatement that "volume of business was below that of the previous fiscal year," and implying that but for diligent economies including the merger of Clinton and Tebo (until then separate plants of the Todd Dry Dock, Eng·ineering· & Repair Corporation) there might

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have been no profit at all. Among· other economies was a lO'fo salary reduction voted March 29, 1933.

The acuteness of the economic squeeze for rank-and-file workers and the continued sense of "family" among those employed in Todd's oldest plants was demonstrated at this crisis by the voluntary agreement of the Corporation's New York harbor employees to contribute 2% of their earnings for the first quarter of the year to a relief fund administered by their own committee for the benefit of needy former and present employees of the New York area yards.

By mid-1933 the Roosevelt Administration had its New Deal under way, with the National Recovery Act and other measures to counter depression and unemployment which, while controversial at the time (and, in the case of NRA, ultimately ruled unconstitutional) , certainly assisted the Reilly team's own efforts to steady the business at something better than a bare subsistence level. Despite the best efforts of all concerned, however, depression would remain a fact of shipyard life to the end of the decade.

While retrenchment and economy were indispensable survival measures and would be so vigorously pursued as to work major changes in the geography of Todd during the early Reilly years, the true sine qua non of depression-fighting was of course the successful cultivation of business. In the thirties, this was a desperate and often forlorn effort. Owners and husbands of ships were doling out repair work with an eye-dropper, and Todd's were by no means the only yards with acute eye trouble. Both Gulf yards had heavy competition, notably from Alabama Dry Dock & Shipbuilding at Mobile and from Johnson Iron Works, Dry Dock & Shipbuilding at New Orleans. In New York there was even more of a competitive donnybrook, with United Dry Docks (Staten Island, Morse, Fletcher) and others scrimmaging with Todd for every offering. As the decade advanced, several of these opponents were collected under the Bethlehem Steel banner; but this if anything heightened the competition, even though it produced a more nearly bilateral contest.

It was still an age which barred few holds in business competition, even when times were normal. When times were not

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normal, the battle for repmr work could be to the deatheconomically, at least. The gladiators were likely to be debonair young men known as solicitors, working out of the office of the vice president in charge of sales-in Todd's case at this period, William A. Maloney. Their duties ranged from attending repair bid sessions on the Corporation's behalf to cultivating agents, masters, and chief engineers who might have repair orders in their pockets, to keeping watch on incoming ship traffic for vessels in possible need of hospitalization, to maintaining close relations with the ship news reporters who then congregated at the old Battery Barge Office-to running personal errands for the headquarters "brass."

It was an accepted premise of doing business that "You have to spend a dollar to make two." In whatever light Justice Department and Internal Revenue monitors of a later and presumably more upright era might view such practices, they were considered a valid and prudent business investment at a time when it could be suicide to show the potential customer scanter courtesies than your competitor. Such courtesies might range from picking up the odd taxi fare to maintaining at company headquarters (of course, after the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment) a lounge where masters and engineers, who as often as not make up their owners' minds where their vessels shall be repaired, might "take their ease in their inn."

On a loftier corporate plane, major Todd customers, actual or potential, were entertained, like those of virtually all other national business organizations, in "the style to which they were (presumably) accustomed." While Todd himself was alive, such entertainment was likely to take the form of combined sea voyages and golf outings up the Connecticut shore aboard his yacht Saelmo-named for the first two letters of each name of his mother, Sarah Elizabeth Moody. At the start of the Reilly era, two greatly elaborated sequels to these cruises were scheduled in connection with the Rainbow-Endeavour series of America's Cup Races in September, 1934, when the coastal passenger ships Acadia and Saint john were chartered from Eastern Steamship Lines, filled with Todd customers and friends, and sent on twonight cruises from New York to Newport.

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-0 ....

The New Regime-Directors, Officers, and Senior Staff of Todd Shipyards Corporation at an unidentified function early in the Reilly presidency: Board of Directors at head table, left to right, David H. Lanman, Sanford S. Cox, J. Herbert Todd, John D. Reilly, George Dawe, George J. Robinson, George G. Raymond, Marshall J. Dodge; left to right, far side of table: James G. Broderick, Russell W. Bowes, Emile P. Enfer, Frank H. Reimers, J. L. Lawder, Henry Frielinghaus, Robert D. McGregor, Ernest H. Dendel; left to right, near side of table: John Gardner, William A. Maloney, ·william H. Raab, Joseph A. Seitz, James McDonald, John J. Dement, William J. Sammon, J. William Jamin, Joseph Haag, Jr., Francis J. Gilbride.

But for most of the Reilly years the Corporation took the more conventional course of owning and staffing a private country club, Amackassin Lodge at Blairstown, New Jersey, for the use of associates, clients, and its own executives. This resort was rnaintainecl until October, 1952, when a combination of postwar recession and changing styles in busintss cultivation dictated its disposal, without replacement.

Though contraction and conso1idation was to be the Todd order of the day for the seven opening years of Reilly's presidency, his first major reorganizational move (apart from the nominal merger of Clinton and Tebo) was one of expansion. This was the purchase for $611,000, on August 23, 1934, of a third Gulf Coast plant, the Galveston Dry Dock & Construction Company. Negotiations to this end, contemplating this price, had been authorized by his directors two months earlier. It seems probable, however, that this was an acquisition he and Todd had discussed and projected during the latter's lifetime, to complete the "Todd presence" on that major stretch of the nation's coastline.

What is more certain is that a factor in his decision was the interest shown by Robert L. Hague, New York marine manager for the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. Hague, a longstanding friend and major customer of Todd Shipyards, was also a leader in New York shipping circ1es and such an active proponent of American-flag shipping that his name has been perpetuated in the American Legion's unique Merchant Marine Post at that port. Galveston was, in those pre-OPEC days, probably the leading American (and perhaps world) tanker terminus. A growing volume of heavy ship repair was therefore to be anticipated there, and Hague was understandably interested in having Todd repair facilities available at both ends of his fleet's busy coastal run.

Even thoug·h the Galveston yard's facilities on Pelican Island (part of the bar which lies off much of that part of the Texas

coast) were in poor condition and wou1d require extensive, and

!05

expensive, renovation, the interest of such a customer as Hague was persuasive enough to warrant the necessary outlay, even in a period of austerity.

Incorporated as Todd Galveston Dry Docks, Inc., the yard opened for business September I, 1934, with improvements still to be made. One of the first of these was,_in a sense, provided by William H. Todd through his acquisition three years earlier of the Jahncke yard's equipment, and his having held one of its two drydocks in reserve for future use. This dock Reilly promptly ordered transferred from Algiers to Galveston. Major improvement work was continued as funds permitted and, as it neared completion in the fall of 1939, a second drydock was towed to the Texas yard from New York.

The man who took delivery of the first drydock and put it to work was the same who, as vice president in charge of the Algiers plant, had supervised its acquisition from Jahncke, and who had later appraised the Galveston yard for Reilly and recommended its purchase. Fred D. Hesley had joined Todd from the Shipping· Board in 1923, taking over the New Orleans plant in 1927. Besides being in charg·e of Todd Galveston from the start and becoming its president in 1937, he was in effect responsible for all Gulf operations from the summer of 1935 until the end of independent Todd control at Mobile and New Orleans, commuting between the three ports.

The form of name given the new Galveston subsidiary reflected a decision on the part of the parent corporation to introduce greater uniformity of nomenclature into its nationwide establishment. At approximate six-week intervals after its adoption for Galveston, the Mobile plant was redesignated Todd Mobile Dry Docks, Inc., and the Algiers plant, Todd New Orleans Dry Docks, Inc. Between the dates of these two changes, Todd Dry Docks, Inc., was brought into conformity by reincorporation as Todd Seattle Dry Docks, Inc. For an unspecified reason, probably related to the somewhat intricate corporate relationships between the original New York area plants, this formula was not applied to them for nearly a decade longer.

Though the Galveston acquisition appears to have justified itself from the start, there was no avoiding the fact that the

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The latter was already in negotiation with Alabama Dry Dock & Shipbuilding, seeking some comparable way out of the mutually damaging scramble for the shrinking business available at Mobile. The decision to seek a truce had not been taken easily. But it had become imperative that the Corporation salvage what could be salvaged of the resources which, in more prosperous times, it had poured into making Todd Mobile a first-class repair facility

The solution in this case, though different in form from that reached at New Orleans, proved equally beneficial to Todd and averted potential collapse of the Alabama port's ship-repair capacity, only a few years before it would be desperately needed in the national interest. After extended negotiation, on December 10, 1936, Todd Mobile Dry Docks passed from the Corporation's operational control wi~h the execution of a 912-year lease to Alabama Dry Dock, effective January I, 1937, at a rental geared to the level of profits from repair operations.

Reorganizing and cutting back the New York area establishment was a decidedly more intricate task than resolving the Gulf problems. The interlocking complex of corporations and plants which was a legacy of the war, and in which the only significant change prior to Todd's death had been the formation of Todd Dry Dock Engineering & Repair with the elimination of one plant site, was now obviously superfluous to the Corporation's requirements, and an unwarranted extravagance. Under existing business conditions it had become clear that the Corporation's regional needs could be amply served by the Erie Basin and Hoboken plants, with appropriate separate facilities for the oil-burner unit. But the necessary preliminaries-rationalization of the flow of authority, redeployment of equipment, revision of production sequences, and elimination of overlaps and redundancies-were so involved that it would be a half-decade after Todd's death before any of the evacuated real estate could be leased or sold.

108

Clinton was both the first and the last to go. The 1932 decision to merge it into the Tebo plant started a process of transferring its equipment across to 23rd Street; but it seems to have been two years before it was entirely vacated and closed, except as a place to tie up idle vessels. Meanwhile a similar process of dismantlement had already begun at Tebo, it being reported to the Todd directors in May, 1933, that operating expenses were to be cut by transferring part of that yard's drydocking equipment to Tietjen & Lang and "diverting" its principal operations to the two senior yards.

Just a year later the Todd Dry Dock, Engineering & Repair Corporation (now consisting solely of Tebo, since the oil burner operation had been broken out and reconstituted a separate corporation in July, 1932) was formally merged into the Robins Dry Dock & Repair Company, along with the inactive Erie Basin Towing & Hoisting Company. The 23rd Street plant was thus left as the sole vestige of the Corporation's wartime expansion, and a not very active vestige, at that. It still served as housekeeper for Todd Combustion Equipment, Inc. (as the burner subsidiary was now known) and for the Corporation's Central Purchase Office, until that unit was transferred to 25 Broadway in April, 1935. It continued to service and even to build small vessels, delivering the Texaco tug All American in May of the latter year. But, as an operating unit, it was already on borrowed time, which ran out on October I, 1937, when its premises were leased for ten years to the Sullivan Dry Dock & Repair Corporation.

Clinton lingered on for years as a Todd property, as empty and abandoned (though not as neglected) as it had been before 1918. Finally, on December 12, 1939, it was sold at a loss, to Ira S. Bushey & Sons, and Todd in New York was once more a twoyard firm.

In addition it had, of course, its burner and specialty equipment plant which, as Todd Combustion Equipment, Inc., or later as a division, would contribute to corporate income and reputation for another thirty years. Ousted after more than a decade from the quarters it had occupied at the 23rd Street

109

plant, it moved early in 1937 back to Manhattan, where its address became 601 West 26th Street. Here it perfected at this period an improved Variable Capacity burner and a Rotary Fuel Oil Burner "with ability to burn any of the presentday cmnmercial fuel oils under fully automatic control."

Use of Todd burners was still strong both here and abroad. In 1939 the new trio of Panama Liners came out equipped with them as part of their "full automatic engine control," and they were specified by the Maritime Commission for six of its first ten C-2 freighters, including Challenge and Red]acket, launched May 20, 1939, to inaug·urate the new class. Overseas it was reported that as of May 31, 1939, Todd Oil Burners, Ltd., m London, had delivered over 5,000 burners to foreign vessels.

Not to be outdone by its subsidiaries in this decade of change, Todd corporate headquarters now decided to move itself. After fifteen years in the Cunard Building, it shifted in early 1936 to that of another g·ood friend and customer, United States Lines. Geographically, it was not much of a move-just the length of Bowling Green Park. But it gave Todd Shipyards Corporation a new 1nailing address which it would use for over a third of a century: One Broadway.

Neither Todd nor any other yard g·ot a chance, in the end, at the largest (and g·hastliest) potential repair job of depression days, the Mmro Castle, gutted by fire off the New Jersey coast in September, 1934. But that disaster did convey, besides its obvious lessons in safety, discipline, and responsibility, how desperate was the shipyard industry's hunger for work of any kind at that deepest dip of the country's economic fortunes. At the first report that the ship was afire a Todd solicitor was dispatched to Asbury Park, New Jersey, to learn what he could of the extent of the damage and what plans, if any, existed for repairing it. The n1an who was sent on this somewhat macabre prospecting mission was Harold F. Higgins, ·who would go on to serve the Corporation as a valued and popular sales representative for a full half-century before retiring in 1971.

Having ascertained that the burned-out hulk was under tow to her Wall Street pier, Higgins returned to New York andreported his findings, only to be ordered back almost at once to

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Tebo-built fruit steamer Ormes (later Taku) on trials, 1920.

In 1921 Todd began planning one more war memorial, in his home town of Wilmington, though it was not to be completed and dedicated until November I I, 1925. Standing at the end of the Washington Street bridge over the Brandywine, it consists of a winged victory executed by Henry Augustus Lukeman, sculptor of the titanic Confederate memorial on Georgia's Stone Mountain. With a characteristic blending of patriotic and family sentiment, the former Pusey & Jones rivet heater dedicated this monument, still known as the Todd Memorial, to Delaware's war veterans, living and dead, in memory of his Wilmington parents.

Just as Todd's oldest and largest repair yard was tooling for the return of "business as usual," which under the circurnstances would involve much pennanent and extensive ship reconstrucM tion in contrast to the temporary patching· which had too often had to suffice during the war, it lost the services of its leading expert in such work. Anthony J. McGarvey, general superintendent of the Robins Dry Dock & Repair Company, and one of Todd's oldest and closest friends, retired in March, 1919, be-

47

Lord Dufferin under repair at Robins, after being cut in two by Aquitania.

When last seen in these pages, the Tebo yard was winding down the emergency construction program which William H. Todd had reluctantly but loyally undertaken, to answer the Navy's call for minesweepers. Of the ten originally contracted for, only nine were put in hand before the unexpected Armistice eliminated the need for them. The ninth in the series, Gannet, was launched March 19, 1919.

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United States, Colonel E. H. R. Green's "steamship-yacht," at Tebo, 1923.

based on a patent purchased from James Holafield of Mobile, were in production in 1925. One of the most flourishing product lines in that pre-electronic era was the oil-fed high endurance Todd Lamp which, although widely employed on shipboard, for buoys, and in marine signals, found its primary market ashore, on railroads and highways.

Even though conversion to oil-burning and diesel was sweeping the marine scene, with Todd Shipyards Corporation in the thick of the fray, some owners were not yet ready to cast their lot with oil. To afford them an alternative, William H. Todd assigned his engineers the demanding task of perfecting systems and equipment for burning· pulverized coal under ships' boilers. At the annual meeting of June 5, 1928, he was able to report: "Your Company has, for the last two years, been developing a pulverized coal burning· system, which is now completed and we think the best in the market." A year later he reported

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Massed Bands of Todd's Robins, Tietjen & Lang, and Tebo plants during the first world war.

boy" statue in Red Hook Park on Flag Day, 1921, and at the dedication of the Prospect Park war memorial a few days later.

On August 4, 1922, the Todd Band earned a small niche in telecommunications history, when it broadcast over recently established Radio Station WJZ, Newark, and was reported to have been heard "as far distant as Montpelier, Vermont." It continued to earn applause and to foster Todd public relations until it fell victim to hard times in the fall of 1931.

From the summer of 1921 through that of 1922 both Robir{s and Tietjen & Lang· were involved in an extensive program of adding third-class accommodation to American passenger vessels being readied for services to England and the Continent. Erie Basin worked on a series of war-built medium liners originally named for states but rechristened, while the program was

79

EVERY KIND OF SHIPWORK

A History of Todd Shipyards Corporation

1916- 1981

by

C. BRADFORD MITCHELL

\Vith the Advice and Research Collaboration

of EDWIN K. LINEf'O

Maps, Charts, and Diagrams by FRANK CRA~l

New York 1981

This emphasis, at the very moment of the Corporation's birth, is completely in line with William H. Todd's lifelong philosophy, which he would bequeath to his successors for at least a quarter-century after his death: that repair work is the only dependable bread and butter for an American shipyard. Testifying under oath three years later, he put it succinctly: "Todd Shipyards Corporation, when organized, was essentially intended, through its subsidiaries, to be a ship repair company" [original italics]. Later in the same testimony he said, "It was realized by deponent that there was no real money to be made in ship construction, especially upon the West Coast," and "Neither deponent nor any of the directors of Todd Shipyards Corporation ever intended to embark upon the ship construction business."

Why then, it may well be asked, did he purchase the Seattle company in the fir.st place? No categoric first-hand answer is available; though one has to recognize the possibility that the purchase was a condition of Bertran, Griscom's necessary financial support in the master transaction. A less cynical alternative answer could be that Todd, never a man to undervalue the possible, really believed in 1916 that he could make a success where all but Moran had failed, and could in the process add luster to his own creation by associating it with the Moran legend. Finally, and perhaps most plausibly, it would have been entirely consistent with Todd's peculiar blend of realism and vision to recognize. that what mattered was to establish a foothold-any foothold-on Puget Sound, even though he might (as he actually did) relinquish the exact property which gave him that foothold in less than two years.

If this was indeed his reasoning, it has been amply vindicated by the role Todd Shipyards and their people have filled in northwestern maritime affairs for six and a half decades.

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Technically, Todd Shipyards Corporation was born into a nation at peace and destined to be at peace for almost ten months more, But actually the world of ships and the sea, to which shipyards belong, had been at war for over a year, The Lusitania had lain that long on the bottom off Ireland's Old Head of Kinsale. The cripples were already stumbling toward American yards from sea, under their own steam or under tow. The war could be said to have begun for Erie Basin when the British sought to buy it.

To cope with the growing volume of work and the additional flood already looming as the nation slipped toward military involvement, it was clear that Todd's newly consolidated facilities in New York would have to be expanded at once. Before the end of its first summer, the Corporation had purchased the Tebo Yacht Basin, at the foot of 23rd Street, Brooklyn, just across Gowanus Bay from Red Hook, and before the year's end had enlarged it by adding an adjoining tract to the south. Long established as a snug harbor for lay-up and repair of the yachts of the wealthy, Tebo, with its two small drydocks, was seen at this time as an overflow repair facility which, in addition to its traditional functions, could relieve some of the pressure on Todd's major plants. As it turned out, this plan was to be drastically altered to meet government requirements, once the nation was officially at war.

What appears to have been Todd's first direct war order was also its introduction to a new activity which would figure prominently throughout its first half century: the manufacture in volume, outside its shipyard shops, of engineering· components and equipment. In the opening· weeks of 1917 the Canadian Naval Service approached Todd to supply thirty compound steam engines and boilers for a fleet of small vessels already under construction north of the border. The resultant contract, approved by Todd's directors on February 27, could not be fitted into the busy schedules of the Corporation's existing New York plants. It was necessary to expand again.

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The new acquiSltwn (leased at first, then purchased two years later) was the Quintard Iron Works, one of the last and most famous of Manhattan's foundry and machine shops, at 12th Street on the East River. Like Delamater, it had turned out engines for Civil War gunboats, and had crossed Todd's wake at least once before when, in 1888, it designed and built those for the USS Maine. It was lying virtually idle when reactivated under the Todd lease April 1, 1917, but within three months it had shipped the first four Canadian engines, and before year-end the entire order had been completed. By then, new work was already laid out for it within the war-reoriented Todd complex.

This new work \vas the manufacture of triple-expansion machinery, with propellers, shafting, and all heavy metal work, for ten 188-foot minesweepers now on order at the Tebo yard. As mentioned above, the declaration of war had sharply altered plans to use Tebo as a supplementary repair plant while continuing it., traditional function of yacht storage and maintenance. In the words of Todd's 1919 deposition, "About May, 1917, at the urgent request of the Navy Department, the whole idea of the plant was changed and the property was improved, developed and equipped for construction work."

After extensive site clearance, rearrangement, and construction of buildings, docks and shipways, the first minesweeper, the USS Lapwing, was launched March 16, 1918.

(Despite the disenchantment with which he looked back on this crash construction program in 1919, Todd never stinted his enthusiasm or support while it was officially reg·arded as an essential component of the nation's war effort. Its progTess was fully reported in the new house organ The Keel, established in August, 1918, and morale was kept high by involving the yard workers and their families in all ceremonial occasions. For example, at the launching of the sixth vessel, the Auk, September 28, 1918, Todd and a Supreme Court .Justice sawed through one of the holding ways, while the teen-age daughter of Tebo's boss carpenter waited to christen the ship, the newly-organized Tebo Band played, and an army plane circled above dropping Liberty Loan leaflets.)

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I I I I I J ! I ! ! ' l l ; !

Almost simultaneously with the leasing of Quintard, the expanding· Todd "family" added another Manhattan-based subsidiary which, after the war, would evolve into its most impor~ tant sideline and a potent means for making the Todd name internationally known, both afloat and ashore. This newcomer was the White Fuel Oil Engineering Corporation, then of 601 Washington Street but destined to move into and absorb the Quintarcl Plant, once Todd's wartime engine-building commitments were discharged.

White's specialty was the manufacture, sale, and installation, under patent, of automatic bnrners for fuel oiL In 1917, coal still fired the overwhelming majority of the world's power plants, but a quiet transition was already underway in ships' boiler rooms, and Todd, cannily anticipating its postwar acceleration, purchased both the company and its patents. Under these in the next half-century his firm would equip whole fleets of ships and innumerable shore-based steam generators with Todd Oil Burners.

One other acquisition remained to complete the Todd wartime establishment in the New York area. At the foot of Clinton Street in Red Hook, near the Robins Plant but facing directly on Gowanus Bay just about opposite the Tebo Yacht Basin, was what was known as the "old Poillon Yard," abandoned since 190 l and in a state of considerable decay. Responding to Shipping Board pressure for increased drydock capacity in the port, and to ease its own overcrowding (at this stage of the war, Todd wrote, all subsidiary plants were working "at about 200% of what would ordinarily be considered their capacity") , the Corporation's directors voted February 13, 1918, to purchase this yard from the Poillon executors. Demolition, dredging, and construction were promptly undertaken (the latter including an 8,800-ton floating drydock) ; but the war had ended before this rehabilitation could be completed. The restored yard was incorporated as Clinton Dry Docks in March, 1919, and the first ship to occupy the new dock, the freighter Buckhorn, lifted in mid-June.

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I ,.

These satellite plants, limited and specialized though most of them were, contributed significantly to easing the burden on the major yards when war pressures were heaviest. By the fall of 1918, Tebo, besides its construction program, was using its piers for the engining, fitting-out, and camouflage-painting of a score of Shipping Board freig·hters built elsewhere. Clinton, even though unfinished, could be used, once the dredges completed their work, for storage space and floating repairs. Quintard furnished engines not only to Tebo but to the Navy for vessels under construction at Baltimore and to another Maryland yard for wooden tugs it was building for Todd. Perhaps the best instance of this coordinated Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance system came just at the war's end when the small tanker Manuel Rionda, ordered by Sinclair Navigation, was constructed at Tebo, engined by Quintard, and fitted with oil burners by White Fuel Oil Engineering.

The heaviest burden of war work fell, of course, on the Corporation's three oldest and largest components, Robins, Tietjen & Lang·, and Seattle Construction, plus of course the latter's major offshoot at Tacoma, Washington. The fact that the great bulk of repair surgery was performed by the eastern yards, the rna jor construction entirely by the western, gave the latter the lion's share of publicity and glamor. Even in peacetime, repair work has little claim on press or public interest; in wartime, when it has largely to be performed behind a veil of censorship, it is likely to gu unnoticed except by those actually engaged in it, or officially cognizant of its magnitude.

Its magnitude was enormous, and constantly growing. By early 1917 a second layer of miscellaneous war casualties had been superimposed on the standard base of routine repair and overhaul. To this, the President's March 12 Executive Order authorizing armament for United States merchant ships added a third layer, almost immediately topped, as American entry into

34

the war became a certainty, by a layer of major conversions. As Todd himself described it, the New York harbor yards "converted ships into transports, minelayers, hospital ships, etc. They installed a large majority of the gun mounts and other war devices upon merchant vessels and ... also kept the ships running during the whole course of the war by general and emergency repairs."

One enormous special service rendered by both the Red Hook and Hoboken yards was thus described by the Corporation's founder: "Todd Shipyards Corporation and its subsidiaries repaired and refitted a large majority of the damaged German and Austrian vessels interned at the Port of New York, doing approximately 70% of all such work and at least 80% of all done outside the Navy Yard." Among the score or more of major transatlantic liners thus made available for transport and other services were the great Leviathan (ex-Vaterland), George Washington, Mt. Vernon (ex-Kronprinzessin Cecilie), Agamemnon (ex-Kaiser Wilhelm II), President Lincoln, President Grant, and Covington (ex-Cincinnati). The restoration of these seven ships to operable condition, in itself, added approximately 165,000 gross tons to available allied sealift.

All these classes of work, with a steadily rising volume of war damage repair, continued to preoccupy Todd's major and minor New York area facilities up to and beyond the war's abrupt termination.

Huge and vital as this eastern activity was, to the public eye Todd's most conspicuous war service, as already suggested, was rendered on Puget Sound. There, for all to see, months before this country's entry into the war, the newly acquired Seattle Construction and Dry Dock Company was building or preparing to build over a dozen ships, many of them directly or indirectly connected with what was going on in Europe and on the high seas. These included the submarines N-1, N-2, and N-3, the United States Destroyer Gwin, and a number of dry-cargo vessels, most of them large for their day. Over two-thirds of the latter were of the 7 ,500-dwt. design which was to be the proto-

35

:j

n

II .:I t rj:

II' •. 1 j:j ~ I •• _.li ! ' ;.i:

i·.·l' ;I '

Before this could be done, it was necessary to establish proprietorship of Quintard, on which until now Todd had only held a lease. That disability was removed July 2, 1919, when, in consideration of $250,000, the plant ownership passed to Todd Shipyards. Corporation. Four months thereafter, the latter's board voted the Quintard Iron Works out of existence by authorizing its merg·er into White Fuel. By the spring of 1920 the oil-burner unit, which was to be the most migratory segment of the Todd complex, had completed the first of at least eig·ht address changes it would undergo in the next half-century (not counting those of foreign affiliates).

The man who supervised ·white's move from Washington Street to the East River was already internationally esteemed as an authority on the relatively novel technology of oil-burning. Born in the English industrial center of South Shields, James McDonald had taken advanced engineering studies, served a six-year apprenticeship, and gone to sea in British enginerooms, where, by the age of 25, he rose to chief with a First Class Board of Trade Certificate. After returning to shore employment at South Shields, he joined White in New York, where William H. Todd found and retained him at 42 as general manager.

While formal corporate expansion of Todd Oil Burners overseas would not take place until after the time-span of this chapter, it is to be noted that in May, 1921, the Keel reported establishment of a shop known as "Todd Oil Burners, eng·ineers," at 49-51 Eastcheap, London, "for the manufacture and installation of oil-burning systems." McDonald's background and affiliations undoubtedly contributed to this first penetration of the foreign market.

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I I I

I i I I I I I

Lord Dufferin under repair at Robins, after being cut in two by Aquitania.

When last seen in these pages, the Tebo yard was winding down the emergency construction program which William H. Todd had reluctantly but loyally undertaken, to answer the Navy's call for minesweepers. Of the ten originally contracted for, only nine were put in hand before the unexpected Armi· stice eliminated the need for them. The ninth in the series, Gannet, was launched March 19, 1919.

55

But the building ways were still there, the plant had shown that it could do a professional job on small steel hulls, and a couple of customers were in sight. So, for a little while, Tebo stayed in the construction business. As already mentioned, the Sinclair Navigation Company was shopping for a small, shallowdraft tank vessel-or rather a pair of vessels-capable of entering Cuba's outports. They were to be 216 feet in length and of 1,450 dwt.-what would be called self-propelled tank barges today. i\!Ianuel Rionda, named for a prominent island industrialist who was its "first to use liquid fuel in cargo lots in the manufacture of sugar," was launched April 22, 1920, as "the first oil carrier to fly the Cuban flag." She was followed into Gowanus Bay December 29 by a sister ship, W. E. Ogilvie.

Between these launchings, two handsomer and somewhat larger sister ships of an entirely different type had been launched July 20 and November 6 and christened Ormes and Oritani. Of 2, 750 gross tons, and 227 feet long overall, they were banana carriers ordered for the Donald Steamship Company, a subsidiary of an Oriental Navigation Company whose president attended both launchings. One suspects that they were built on speculation to catch the favorable postwar charter market. A photo of Ormes on the day of her sister's launching shows her in United Fruit colors, but the pair seem never to have belonged to that company; and were owned in Montreal under British flag by 1925. At all events, they evidently stuck together, for they showed up many years later at another Todd yard for conversion to an entirely different service.

By 1921 Tebo's shipbuilding seems to have come to an end, barring the occasional small tug, city ferryboat or fireboat-the latter dear to William H. Todd's heart as a lifelong volunteer fireman, and an Honorary New York City Fire Commissioner from the Hylan administration to his death. Also there were the company service boats Virginia (crane-launched to replace the Natalie Mae) and a second Natalie !VIae launched the same day as W. E. Ogilvie.

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I

At this same period the Tebo yard was making something of a specialty in the realm of engineroom innovation. Starting in the fall of 1920, it installed novel turbo-electric main power plants in a series of large emergency-built triple-expansion cargo steamers. The first, Eclipse, ran highly successful trials October 19, 1920. She was followed March 5 by the Invincible, which, after going· through her paces without a hitch, proved herself anything but invincible by colliding with the transport Madawaska ten days later when she had barely cleared Sandy Hook on her maiden electric voyage, and having to put back to Tietjen & Lang for bow repairs. Three other ships, Archer, Independence, and Victorious, were similarly repowered at Tebo in 1921.

But the former yacht basin was still not done with advanced engineroom systems. Early in 1921, the American Mediterranean Steamship Company awarded Tebo a contract to convert the 257-foot engines-aft freighter Fordonian to diesel-electric power, the Keel confidently announcing that "the attention of marine engineers and shipowners throughout the world is today largely directed toward the Diesel engine in combination with electric drive as the propelling power for vessels of all types."

While this considerably overstated the case, at least so far as contemporary American shipowners (or their successors for a long· time to come) were concerned, it probably reflected accurately a position to which William H. Todd was prepared to subscribe. Witness the fact that at this same period his Tacoma yard was delivering to the Alaska Steamship Company a freighter the like of which would not be seen in many American-flag fleets until an as yet undreamed-of OPEC, over half a century later, forced the economic advantages of diesel propulsion on the attention of a distnayed maritime community.

The ship in question was the 368-foot, 6,500-dwt. Kennecott, propelled by 1,200-horsepower diesel engines. So pleased were her owners with the March I 7 trials of this first fully commercial product of the Todd Dry Dock & Construction Corporation that they paid the construction price in full before the end of

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the month. But despite her auspicious debut the Kennecott was ill-starred. Through no fault of her still-novel propulsion system, she was wrecked in British Columbia waters while still new, February 20, 1923, and so lost whatever lasting influence she might have had on the engining of American ships of the future. Her construction stands, however, as an innovative milestone for Todd.

The Kennecott's launching, just 65 days after her keel was laid, came between those of two other ships which had been on Todd's order book almost four years. These, of course, were the scout cruisers Omaha and Milwaukee, which at last splashed into Commencement Bay December 14, 1920, and March 24, 1921-to be followed two months later by their "afterthought" sister Cincinnati. Such deliberate construction of combat ships has always been routine in peacetime, but to have moved so slowly under the conditions prevailing in 1917 and 1918 is a little surprising·. It has been said that the Navy itself set the slow pace of wartime work on the trio-which, if true, suggests a remarkably enlightened high-level strategic decision that to fight what might be a long war the nation had more imminent and urgent need for thirty cargo carriers than for three warships unsuited to convoy duty.

Be that as it may, it would be I 924 before the last of the Omahas was commissioned. But Todd had completed the basic construction ·work and got the entire class afloat before its own fifth birthday. An interesting aspect of all three launchings was that the hulls were sent down the ways bow first, the first naval craft to be so launched on the west coast.

Completing· these vessels, and shifting their hulls back and forth between Tacoma and the Bremerton Navy Yard, would provide some work for the Todd Dry Dock & Construction Corporation, but the scarcity of new business for that yard seemed to bear out the dim view William H. Todd held of ship construction as a continuing and self-sustaining line of work. For a time in late 1920 there was flickering hope that a government order might be obtained for what was referred to in board meetings as "Naval Transport No. 2," but nothing came of it.

58

There would ultimately be two more orders, but it was plain that Todd's first venture in the building of major new tonnage had virtually run its course-until the next emergency.

All signs pointed, on the other hand, to reinforcement and consolidation of its ship repair position. At Tietjen & Lang, echoing Tebo's preoccupation with electric propulsion, Dry Dock No. 6 was converted from steam to electric power in August, 1920. At Harbor Island, "Big Bill" was manfully reinforcing the plant's initial docking capacity. And for its New York area, in the spring of 1921, the Corporation provided three additional drydocks, distributed between Tebo, Clinton, and Tietjen & Lang. On a nationwide basis, this gave Todd a total of 23 dry docks-21 floating and two gTaving-and gave it a position of leadership in the ship repair business of the Atlantic and Northwest Pacific Coasts.

As 1920 merged into 1921, the old cordial familial ties of a Red Hook industrial plant which was also a community rallying point remained strong. At the end of October the Sponsor's Club, "composed of the young ladies who have officiated at the launchings of the minesweepers, oil tankers, freighters, lighters, tugboats, and dispatch boats at the yards of the Todd Shipyards Corporation," held their first annual luncheon and reception at the Astor. On Washington's birthday the Volunteer Firemen's Association marched through Brooklyn's snowbanked streets, with a delegation from Wilmington "led by Battalion Chief William H. Todd." And on April 26 the William H. Todd Corporation, now a fraternal organization, marked its sixth anniversary with a dinner at the Hotel Bossert, attended also by "the Ladies Auxiliary, of which Mrs. William H. Todd is president."

These pleasant neighborhood-style functions would continue for years to come, in Brooklyn and in Hoboken; but a change had already begun, as an inevitable consequence of the decision of Todd himself to expand from an essentially community-based organization to a large and necessarily more impersonal working part of American industry. It would be a working part which never-at least in its first 65 years-lost touch with its roots; but

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as it tapped into other roots along· thousands of rniles of coastline, it could never again be so singly and personally identified with its place of origin.

This transition was of course gradual and never tied, in the minds of the people involved, to a specific moment in time. But so far as such things can be dated, it is probably safe to mark May I, 1921, as the date when the tide turned. On that date Todd's corporate offi!CeS moved from 15 Whitehall Street to the II th floor of the newly completed Cunard Building at 25 Broadway. While this did not overtly change anything at Erie Basin or Tietjen & Lang, it marked for the five-year-old corporation the physical breaking point with its parentage. 15 Whitehall was John N. Robins' office and stood for all Robins had done to transmute a scattering· of New York iron works into a single Brooklyn plant. But henceforth Todd, the corporation, was out of the shadow of Robins. The era of Todd, the national enterprise, had begun.

Gulf and West Coast Repair Yards of the Mid-Thirties: left page, upper, Todd Mobile Dry Docks, Alabama; lower, Todd Seattle Dry Docks, Washington; right page, Todd Galveston Dry Docks, Texas.

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the now-bankrupt Mobile Shipbuilding Company and put the expansion under way. By May 22, 1929, he could report to his stockholders, "Extensions, including dredging, new piers and slipways, which double the capacity of the Mobile plant, are under way and when completed in about two months will make this plant the most modern ship repair yard on the Gulf." At the 1930 meeting· he reported the improvements completed.

In the spring of 1931, A. Colden Deyo, one of Todd's original "gang" from Robins days, was sent to Mobile to replace John F. Prigge, who had succeeded Marshall in 1925 as manager of the enlarged plant. He would remain there until his death in 1935.

With Mobile finally expanded and equipped to his liking, Todd turned his attention to completing the New Orleans yard as the fully qualified competitor for Gulf repair business he had always intended it should be. This called for two very substantial expenditures, in 1930 and 1931. In the former year $132,000 was paid to complete the long· process of readying and equipping Hines Lane-$123,000 of it for drydock facilities. In September, 1931, he laid out $700,000 to acquire the entire personal property of Jahncke Dry Docks, Inc., of New Orleans, including two drydocks, machinery, tools, and various floating equipment. Thus, by one purchase, he shrewdly reduced the potential business competition his local plant would have to face and strengthened its ability to face it. One of the Jahncke docks was moved to Algiers and put to work, the other held in reserve, to be used ultimately in a further Gulf expansion which Todd himself would not live to oversee.

From the moment of the Armistice, William H. Todd's sagacity in purchasing the White Fuel Oil Engineering Corporation and retaining James McDonald to manage it became increasingly apparent. Despite his known partiality to the metalworking trades and to the Robins plant where he and his closest friends had practiced them, he seems to have felt a particularly strong fostering interest in his "burner" subsidiary and its offshoots, both on the West Coast (where Harbor Island manufactured and installed oil-burners for Pacific shipping) and overseas.

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And well he might. Almost as soon as the world was at peace, a flood of demand for oil fuel conversions, coupled with White or Todd burner installations, set in so strongly that it was some· times difficult for the production force at the old Quintard works to keep pace. In October, 1920, the Keel reported that Todd burners had been installed in over 30 vessels during the preceding quarter. This figure would have included the new Tebo-built fruiters and tankers, but it also covered at least one or two vessels of most of the still-numerous Atlantic coastwise lines. The United Fruit Company was already embarked on a program which would see the entire Northern Division of its Great White Fleet fired by Todd burners as of the beginning of 1923.

A distinguished convert to the Todd system which set a trend in the private pleasure craft field was the big J.P. Morgan steam yacht Corsair, converted at Tebo in late 1923. Even more gratifying was the rapid rise of demand from foreign shipowners. By 1922 both Furness-Withy and Canadian Pacific had specified Todd equipment for several vessels, including the ex· German liner Empress of Australia, largest passenger ship on the Pacific. Probably the greatest and most leg-itimate source of corporate self-satisfaction was the selection by Harland & Wolff of the Todd device over competing European products for their 1923 conversion of the White Star Liner Homeric.

These successes in the foreign market certainly influenced Todd's decision in 1924 to establish on Fenchurch Street, Lon· don, a corporate subsidiary, Todd Oil Burners, Ltd. This or a successor would continue to promote and market burners and other specialty equipment in Europe for over forty years to come.

It may be mentioned in passing that the Fenchurch Street subsidiary was not the sum total of Todd's foreign ventures in the twenties. For several years, starting· in 1923, a sales office was maintained under the management of ]. Irvine Milne on Avenida Rodrigues Alves, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil.

In 1924, obviously for purposes of clearer product identifica· tion, the White subsidiary was redesignated the Todd Oil Burner & Engineering Corporation. However, neither its title nor its

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separate shop on East 12th Street, Manhattan, was destined to last very long. The reason, as explained by Todd himself at the annual meeting of June 15, 1925, was that "the general depression in the shipping- business still continues . ... In order to reduce expenses, your officers have completed arrangements for amalgamating the Todd Oil Burner & Eng·ineering· Corporation plant with the ship repair yard of the Tebo Yacht Basin Company."

While this did not exactly describe the form the retrenchment move would take, it did accurately forecast that, as of the following September 19, the oil burner branch would be merged with both the Tebo and Clinton yards under the corporate name of Todd Dry Dock, Engineering & Repair Corporation, and be physically transferred to the former plant. It would remain a part of this rather illogical grouping for the next seven years. Meanwhile, before the 1926 annual meeting, the parent corporation would have sold the former Quintard property which had experienced such a brief but productive revival under its nwnershi p.

If a consolidation had to be made, however, the physical tie with Tebo was not entirely devoid of sense. Since its acquisition by Todd, the old yacht basin had tended to have the most explicit technological orientation of the corporate subsidiaries. As the yard which, under the vice-presidential management of James Strachan Milne, had engined war emergency hulls, pioneered electric drive conversions, and, alone among Todd's eastern plants, assembled complete seagoing· vessels, it afforded a reasonably congenial workplace for the makers of oil-burning and other equipment.

The "other equipment" included a lengthening· catalog of devices, most of them invented or developed in-house, and by no means restricted to boiler-room use. Oil-burners themselves came in a variety of modifications, including· the variable capacity burner and a "steam burner," as did oil-burning ranges, automatic boiler feed water control mechanisms, and the "Todd Guardian," which automatically cut off oil supply to boilers low on water. Eleven types of Todd Twin-Pole Arc Welders,

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United States, Colonel E. H. R. Green's "steamship-yacht," at Tebo, 1923.

based on a patent purchased from James Holafield of Mobile, were in production in 1925. One of the most flourishing product lines in that pre-electronic era was the oil-fed high endurance Todd Lamp which, although widely employed on shipboard, for buoys, and in marine signals, found its primary market ashore, on railroads and highways.

Even though conversion to oil-burning· and diesel was sweeping the marine scene, with Todd Shipyards Corporation in the thick of the fray, some owners were not yet ready to cast their lot with oil. To afford them an alternative, William H. Todd assigned his engineers the demanding· task of perfecting systems and equipment for burning pulverized coal under ships' boilers. At the annual meeting of June 5, 1928, he was able to report: "Your Company has, for the last two years, been developing a pulverized coal burning· system, which is now completed and we think the best in the market." A year later he reported

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"highly successful" tests by the Shipping Board and Navy, and in 1930 said, "Arrangements are being made for the production and sale of this system in Great Britain and other countries."

But the Depression, and petroleum's swift conquest of the shipping world, overtook these enthusiastic beginnings, and there is no indication that there was further consideration of pulverized coal in Todd circles after the death of its chief proponent. Perhaps, in the long retrospect from 1981, it would be

just as well if there had been. Two concomitant developments to the Corporation's oil

burning activities warrant passing mention, since they display, apart from garden-variety profit motivation, a degree of social responsibility rather surprising for the times. One was the establishment in May, 1923, of the Todd Oil Burning School at the White plant on East Twelfth Street. Here five-day courses in the "comparatively new science of oil burning" were offered tuition-free to "engineers, firemen, both stationary and marine, in fact anyone interested in oil burning." Demand was strong enough so that night courses had to be added, and certificates were issued in the first year to 334 out of approximately 400 who attended, the Keel announcing that "the school has come

to stay." To those who think of environmentalism and pollution pre·

vention as post-Torrey Canyon developments, it may be a surprise that at the start of the year 1923 a Todd publication recognized pollution of harbors and beaches as an unwelcome byproduct of the economy and shipboard cleanliness achieved by the shift to oil fuel. The White engineers, it reported, had been working for some time on the problem of oily water discharge, and had already perfected, placed on the market, and installed aboard ship the Todd Bilge and Ballast Filter Tank to cope with the problem. The next year, carrying the process a step further, the Tebo yard constructed for the Asiatic Petroleum Company an "Oil Separator Barge" to cope with pierside discharges. A Keel photograph showed it at work in New York Harbor alongside a berthed liner.

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The Tebo yard's production of the separator barge is a reminder that, while no longer a builder of even minor commercial ocean tonnage, it still had the facilities and skills to construct well found, efficient small craft of various types, and continued to do so through the twenties and early thirties. Two of its handsomest products, both delivered in 1922, were the steam pilot boat Maryland, for the Cape Henry station, and the twin-screw diesel cruising yacht Cynthia for Commodore Merrill Mills of Detroit. Both were of Cox & Stevens design, and they were of equally patrician appearance, though the former had been initially intended as a steam trawler. Tebo's not inconsiderable output of harbor craft also included ferries and fireboats for the City of New York and two flights of oil-burning steam tugs, Nos. 30, 31, and 32 for the New York Central Railroad and Socony 8 and 9 for the Standard Transportation Company.

Never forgetful of its original mission as a haven of refuge and refit for yachts, the yard also continued to shelter and service these toys of a society part of which was still aflluent enoug·h to keep them. Mention has already been made of Corsair's conversion to oil burning. A more elaborate operation was performed in late 1921 and early 1922 on Henry Putnam's 168-foot three-masted schooner A ley one, one of the largest yachts then extant, when she was given diesel-electric auxiliary power in place of her original triple-expansion steam plant.

An even larger guest (or more properly resident) of the Tebo yard for several years of the decade was the 256-foot, twofunneled yacht-steamship United Stales owned by Colonel E. H. R. Green, son of the eccentric New England millionairess Hetty Green. The United States was doubly linked to Todd. Built in 1909 at Manitowoc, Wisconsin, as a Great Lakes passenger steamer, she had been purchased by Green in 1915 and consigned to the Robins yard for lengthening and a palatial interior rebuilding. But, after the briefest of yachting careers, she had been laid up at Tebo, where she lang·uished until the Colonel sold her back into commercial service, and she left Brooklyn in 1923 for the Lakes once more.

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Mongolia of the American Line, whose third-cabin accommodation was renewed and enlarged at Tietjen & Lang after the war (during which she had been credited with the first hit on an enemy submarine).

-Courtesy Steamship Historical Society of America

The three-way merger of the White, Clinton, and Tebo plants in 1925 made more logical sense as between the last two than as to the first. From the immediate postwar period, the former Poillon yard was almost perfectly designed to complement the facilities and services of the former yacht basin. Tebo had shipways and could build vessels; Clinton could not. But Clinton had a large drydock and could handle certain classes of repair work for which Tebo was not equipped. When the latter was converting the Eclipse and her sisters to turbo-electric drive, the large re-engined vessels had to be brought across Gowanus Bay to Clinton for drydocking. While only Tebo could build a tug from the keel up, in 1923 Clinton could and did build and engine the Radio for Van Sciver of Philadelphia on the bare hull of the unfinished Shipping Board tug Cyclone. If a fireboat were to be built, Tebo had to do it; but Clinton installed and successfully tested (to Honorary Fire Commissioner Todd's delight) new and improved turbines and pumps on the New York Fireboats Thomas Willett and james Duane in 1922. Either yard had the expertise to install machinery, and in rush times job could be shifted back and forth between South Brooklyn and Red Hook.

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Thus the merger of September, 1925, so far as these two plants were concerned, simply made for even more economical and less expensive cooperative arrangements than those already in being.

For the Corporation's main repair yards, at Erie Basin, Hoboken, and Harbor Island, the 25 Broadway era began with an abundance of work (some of it still residue of the postwar backlog), continued prosperous until mid-decade, then gradually tapered off as the impending general Depression was heralded by slackening activity in shipping.

All three plants were still under the direction of the men Todd had selected in 1916: George]. Robinson at Robins, with the title of vice-president (raised to president in 1924), George G. Raymond as president at Tietjen & Lang, and C. W. Wiley as chairman of the two Pug·et Sound yards, with H. W. Kent under him as president at Seattle. Robins, and Red Hook, were still very much the Corporation's "old family homestead," with close ties, municipal, charitable, recreational, and religious, between shipyard and community. Todd's personal, unostentatious benevolence was an importan_t fact of life in an area ·which, though self-reliant, was already drifting toward overcrowding and poverty.

His own neighborly involvement was supplemented by the social and charitable activities of the William H. Todd Corporation and its ladies' auxiliary, as well as by those of the Mutual Aid Societies which existed at most Todd plants. Annual plant picnics and field days were held, a favorite resort being Grant City on Staten Island. Athletics flourished, centering on Todd Field in Red Hook, early established for interdepartmental, interplant, and community sports competition.

The company, and Todd personally, also entered actively into Brooklyn ceremonials and parades, especially where the Fire Departrnent or Volunteer Firemen's organizations ·were in~ volved, always led by the Todd Band. The latter unit, organized during the war, was in demand both on and off the yard premises, as for example at the unveiling of the "Fighting Dough-

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Massed Bands of Todd's Robins, Tietjen & Lang, and Tebo plants during the first world war.

boy" statue in Red Hook Park on Flag Day, 1921, and at the dedication of the Prospect Park war memorial a few days later.

On August 4, 1922, the Todd Band earned a small niche in telecommunications history, when it broadcast over recently established Radio Station WJZ, Newark, and was reported to have been heard "as far distant as Montpelier, Vermont." It continued to earn applause and to foster Todd public relations until it fell victim to hard times in the fall of 193!.

From the summer of 1921 through that of 1922 both Robins and Tietjen & Lang were involved in an extensive program of adding third-class accommodation to American passenger vessels being· readied for services to England and the Continent. Erie Basin worked on a series of war-built medium liners originally named for states but rechristened, while the program was

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Service Station for Steamboats: The big Hudson River Day Liner Alexartder Hamilton in drydock at-Tietjen & Lang.

-Courtesy Franklin B. Roberts

he had relinquished the presidency of Clinton-which he had held since the revival of that plant-to J. Herbert Todd. But a vacation, as it turned out, was not enough, and on May 22, after returning to work for a few months, he stepped aside in favor of his vice president, George Dawe.

Robinson's retirement was widely regretted, not only by his subordinates and colleagues in the Todd organization but by a legion of shipping and shipyard men in this country and abroad, to whose minds he had been virtually synonymous with Todd and Erie Basin. To Todd himself it' was a heavy personal loss, for the two had been fellow workmen long before there was a William H. Todd Corporation, let alone a Todd Shipyards. Robinson was in fact eight years senior to Todd in continuous service at the Red Hook plant, having started as a Handren & Robins passer boy in New York in 1884, and returned after a few years' service at the Navy Yard, in 1887. He continued after retirement as a director of the Corporation.

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Besides its already mentioned function of making Todd Oil Burner installations on the west coast, Todd Dry Docks at Seattle performed during these years a long succession of heavy repair and reconstruction jobs, along with the standard fare of cleaning, painting and maintenance. As the only Todd facility on its side of the continent once Tacoma was phased out, it had to be more versatile, in fact, than the Port of New York plants which, like Tebo and Clinton, and to a lesser extent Tietjen & Lang, tended to develop specialties. Harbor Island, by contrast, had to receive and serve all that floated to its gates, lame, halt, or healthy.

While New York was busy with third-cabin conversions, Seattle was amending the ills of the Shipping Board's passengercargo fleets on the Pacific. When the Admiral Line's Wenatchee was plagued by abnormal breaking-in problems, especially to her fuel pumping system, on her maiden voyage from Seattle to the Far East early in 1921, she was taken out of service for a Todd overhaul so exhaustive that she was not back on berth until October 15. Her fleetmates Keystone State and Silver State subsequently underwent the same treatment.

The Seattle yard's "big" drydock was also one of the few in the northwest capable of lifting the "535's"-the larger of the Shipping Board's standard combination liners. The Presidents Madison, McKinley, Jefferson and Grant of this class had all been routinely docked by March, 1923, the Madison (which was to provide Todd with a major headache a decade later) being the first of her class to enter any private shipyard facility on the Sound.

Seattle also had its share of collision repairs, as extensive as any of those handled at Robins. One of the earliest was replacing· the stem of the Shipping Board freighter West Hartland, virtually demolished April I, 1921, in collision with the Admiral Liner Governor, which sank in Puget Sound with the loss of ten lives.

More spectacular, though miraculously fortunate in human terms, was the damage Harbor Island was called on to remedy in 1922 for the crack Admiral Liner H. F. Alexander, C. W.

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Now began Todd's share of the miracle. The required work, by conservative estimate, would normally have taken 45 to 50 days. But speed was the life of the H. F. Alexander, in a day when most travellers still preferred the water to the rail route between California and Washington. She had a pace to sustain, and Todd a reputation. She was out of the yard, as good as new, in l9days!


A conversion in many ways comparable to that of the Wright by Robins was performed at Harbor Island in 1923 on a 5,210-dwt. war-built freighter, previously in Shipping Board service out of Seattle. The Todd yard was awarded a contract to make the necessary alterations in the Dellwood for her new function as a cable-layer of the military cable and telegraph service to Alaska then maintained by the Army Signal Corps. The job included installation of five tanks to hold 2,000 miles of cable, a 20-foot forward extension of the vessel's 321-foot length to accommodate cable sheaves, conversion from well to flush deck, and superstructure alterations including living quarters for a crew of more than a hundred.

Her delivery to the Signal Corps was not Dellwood's last contact with Todd during the time-span of this chapter-or her last Harbor Island conversion. By 1932, completion of a radiotelephone link with Alaska had ended the need for her cable-laying services, and she reverted to the Shipping Board, which sold her to Seattle salmon packers as a cannery transport. The $100,000

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Now began Todd's share of the miracle. The required work, by conservative estimate, would normally have taken 45 to 50 days. But speed was the life of the H. F. Alexander, in a day when most travellers still preferred the water to the rail route between California and Washington. She had a pace to sustain, and Todd a reputation. She was out of the yard, as good as new, in 19daysl


A conversion in many ways comparable to that of the Wright by Robins was performed at Harbor Island in 1923 on a 5,210-dwt. war-built freighter, previously in Shipping Board service out of Seattle. The Todd yard was award~d a contract to make the necessary alterations in the Dellwood for her new function as a cable-layer of the military cable and telegraph service to Alaska then maintained by the Army Signal Corps. The job included installation of five tanks to hold 2,000 miles of cable, a 20-foot forward extension of the vessel's 321-foot length to accommodate cable sheaves, conversion from well to flush deck, and superstructure alterations including· living quarters for a crew of more than a hundred.

Her delivery to the Signal Corps was not Dellwood's last contact with Todd during the time-span of this chapter-or her last Harbor Island conversion. By 1932, completion of a radiotelephone link with Alaska had ended the need for her cable-laying services, and she reverted to the Shipping Board, which sold her to Seattle salmon packers as a cannery transport. The $100,000

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H. F. Alexander, speedy Admiral Liner repaired by Todd's Seattle yard in record time after 1922 encounter with Cake Rock off Washington's coast.


job of reconverting her was awarded to Todd Dry Docks by her new owners, who subsequently operated her as the Harris Steamship Company.

Not to be outdone by Tebo, the Seattle yard also contributed extensively at this period to the equipping and completion of the 116-foot diesel cruising yacht Alician. Newly built of wood at Seattle to designs of M. MacNaught, she was propelled by twin !50-horsepower diesel engines and, because of her size, provided with an engineroom telegraph system. Most of her metal equipment-stack, tanks, etc.-was furnished by Todd.

In the 1920's, the rapid growth of automobile travel in and between the Olympic Peninsula, Vancouver Island, and the mainland put increasing strain on the vehicular capacity of the "mosquito fleet" of small and medium-size steamboats for which those waters were famed, and prompted Todd's Seattle yard to develop what amounted to a new specialty. This was the conversion of such steamboats to enlarged, douhle-ended, but still definitely seaworthy ferryboats.

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The pattern was set in 1921 when a contract was accepted to alter the fifteen-year-old 175x34-foot steamer What com into a drive-through automobile and passenger carrier. The procedure consisted in removing the vessel's entire superstructure, cutting down the main deck forward, sponsoning it to a maximum beam of 48 feet, and erecting a new house of 11 jlz-foot vehicular clearance with passenger accommodation above. Though doubleended for loading, the vessel was single-ended for operation. To cope with the necessity of working alongside some piers, where the tides had a range of 15 feet, a ten-ton vehicle elevator was mounted athwartships forward. Thus transformed, she returned to service under the new name City of Bremerton.

The success of this operation led to Todd's giving similar but enlarged treatment to the fast, two-stacked Seattle (ex H. B. Kennedy), which joined City of Bremerton as a running mate in May, 1924. Simultaneously, another passenger boat, the Sioux of 1910, was being converted to what was described as the "oceangoing-'' ferry Olympic. She left Harbor Island June 14, 1924, to take up service on the often-turbulent crossing from Port Angeles, Washington, to Victoria, British Columbia.

Seattle's passenger conversions were not, however, limited to small steamboats. In 1928, it delivered the 430-foot Ward Liner Havana fully converted, after years of service as the hospital ship Comfort, into a luxury cruise ship for her owners' service between New York, Florida, and Cuba.

This was the year in which C. W. Wiley, heretofore chairman of the now inactive Todd Dry Dock & Construction Corporation at Tacoma, with general authority over all Todd west coast activities, took over the presidency of the Seattle yard, on the resignation of H. W. Kent. He would hold this office for the rest of his life. James A. Eves, president of Tacoma, whose energy and dedication had made him the symbol of Todd ship construction on the Pacific, remained prominent in marine affairs on the Coast and served as a director of Todd Seattle Dry Docks, Inc., until his death in June, 1936, just ten months after Wiley's.

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Although business depression was already a very apparent and progressive condition to shipyard people by 1928, \Villiam H. Todd was still resolutely building for the future. Having taken rneasures to secure his economic flanks by merging his burner branch with Clinton and Tebo, selling the Quintard site, and closing Tacoma, he calmly announced to his 1928 annual meeting that, in addition to its substantial and continuing outlays on the Gulf, their Corporation was about to add as a crowning facility at the Robins plant "a large graving drydock" which would take more than a year to build. Indeed, work on this mammoth project (really a drastic reworking and enlargement of the old Graving Dock No. I of 1866) had actually started a month earlier. In a ceremony at Erie Basin that May, Borough President James ]. Byrne, with a shovel, and Todd, with a drill, had formally broken ground for the new structure, which was to be the most capacious drydock in the New York harbor area, with "a clear length of 731 feet, enabling it to handle most of the large liners that come to this port." Todd was at pains to point out that, like the recent improvements at Mobile, Alg·iers, and Tebo, this project was "financed out of funds of your Corporation available for the purpose, and no borrowing or issue of securities had been necessary." In a time of uncertainty, he was taking no chances with the firm's solvency.

While work on the graving dock moved forward, Todd refitters undertook a job which peripherally involved the Corporation in one of the century's great exploring ventures. And not for the first time: three years earlier the Keel had pointed out in a feature story, "Voyages of Adventure Start from Tebo's," that the 23rd Street yard had lately prepared the steam trawlers Foam and Spray to seek the g·old cargo of the sunken Ward Liner Merida, that it regularly laid up the glass-bottomed Hirondelle which the then Prince of Monaco used for pelagic exploration, and that it had outfitted William Beebe's Arcturus for his celebrated Sargasso Sea and Galapagos Islands expedition, then in progress.

Now, Tebo \vas overhauling and preparing the square-rigged steam sealer Samson, to serve as flagship for Admiral Richard E.

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Byrd's first expedition to Antarctica. Renamed City of New York, the old ship sailed from Brooklyn, August 25, 1928.

Work on "the largest privately owned modern drydock on the Atlantic Coast" continued for over a year more until, on December 7, 1929, when the Wall Street crash had already raised the curtain on depression, William H. Todd's massive vote of confidence in the future was officially cast and recorded. As the crowd attending the opening ceremonies watched, the new dock was flooded and its first occupant, the Munson Liner Southern Cross, floated over the blocks. Big as she was, pictures show her seemingly shrunken by the size of the basin in which she stood. It was not until the following July 12 that the new dock's capacity was fully utilized, and Todd's planning vindicated, when Graving Dock No. I was entered (and filled) by the George Washington, second-largest American-flag ship, and heretofore unable to find private drydock service in New York.

Despite his confidence in the Corporation's soundness and future progress, Todd was realistically aware of the worsening economic climate and the difficulties ahead. As early as the 1925 annual meeting, when he announced a one-third cut in the quarterly dividend, from $1.50 to $1.00 per share, he said, "The general depression in the shipping business still continues ... and has resulted in a falling· off of the earnings of your company. How long this condition may continue is problematical." In both the next two years' reports he alluded soberly to "the uncertainties still obtaining in the shipping business."

Although the new graving dock and the coal pulverizer enabled him to report in a somewhat more optimistic vein at the 1928, 1929, and 1930 meetings, the monthly financial status resumes given in the board minutes tell the real story, indicating that between early 1927 and late 1929 the Corporation's current assets were cut almost in half: from $7.3 million to just over $4 million. After a slig·ht rebound in early 1930, the decline set in again. By August, 1931, the officers were authorized to borrow up to $800,000 and, by September, up to $1,000,000 more. At the end of 1931, the balance, net of borrowings, fell to $1\1 million.

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Admiral Richard E. Byrd's City of New York in Antarctic ice afer fitting out at Tebo in 1928.


In the face of these losses, the dividend could not survive intact, even as reduced in 1925. On November 27, 1931, the quarterly dollar was halved. The same amount was voted at the meeting of February 25, 1932; but then Todd himself was not present.

In his Annual Report of May 21, 1931 (which incidentally was the first he had so captioned, all preceding reports having been called simply "Balance Sheet") , he had been as nearly pessimistic as his nature ever allowed him to be, concluding with the sentence, "As might be expected wiih the current depression, the volume of work on hand is below normal, but your Company is in excellent financial and physical condition to benefit fully from the country's business revival."

In succeeding months his health failed steadily, and the last meeting he was able to attend was that of January 28, 1932, when it was voted to repay $200,000 on the recent Brooklyn Trust Co. note, reducing the loan to $500,000, an action which must have pleased him. But he attended no more meetings, and

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J. Herbert Todd, son of the Corporation's founder and an officer or director until 1946.

tables for a William H. Todd. His blend of self-confidence, industrial democracy, uninstitntional benevolence, and what one of his eulog·ists described as perennial boyishness would not even be comprehensible to the corporate world of a very few years later. That harder world would call for more singleminded concentration on the achievement of defined competitive goals, for resignation to the purported inevitability of labor-management conflict, and for cool, clearsig·hted perception of the means by which survival and further expansion must be achieved.

Reilly seems to have recognized from the first that it was under the conditions and within the parameters imposed by such a world that he must plan and execute any strategy to ensure

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r the Cmporation's survival and renewed growth along the lines he and Todd had envisioned. To do so mig·ht well require a somewhat higher degree of personal detachment than had been customary heretofore from the daily domestic affairs of any single part of what was now a large multiregional organization. Though this detachment never approached that of the recluse tycoons of film and fiction, it is fairly clear that his relations with his corporate family ·were less casual and intimate than Todd's. It may be safe to say that the differences between the two men in this respect are epitomized in the nickname, half cynical, half affectionate, by which Reilly was known (and still is) to those who worked with and under him: "The Boss."

Elected with Reilly to serve as chairman of the executive committee was the founder's son, ]. Herbert Todd, who then headed the Todd Dry Dock, Engineering & Repair plant at 23rd Street,Brooklyn. Also named to the committee, and elected executive vice president in charge of operations, -was Georg·e Dawe, already president of Robins. George Raymond, president of Tietjen & Lang and a Todd vice president, completed the central group.

There was no question what subject had first claim on the new administration's attention. The Depression was biting ever more deeply into the physical and economic wellbeing of the Corporation, financially sound though it still might be. The same annual report which announced Todd's death and the new officer hierarchy divulged that since the previous year net profit had dropped to $695,415, i.e. ,by exactly one-fourth. It also noted that the quarterly dividend had been pared to twenty-five cents (the lowest level that it would reach, incidentally, for forty years) .

The slide continued. In the 1933 report, the first over his signature, Reilly cited an even steeper percentage drop, to a net profit of $402,693, noting in apparent understatement that "volume of business was below that of the previous fiscal year," and implying that but for diligent economies including the merger of Clinton and Tebo (until then separate plants of the Todd Dry Dock, Eng-ineering· & Repair Corporation) there might

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have been no profit at all. Among other economies was a I 0% salary reduction voted March 29, 1933.

The acuteness of the economic squeeze for rank-and-file workers and the continued sense of "family" among those employed in Todd's oldest plants was demonstrated at this crisis by the voluntary agreement of the Corporation's New York harbor employees to contribute 2% of their earnings for the first quarter of the year to a relief fund administered by their own committee for the benefit of needy former and present employees of the New York area yards.

By mid-1933 the Roosevelt Administration had its New Deal under way, with the National Recovery Act and other measures to counter depression and unemployment which, while controversial at the time (and, in the case of NRA, ultimately ruled unconstitutional), certainly assisted the Reilly team's own efforts to steady the business at something better than a bare subsistence level. Despite the best efforts of all concerned, however, depression would remain a fact of shipyard life to the end of the decade.

While retrenchment and economy were indispensable survival measures and would be so vigorously pursued as to work major changes in the geography of Todd during the early Reilly years, the true sine qua non of depression-fighting· was of course the successful cultivation of business. In the thirties, this was a desperate and often forlorn effort. Owners and husbands of ships were doling out repair work with an eye-dropper, and Todd's were by no means the only yards with acute eye trouble. Both Gulf yards had heavy competition, notably from Alabama Dry Dock & Shipbuilding at Mobile and from Johnson Iron Works, Dry Dock & Shipbuilding at New Orleans. In New York there was even more of a competitive donnybrook, with United Dry Docks (Staten Island, Morse, Fletcher) and others scrimmaging with Todd for every offering. As the decade advanced, several of these opponents were collected under the Bethlehem Steel banner; but this if anything heightened the competition, even thoug·h it produced a more nearly bilateral contest.

It was still an age which barred few holds in business competition, even when times were normal. When times were not

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normal, the battle for repan work could be to the deatheconomically, at least. The gladiators were likely to be debonair young men known as solicitors, working out of the office of the vice president in charge of sales-in Todd's case at this period,

William A. Maloney. Their duties ranged from attending repair bid sessions on the Corporation's behalf to cultivating agents, masters, and chief engineers who might have repair orders in their pockets, to keeping watch on incoming ship traffic for vessels in possible need of hospitalization, to maintaining close relations with the ship news reporters who then congregated at the old Battery Barge Office-to running personal errands for the headquarters "brass."

It was an accepted premise of doing business that "You have to spend a dollar to make two." In whatever light Justice Department and Internal Revenue monitors of a later and presumably more upright era might view such practices, they were considered a valid and prudent business investment at a time when it could be suicide to show the potential customer scanter courtesies than your competitor. Such courtesies might range from picking up the odd taxi fare to maintaining at company headquarters (of course, after the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment) a lounge where masters and engineers, who as often as not make up their owners' minds where their vessels shall be repaired, might "take their ease in their inn."

On a loftier corporate plane, major Todd customers, actual or potential, were entertained, like those of virtually all other national business organizations, in "the style to which they were (presumably) accustomed." While Todd himself was alive, such

entertainment was likely to take the form of combined sea voyages and golf outings up the Connecticut shore aboard his yacht Saelmo-named for the first two letters of each name of his mother, Sarah Elizabeth Moody. At the start of the Reilly era, two greatly elaborated sequels to these cruises were scheduled in connection with the Rainbow-Endeavour series of America's Cup Races in September, 1934, when the coastal passenger ships Acadia and Saint john were chartered from Eastern Steamship Lines, filled with Todd customers and friends, and sent on twonight cruises from New York to Newport.

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The New Regime-Directors, Officers, and Senior Staff of Todd Shipyards Corporation at an unidentified function early in the Reilly presidency: Board of Directors at head table, left to right, David H. Lanman, Sanford S. Cox, J. Herbert Todd, John D. Reilly, George Dawe, George J. Robinson, George G. Raymond, Marshall J. Dodge; left to right, far side of table: James G. Broderick, Russell ,V. Bowes, Emile P. Enfer, Frank H. Reimers, J. L. Lawder, Henry Friclinghaus, Robert D. McGregor, Ernest H. Dendel; left to right, near side of table: John Gardner, William A. Maloney, William H. Raab, Joseph A. Seitz, James McDonald, John J. Dement, William J. Sammon, J. William Jamin, Joseph Haag, Jr., Francis J. Gilbride .

.................. .., .. ..,..,.., .. .., .. ~ - - " '""J

But for most of the Reilly years the Corporation took the more conventional course of O\vning and staffing a private coun~ try club, Amackassin Lodge at Blairstown, New .Jersey, for the use of associates, clients, and its own executives. This resort was 1naintained until October, 1952, when a combination of postwar recession and changing styles in business cultivation dictated its disposal, without replacement.

Though contraction and consolidation was to be the Todd order of the day for the seven opening years of Reilly's presidency, his first major reorganizational 1nove (apart from the nominal merg·er of Clinton and Tebo) was one of expansion. This was the purchase for $611,000, on August 23, 1934, of a third Gulf Coast plant, the Galveston Dry Dock & Construction Company. Negotiations to this end, contemplating this price, had been authorized by his directors two months earlier. It seems probable, however, that this was an acquisition he and Todd had discussed and projected dnring the latter's lifetime, to complete the "Todd presence" on that major stretch of the nation's coastline.

What is more certain is that a factor in his decision was the interest shown by Robert L. Hague, New York marine manager for the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. Hag·ue, a longstanding· friend and major customer of Todd Shipyards, was also a leader in New York shipping circ1es and such an active proponent of American-flag shipping· that his name has been perpetuated in the American Legion's unique Merchant Marine Post at that port. Galveston was, in those pre-OPEC days, probably the leading American (and perhaps world) tanker terminus. A growing volume of heavy ship repair was therefore to be anticipated there, and Hague was understandably interested in having Todd repair facilities available at both ends of his fleet's busy coastal run.

Even thoug·h the Galveston yard's facilities on Pelican Island (part of the bar which lies off much of that part of the Texas

coast) were in poor condition and would require extensive, and

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expensive, renovation, the interest of such a customer as Hague was persuasive enough to 'Warrant the necessary outlay, even in a period of austerity.

Incorporated as Todd Galveston Dry Docks, Inc., the yard opened for business September I, 1934, with improvements still to be made. One of the first of these was,,in a sense, provided by William H. Todd through his acquisition three years earlier of the Jahncke yard's equipment, and his having held one of its two drydocks in reserve for future use. This dock Reilly promptly ordered transferred from Algiers to Galveston. Major improvement work was continued as funds permitted and, as it neared completion in the fall of 1939, a second drydock was towed to the Texas yard from New York.

The man who took delivery of the first drydock and put it to work was the same who, as vice president in charge of the Algiers plant, had supervised its acquisition from Jahncke, and who had later appraised the Galveston yard for Reilly and recommended its purchase. Fred D. Hesley had joined Todd from the Shipping Board in 1923, taking over the New Orleans plant in 1927. Besides being in charge of Todd Galveston from the start and becoming its president in 1937, he was in effect responsible for all Gulf operations from the summer of 1935 until the end of independent Todd control at Mobile and New Orleans, commuting between the three ports.

The form of name given the new Galveston subsidiary reflected a decision on the part of the parent corporation to introduce greater uniformity of nomenclature into its nationwide establishment. At approximate six-week intervals after its adoption for Galveston, the Mobile plant was redesignated Todd Mobile Dry Docks, Inc., and the Algiers plant, Todd New Orleans Dry Docks, Inc. Between the dates of these two chang·es, Todd Dry Docks, Inc., was broug·ht into conformity by reincorporation as Todd Seattle Dry Docks, Inc. For an unspecified reason, probably related to the somewhat intricate corporate relationships between the original New York area plants, this formula was not applied to them for nearly a decade longer.

Though the Galveston acquisition appears to have justified itself from the start, there was no avoiding the fact that the

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The latter was already in negotiation with Alabama Dry Dock & Shipbuilding, seeking some comparable way out of the mutually damaging scramble for the shrinking business available at Mobile. The decision to seek a truce had not been taken easily. But it had become imperative that the Corporation salvage what could be salvaged of the resources which, in more prosperous times, it had poured into making Todd Mobile a first-class repair facility

The solution in this case, thoug·h different in form from that reached at New Orleans, proved equally beneficial to Todd and averted potential collapse of the Alabama port's ship-repair capacity, only a few years before it would be desperately needed in the national interest. After extended negotiation, on December 10, 1936, Todd Mobile Dry Docks passed from the Corporation's operational control wi\h the execution of a 9Y2-year lease to Alabama Dry Dock, effective January I, 1937, at a rental geared to the level of profits from repair operations.

Reorganizing and cutting back the New York area establishment was a decidedly more intricate task than resolving the Gulf problems. The interlocking complex of corporations and plants which was a legacy of the war, and in which the only significant change prior to Todd's death had been the formation of Todd Dry Dock Engineering & Repair with the elimination of one plant site, was now obviously superfluous to the Corporation's requirements, and an unwarranted extravagance. Under existing business conditions it had become clear that the Corporation's reg-ional needs could be amply served by the Erie Basin and Hoboken plants, with appropriate separate facilities for the oil-burner unit. But the necessary preliminaries-rationalization of the flow of authority, redeployment of equipment, revision of production sequences, and elimination of overlaps and redundancies-were so involved that it would be a half-decade after Todd's death before any of the evacuated real estate could be leased or sold.

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Clinton was both the first and the last to go. The 1932 decision to merge it into the Tebo plant started a process of transferring its equipment across to 23rd Street; but it seems to have been two years before it was entirely vacated and closed, except as a place to tie up idle vessels. Meanwhile a similar process of dismantlement had already begun at Tebo, it being reported to the Todd directors in May, 1933, that operating expenses were to be cut by transferring part of that yard's drydocking equipment to Tietjen & Lang· and "diverting" its principal operations to the two senior yards.

Just a year later the Todd Dry Dock, Engineering & Repair Corporation (now consisting solely of Tebo, since the oil burner operation had been broken out and reconstituted a separate corporation in July, 1932) was formally merged into the Robins Dry Dock & Repair Company, along with the inactive Erie Basin Towing & Hoisting Company. The 23rd Street plant was thus left as the sole vestige of the Corporation's wartime expansion, and a not very active vestige, at that. It still served as housekeeper for Todd Combustion Equipment, Inc. (as the burner subsidiary was now known) and for the Corporation's Central Purchase Office, until that unit was transferred to 25 Broadway in April, 1935. It continued to service and even to build small vessels, delivering the Texaco tug All American in May of the latter year. But, as an operating unit, it was already on borrowed time, which ran out on October I, 1937, when its premises were leased for ten years to the Sullivan Dry Dock &

Repair Corporation. Clinton lingered on for years as a Todd property, as empty

and abandoned (thoug·h not as neglected) as it had been before 1918. Finally, on December 12, 1939, it was sold at a loss, to Ira S. Bushey & Sons, and Todd in New York was once more a twoyard firm.

In addition it had, of course, its burner and specialty equipment plant which, as Todd Combustion Equipment, Inc., or later as a division, would contribute to corporate income and reputation for another thirty years. Ousted after more than a decade from the quarters it had occupied at the 23rd Street

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plant, it moved early in 1937 back to Manhattan, where its address became 601 West 26th Street. Here it perfected at this period an improved Variable Capacity burner and a Rotary Fuel Oil Burner "with ability to burn any of the presentday commercial fuel oils under fully automatic control."

Use of Todd burners was still strong both here and abroad. In 1939 the new trio of Panama Liners came out equipped with them as part of their "full automatic engine control," and they were specified by the Maritime Commission for six of its first ten C-2 freighters, including Challenge and Red]acket, launched May 20, 1939, to inaugurate the new class. Overseas it was reported that as of May 31, 1939, Todd Oil Burners, Ltd., m London, had delivered over 5,000 burners to foreign vessels.

Not to be outdone by its subsidiaries in this decade of change, Todd corporate headquarters now decided to move itself. After fifteen years in the Cunard Building·, it shifted in early 1936 to that of another good friend and customer, United States Lines. Geographically, it was not much of a move-just the length of Bowling Green Park. But it g·ave Todd Shipyards Corporation a new mailing address which it would use for over a third of a century: One Broadway.

Neither Todd nor any other yard gut a chance, in the end, at the largest (and ghastliest) potential repair job of depression days, the i11ono Castle, gutted by fire off the New Jersey coast in September, 1934. But that disaster did convey, besides its obvious lessons in safety, discipline, and responsibility, how desperate was the shipyard industry's hunger for work of any kind at that deepest dip of the country's economic fortunes. At the first report that the ship was afire a Todd solicitor was dispatched to Asbury Park, New Jersey, to learn what he could of the extent of the damage and what plans, if any, existed for repairing it. The man ·who was sent on this somewhat macabre prospecting mission was Harold F. Higgins, who would go on to serve the Corporation as a valued and popular sales representative for a full half-century before retiring in 1971.

Having ascertained that the burned-out hulk was under tow to her Wall Street pier, Hig·gins returned to New York andreported his findings, only to be ordered back almost at once to

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the Jersey shore, when it was learned that the wreck had parted its tow and stranded. There he remained, with orders to keep his eyes and ears open, for a full week (during which he almost managed to g·et aboard) until it was clear that the only yard at \Vhich JVforro Castle would ever arrive was a scrapyard.

So the business famine continued, with sizeable jobs as scarce as August snowstorms. One, which Robins did get in April, 1936, and on which it performed what was called "a major piece of ship surgery," was the British steamer W elcombe, raised and broug·ht north after being sunk in the St . .John's River, Florida, by a collision which split her amidships from weather deck to bilg·e. Even as late as March, 1939, the pinch was still painful enough to make a month-long conversion contract to transform the big· ex-Munson liner Pan America into the Army Transport Hunter Liggett an occasion for rejoicing.

Domestic events of this period which struck Robins chroniclers as worthy of record were the introduction of dial telephones at the yard in 1932, the 1935 capsizing of its derricklighter Ox, necessitating her being given a new hull which was launched by the big floating crane iVIonarch in 1936, and an unexplained fire in the latter year which knocked out the yard's main storeroom from March to August.

On Puget Sound the Corporation's new regime started with a near-disaster to the transpacific liner President Madison while under repair at Harbor Island. Lying alongside a repair pier with several side plates removed down to about four feet above the water, and simultaneously loading lumber from a barge on the outboard side, the big steamer was in some way heeled sufficiently so that water poured in and she sank, collapsing against the dock. Refloated after three weeks in what was considered a landmark salvage operation, she then lay idle for over six years until refitted for new Philippine owners, again by Todd, as the President Quezon.

As the decade advanced, two jobs (one involving two ships) came to Todd Seattle which were in the nature of "alumni reunions." The first was the return on December 7, 1937, of the freighter Walter A. Luckenbach, launched almost exactly twenty years earlier by the Seattle Construction & Dry Dock Company,

Ill

and the largest commercial vessel on that firm's order book when it was acquired by Todd Shipyards Corporation. She had come home for general repair of the turbines installed at that time, and, to make the personal reunion complete, the three leading outside machinists who now dismantled them had participated in their installation.

The second reunion was a homecoming to Todd, though not to Seattle. In the summer of 1939 the ex-fruit steamers Oritani and Ormes, built nineteen years before at the Corporation's now-defunct Tebo yard, put in to Harbor Island to be reworked as small general cargo carriers with accommodation for twelve passengers. Renamed Tyee and Taku, respectively, they left Seattle for new careers on the southeastern Alaska service of the Alaska Transportation Company.

During· these years, Todd Seattle acquired a new 16,000-ton floating drydock and parted with a small but historic one. In the spring or summer of 1935, according to Reilly's report at the 1936 annual meeting·, "a floating drydock located at the Seattle Plant and covered by insurance was so damaged as to necessitate abandonment and the building of a new and larger dock, which was completed and placed in operation in January of this year." Four years later, in 1940, what was probably the oldest piece of major equipment at the Seattle yard, venerable Drydock No. 2, built of wood by Robert Moran at the turn of the century, and Harbor Island's first lifting equipment to be transferred from the Seattle Construction yard in 1918, was sold to Canadians for breakwater use in British Columbia.

The new dock, 532 feet in length, consisted of five wooden pontoon sections, of a novel rounded-bottom design intended to eliminate the accumulation of undischarged water which made conventional flat-bottomed drydocks such tempting bait for the borers of teredo-infested Puget Sound. It was built to plans of Admiral Frederic R. Harris, under the direction of an engineer-administrator who already bulked large in Todd affairs and would bulk even larg·er in the decade to come. Roscoe ]. Lamont-who, apparently because of some distaste for his Christian name, was always known as "R.J.," "Jim," or "Pete"-had come to Seattle from the east in time to work for the Morans

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on the USS N ebmska. After some years as ship's engineer and western representative for Electric Boat's submarine construcR tion on the Pacific, he was employed at Todd's Seattle yard, of which he became vice president and general manager in May, 1934, and president twenty months later, succeeding C. W. Wiley.

Lamont's election was to prove an immensely fortunate one for the Corporation less than three years later, when the acceleration of the defense program and of merchant marine revival measures already initiated in W'ashington called for rapid expansion of Todd facilities and activities in the northwest. It was also one of a series of personnel developments during the Depression which, while it thinned the ranks of the "old guard" would, by 1940, give the Corporation and its subsidiaries the new leadership under which they would go to war.

The death roll of the thirties included some of the firm's best-remembered names. Besides Todd himself there were two distinguished superintendent engineers, both long retired: Anthony ]. McGarvey, of Robins fame, in 1933, and J. S. Milne, who had headed the Tebo yard until the mid-twenties, in 1936. Mention has already been made of the deaths of A. C. Deyo and C. W. Wiley in 1935 and of J. A. Eves in 1936, the first two still in harness as chief executives of Mobile and Seattle, the third still a director of the latter subsidiary. But the loss which perhaps shocked the Todd community most deeply was the sudden death in Miami Beach of George Dawe, president of Robins and executive vice president of the Corporation, on February 9, 1939. Dawe, a member of Todd's old "gang," had headed the senior and largest subsidiary for fourteen years. His funeral, attended by 500 friends, business colleagues, and shipping industry representatives, demonstrated the respect and affection in which he was held by the maritime community.

Somewhat ironically, Dawe was survived for a year and a quarter by the man whose retirement in 1925 had put him in

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Three Decades of Robins Management -Seniors of William H. Todd's "Gang": upper left, George J. Robinson; right, George Dawe; lower, Francis J. Gilbride.

-Robimon jJ!toto courte.~y George ]. Robinson II

charge at Erie Basin, George ]. Robinson. Tribute was paid both men in the Keel, publication of which had been revived in November, 1938, after a lapse of over thirteen years.

Dawe's passing left two vacancies which would be filled by men who were to play key roles in the Corporation's tremendous war activities. On February !4, 1939, the presidency of Robins Dry Dock & Repair Company was filled by the election of Francis]. Gilbride, assuring unbroken continuity of administration and policy, inasmuch as Gilbride had been a vice president and member of the Erie Basin management team since the days of Todd's "gang," working in especially close association with Dawe.

Gilbride had already been a director of Todd Shipyards Corporation for two years; hence Dawe's vacant directorship remained open. It was filled February 21 by the election of Joseph Haag, Jr., president of Todd Combustion Equipment, Inc., and a Robins vice president, a young man who had already created and organized Todd's Central Purchase Office, and who was coming to have an executory relationship with Reilly somewhat analogous to that Reilly had once had with Todd. Haag was simultaneously elected a vice president of the parent corporation, having served for the previous two years as its secretary.

The final change necessary to bring a completely new roster (new, that is, since the mid-thirties) of corporate chief executives into being on the eve of Todd's war effort took place in .June, 1940, at Hoboken, when the respected Ernest H. Dendel turned over the title of president of Tietjen & Lang, which he had borne for a decade, to ]. William Jamin, Jr., and assumed that of honorary president. Not that .Jamin's was by any means a new face at Hoboken, any more than was Gilbride's at Erie Basin. His continuous tenure at the New Jersey yard went back to 1910, and he had been its able imd popular vice president and superintendent since 1930.

Thus, as the doldrums of depression began to quicken at the first hints of impending national emergency, Reilly found himself with a new but already well-tested team of Gilbride, Jamin, Lamont, Johnson, and Hesley at his Todd-operated yards (Hesley was senior vice president of Robins in addition to being

ll5

This extensive and diversified output of vessels larg·e and small surely went far to controvert Todd's self-chosen image as a nonshipbuilding firm, even apart from the unquestionably major construction involved in its prolific jumboizing activity. In this connection, the publicity attending the 1958 lengthening of the Richfield tanker David E. Day pointed out that the ship's new midsection was "the largest hull launched in the Los Angeles area" since the end of wartime shipbuilding. In itself, it was a ship 353 feet long with a deadweight carrying capacity of 3,200 tons.

Actually, by the delivery dates of the Day and No. 539, the Corporation had passed the point of no return and was in the process of reverting to full-scale ship construction. But before reviewing these final steps, it is appropriate to take note that the middle and late fifties were another period in which Todd people paused to look back, partly in grief and partly in nostalgia. For this was another time of "changing the guard" such as had previously occurred in the early twenties and late thirties, when the Corporation lost in rapid succession a whole group of veteran leaders and found others to fill their places. Among those retiring from active involvement in directorship or management of Todd affairs were William A. Maloney, Arthur W. Stout, Sr., Fred D. Hesley, and .J. L. Lawder, the last three of whom had played key roles in Todd's development on the Gulf.

Lost by death were Charles F. Strenz in 1954, while still in office as vice president and comptroller; Arthur E. Goddard, the Corporation's first counsel and a member of its 1916 board of directors, in 1955; and two very senior retired executives, Francis J. Gilbride and James McDonald, in 1957. These last were mourned as the only remaining Todd men who had held prominent office in the Corporation from the day of its creation. Their passing left Reilly as the sole survivor of those who had been intimately involved, even in a junior capacity, in the events of 1916.

On May 30, 1959, occurred the death of Lester E. Briese, popular general manager of the Galveston Division, which he had joined in June, 1945, after three years in charge of the war-

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time landing craft production line at the affiliated New Jersey Shipbuilding Corporation.

Meanwhile, younger men who would figure largely in Todd affairs for all or part of the Corporation's remaining history to date were being appointed to fill several of these vacancies. Three who were named directors in 1951 were already general managers of divisions: John T. Gilbride (Los Angeles), who took the place of his father Francis on the latter's resignation from the board; John D. Reilly, Jr. (San Francisco), who similarly succeeded Maloney; and Russell W. Bowes (Combustion Equipment) , who took the seat vacated by Hesley. In 1953 Lawder's place on the board was taken by Francis J. Smyth, and in the months following Strenz' death he was succeeded as comptroller and director by Clifford A. Sheldrake.

On July I, 1955, Todd was reminded of its past somewhat less grimly than by the death of old friends, when a long-lost sheep returned to the corporate fold, where few even remembered it. This stray was the Brooklyn waterfront tract at 23rd Street once known as the Tebo Yacht Basin. Leased in 1937 after being stripped of its equipment, and sold in 1948, it had then been presumably deleted from the books for good. But the buyer had given a mortgage, now defaulted and foreclosed, and Todd once again had a 23rd Street yard which was, said the 1956 annual report, "being operated with satisfactory results pending its resale." No longer operable as a shipyard, it was used chiefly for tying up vessels and performing light voyage repaiYs.

Finally, in March, 1958, it was sold again. The new buyer, under an option surrendered to it by Moore-McCormack Lines, was the City of New York, which proceeded to develop the property as a cargo ship terminal for that company. This time the sale has been for keeps, and the terminal remains in operation at this writing.

The circumstance which clinched Todd Shipyards Corporation's return to major shipbuilding was the award to the Seattle Division late in 1956 of an $18.5 million contract on which it

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New Moore-McCormack cargoliner Mormaccape at Todd's Los Angeles Division, from which she was delivered January 27, 1961.


had bid at Navy request, to build a guided missile destroyer which would ultimately be commissioned as the USS Towers (DDG-9) _ This, reported Reilly and Haag, marked "a new departure for our peacetime activity." The next quarter-century would prove it a farsighted if fateful departure.

An immediate and unavoidable consequence of the award was the authorization by Todd's directors on April 19, 1957, of a $431,000 expenditure to re-erect shipways at Harbor Island near the site of those which had launched 46 destroyers less than twenty years earlier. A new plate shop had just been completed at the same yard.

A further board authorization the following month was not

unavoidable-yet_:but was all the more significant for that reason, as reflecting the new policy line. This was a decision to commit $880,000 to rehabilitating the decayed shipbuilding facilities at San Pedro, as urged by the Division's young general manager and courageously endorsed by top management at One Broadway, "in view of shipbuilding and jurriboizing prospects." Their assessment was vindicated on February 14, 1958, wl1en a contract was signed with Moore-McCormack to build two 466-

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Although this purchase was made in the confident belief that Lester "forms a good base for our program of expanding through diversification," it very soon proved to have been art unfortunate move. In spite of optimistic plans announced in 1966, on the basis of "the highest backlog of orders in [Lester's] history," to build a new plant "to accommodate present and future needs," it was necessary by 1967 to admit that "operating results for the year have been disappointing." Though a plant site was acquired, construction was deferred-permanently, as it turned out. Two management shake-ups and a "prime objective" set in 1969, of expanding the Lester products line, failed to improve matters and the decade ended on the rueful note that the subsidiary's 1970 sales were down by 44%, with small consolation to be found in the fact that times were bad for the entire machine tool industry. Though its disposal was considered as early as the August, 1970, directors' meeting, Lester would remain a drag on Todd's results for several years more.

A more successful diversification move, because the property acquired could contribute effectively to the success of Todd's principal business, was the purchase in January, 1969, of Designers & Planners, Inc., for 18,000 shares of the Corporation's stock. Prominent as a design agent for both naval and merchant construction, the new subsidiary, it was said in that year's annual report, "will strengthen our engineering and design capacity in our principal business of ship repair, conversion, and building."

The enlarged financial scope of Todd's business activities and balance sheets, and its buying and selling of subsidiaries all tended to belie the low profile it had generally maintained in the financial community from its earliest days. Though its stock had been marketed, it had been unlisted on any exchange and, in general, fairly close held. In the wake of the Lester purchase and contemporaneous changes in Securities and Exchange Commission regulations, the decision was made to go more explicitly "public." This led initially to an application filed April 26, 1965, for listing on the American Stock Exchange. On August 12, this was granted, and Todd shares (though traded there by

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special privilege since 1921) were at last available for purchase and sale on an organized market.

It was generally felt, however, by those closest to the Corporation's fiscal affairs, that this should be only an interim step. The business needs and opportunities then anticipated for the seventies would, they believed, require the highest possible financial credentials, calling automatically for listing on the New York Stock Exchange. This was a somewhat more timeconsuming matter, but by midsummer, 1968, two months after the stockholders had g·iven their vote of confidence by authorizing a 3-for-1 stock split, Todd's elig-ibility for Exchange listing was being revie·wed on Wall Street. A favorable ruling in October was followed by formal admission February 13, 1969, with trading of the stock to begin March 25.

On the latter date the market opened with a ceremonial purchase of 100 shares by the new member's president for Mrs. Gilbride. This was immediately followed by another transaction for 900 shares. The ticker symbol "TOD" was at last on the Big Board.

The decade's closing years were another of those recurrent periods in which the Corporation has been literally swept by a wave of deaths among its leaders of the present and recent past. Starting· in 1965 it lost Francis J. Smyth, its Vice President for Public Relations, followed in less than two months by .Joseph B. Meyer, only three years after his retirement as general manager of the Brooklyn Division. Early the next year, again within a two months' period, it paid last respects to J. L. Lawder, honorary vice president and a retired general manager who had joined the firm in the same year as John Reilly, 1907, and to Robert Freebairn, retired vice president for sales, whose contact with the firm had begun in 1920, when as owner's representative he oversaw the construction of the Sinclair tankers Manuel Ti.ionda and W. E. Ogilvie at the old Tebo yard, and formed contacts which led to his subsequent employment by Todd . .July brought the death of a man who was already a Todd immortal, John J. Villaire.

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In February, 1969, the Corporation mourned one of its most revered wartime shipbuilding executives and its postwar chief estimator, Arthur W. Stout, Sr. But the year 1970 exacted the heaviest toll of all, starting with the death in office of New Orleans general manager Bert L. Hale, February 25. He was followed three months later by another legendary wartime leader, R. J. Lamont, honorary vice president since his retirement in 1953. A particularly heavy blow to the New York headquarters in September was the death in office of the popular sales vice president John H. Baker, still a young man despite his 41 years' service with Todd. Rounding off the sorrowful list in November was a retired executive who, like Villaire, had been with the Corporation from the start, J. William Jamin, Jr.

In retrospect, it is tempting to see this sad succession as building up to the climactic bereavement Todd was to experience in 1971. For, while these ten, each highly important to the Todd scene in his own way, were leaving that scene, the man under whose supervision they had all spent a large part of their careers in shipbuilding· was approaching the end of his own lifetime with Todd. John Reilly might no longer come to New York, but New York went to him; he was still chairman, and there are plenty still on deck who will testify that, even if out of sight, the Boss was not easily put out of mind.

Changes were about to take place, however, which would mean that the office from which he had directed the Corporation's survival and expansion for more than half its lifespan would not even be a Todd office much longer. For the lease on its space at One Broadway was due to expire in May, 1971, and was not being renewed, reportedly because of a rumor that the building (still standing in 1981) was to be razed. Instead, all eyes (and the Bridge cameraman's lens) were focussed after 1969 on a slowly rising black office tower at the point where State Street and Whitehall unexpectedly meet, whose address, though it faces on Whitehall, had been fixed by the developer as One State Street Plaza.

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