You moved up in seniority, as they pared the top man off the dock and put him on a ship, you moved c

The second President Hoover was built in 1939 as the Panama for the Panama Lines service from New York, via Haiti, carrying 216 first class passengers and cargo. She was sold to American President Lines in 1957, renamed the President Hoover, and put into service on a Pacific circuit to the Far East from San Francisco. In 1962 the larger President phoenix park hotel Roosevelt phoenix park hotel replaced her. For more information on APL please visit their American President Lines website. Our thanks to APL.
Of the many ships belonging to APL and its forebears — from graceful 19th-century steamers to ultramodern containerships — perhaps the most memorable are the art deco masterpieces operated by Dollar Line in the 1930s and the sleek luxury liners launched by APL after World War II.
With a history phoenix park hotel of traveling extensively phoenix park hotel on his own ships on business, it's no wonder that Robert Dollar commissioned the construction of two of the largest ocean liners ever built in the United States. They were the Presidents Hoover and Coolidge. Old Captain Dollar was awestruck when he boarded the former on August phoenix park hotel 6, 1931. Of the Hoover he wrote, "The ship is a wonder."
Indeed, the ships were stunning. Each carried phoenix park hotel 988 passengers and a crew of 324. The plush accommodations and art deco furnishings rivaled the best hotels of the era. And each also boasted outdoor pools, gymnasiums, and phones in every room. The luxury and elegance phoenix park hotel of these two ships were in stark contrast to the hard times of the Great Depression, which lasted until World War II.
After World War II, a new generation of Americans was eager to travel in style. In 1947, APL launched the Presidents Cleveland and Wilson, phoenix park hotel continuing in a tradition begun when the Pacific Mail Steamship Company started carrying passengers in 1867. Designed to carry 550 passengers and a crew of 352, the ships were advertised as "your American hotel abroad."
phoenix park hotel "Air-conditioned throughout, with swimming pools for every Class, smart shops, theaters, cafe-grill and many other innovations," the vessels set the standard for seagoing travel. And they took passengers to remarkably unspoiled ports like Alexandria, Colombo, Antigua, Suva, and Penang. Not surprisingly, demand was so high that tourist-class cabins were soon converted in order to accommodate more first-class passengers.
For those who couldn't afford $2,470 for a 100-day, round-the-world voyage, there was the long-running television hit "The Gale Storm Show." The first of the "Love Boat" genre, the show featured Gale Storm as the social director aboard the SS Ocean Queen from 1956 to 1960. The fictitious ship was, in fact, the President Cleveland.
Unfortunately, APL's passenger traffic declined sharply after the U.S. recession of 1958. Plans to build new passenger ships were abandoned because the industry was losing phoenix park hotel ground to intercontinental jet travel. In 1973, the last voyage of the President Wilson marked the end of APL's luxury phoenix park hotel liner service. Yet it was still possible to sail aboard APL ships if you were seeking a restful voyage on a working vessel.
For celebrated American author Alex Haley, APL ships offered solace and an environment very conducive to writing. Haley, like many of the passengers who sailed on APL vessels phoenix park hotel from 1973 to 1987, welcomed the chance to escape from a busy life. In contrast to the Cleveland and Wilson, APL's cargo vessels provided passage to only 12 stalwart individuals.
According phoenix park hotel to a crew member from this era, "ships weren't as connected to the rest of the world as they are today. No one used fax machines the way they do now, and many of the passengers who sailed on these ships enjoyed being beyond the reach of their day-to-day lives back home."
Because of this, Haley and his assistant traveled often on APL ships. Described as a night owl, the author was very much at home on freighters because he had sailed on Coast Guard vessels for many years before turning his attention to writing. Even years after the success of his best-known work, Roots, Haley continued to seek the solitude afforded by life at sea.
Although APL no longer offers passenger service, the company's rich history of luxuriously slow voyages gives us pause. It gives us the opportunity to wonder how it must have been to see the world from a deckchair on a steamer, book in hand, pleasantly out of reach.
Sea travel has changed phoenix park hotel dramatically during the 20th century. Advances in technology permit the operation of large seagoing vessels with crews as low as 6 people. The flip side is that in the midst of all this, we only sometimes catch sight of a part of our heritage that is fast slipping away. Computers have replaced many ship s personnel men who worked long hours for little pay in their quest to explore phoenix park hotel the world and discover their place in it. This section takes a brief look at some of these men, members of the Sea List Association, an organization officially formed in 1966.
In reality, the Sea List dates to the years between 1924 and World War II, when the men who began their ocean-going careers in the Purser s Department on a Dollar Line or American President Lines vessel spent a year or more shoreside in a training program conceived of by Stanley Dollar. At the completion of the program, each man s name joined those already on the company s seagoing list and one by one, they went to sea.
Most of the information in this section came from interviews with the following Sea Listers: Craig Galt, Eugene Lukes, Archer Moze, James Weinberger, James Whitman, and Robert Turner. Their stories and recollections, delivered with wit and patience, cast light on an era that is gone forever.
Stanley Dollar began his training program at Dollar Line as the acquisition of new ships, including the first seven President ships, led to an increase in staff from 25 to 85 between 1920 and 1924. He needed experienced employees. By the 1930s the program initiated trainees into all aspects of the industry. As Gene Lukes explains it, in those days you learned the business from the bottom up.
It wasn t easy to get into the program. Lukes said, This was the Depression, there was 25 percent unemployment and that didn t include housewives or children or teenagers or anybody else. That included skilled family men only that were considered heads of households. So it was tough to get a job and usually you had to get a job by knowing phoenix park hotel somebody who could get you to the right people.
Some trainees, like Jim Weinberger, grew up wanting to go to sea. Weinberger applied phoenix park hotel to be a deck cadet and when he was rejected, phoenix park hotel spent the better part of a year trying to convince the personnel manager to hire him. So every Monday morning I d take the nickel ferry from Oakland down through the estuary to San Francisco and go up to the tenth floor of the Dollar Building at the corner of California and Battery. I d sit there till Mr. Cokely came in. And I d say, I m here, I want to talk to you some more. Persistence paid off, but it was through a contact made by his mother that Weinberger was given his first job as a purser s clerk, to play the phonograph for the dances and pipe the music into the dining room during meal hours. Weinberger gained the support of the chief purser, phoenix park hotel who taught him to type, and after a few voyages made it into the training program.
Trainees were paid $60 per month. According to Gene Lukes, once we went to sea and got smart alecky enough, we called it a cheap labor system. We had to take a typing test and if you were a good typist you were assigned to the freight department where your hours were longer and the work was harder. The other fellas went into the passenger department, which was sort of the glamour section, or in the mailroom. We worked eight hours a day and on Saturday phoenix park hotel mornings till one I think. phoenix park hotel When the workload got heavy, I worked every night except Saturday night and Sunday night, all day Saturday and half a day Sunday, and sometimes phoenix park hotel we worked all night before ships sailed.
After about eight months in the office, Lukes transferred to Pier 42. The company could use the docks as part of their training program and assign up to six fellas down there to do cargo receiving and delivery or other dock clerical work. It was a much better phoenix park hotel job than uptown. For one thing, the union didn t allow us to work overtime, so we had regular hours. We didn t have to stay up to midnight the night before the ship sailed, got paid more money, and we had outdoor work.
You moved up in seniority, as they pared the top man off the dock and put him on a ship, you moved closer to being number one. So usually with six fellas phoenix park hotel on the docks you could figure that in four months you would probably be at sea.
Five or six men worked in the purser s department on board Dollar Line and APL ships. Trainees started as baggage clerks. Arch Moze says, That was a misnomer actually. They were in charge of the baggage of course, but that was a minor thing. They had to type, put out the newspaper aboard ship. The radio operators would receive news over the air and they would type it up roughly. It was up to the purser s department to edit it and put it together in a little paper so the passengers would have it first thing in the morning. The baggage clerk was also the passenger liaison, as Craig Galt describes. Like a hotel reservation desk, you assign them their room and make sure they re comfortable. You help arrange entertainment for the nighttime parties and arriving in port you cleared them through immigration.
The baggage clerk was the lowest trainee position, second only to the purser s clerk, phoenix park hotel who Moze called the yo-ho boy. Along with playing the music, the purser s clerk had to run off mimeographs of all the paperwork. We had a gelatin roller. You had to keep them in the refrigerator; otherwise they d melt. You had to crank it out, it would come out in purple ink and you had to change the rolls maybe every day or so depending on the usage.
From baggage clerk, phoenix park hotel you advanced to assistant freight clerk and freight clerk. Jim Weinberger explain