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Telescope 123 Of all rare privileges, one of the rarest is to be a guest on a Great Lakes freighter. It is an experience that the fortunate recipient is not soon to forget.... any more than he'd forget an invitation to Buckingham Palace.... and for the same reason. Freighters are not in the passenger carrying business, and for this reason one does not arrange for such passage. He must be invited as a guest of the company, and such invitation does not come for the askingl Recently, it was our pleasure to be guests of the Huron Portland Cement Company, on board the Steamer S. T, Crapo, for a round trip between Alpena and Detroit. We learned a great deal about ships and cement. We also got to know the nicest group of people you might ever meet. More of this later. We arrived at the plant gate in Alpena, Michigan at a little past noon, and were immediately taken in tow by Gerald Gilmet of the plant's security force. We indicated that we would like to take pictures of the Crapo coming in to the torturous turning operation required for docking. Mr. Gilmet escorted us to the far side of the slip, an excellent vantage point, and we watched a masterful performance of ship handling. This done, we were taken to the ship and put aboard. We met Capt. James Burke who showed us to stateroom #2, and excused himself for the pressure of business. We settled down to mull over the good fortune of being where we were...but the time to mull was not long. Almost before the ship had been made fast....or so it seemed....a pair of large hoses were being connected at the deck. A set of arms were being lowered from the side wall of the silos, spaced so as to conform to the ship's hatches. Finally, when these had been lowered to a horizontal position, telescopic funnels were attached at four positions to the underside of these "arms". The arms were screw conveyors which push the bulk cement from the silo outboard, where it passes over, and falls through openings to which the telescopes have been hung. Thus the cement falls through the telescopes, and is delivered to the hatches on deck. It was here that we were given our first lesson in cement handling. Cement won't "go" anywhere. It has to be pushed, pumped, or blown. We were witnessing two of these processes in operation at the same time. It was being pushed outboard by a stoker-type screw in the conveyors, and at the same time being pumped and forced by compressed air through the hoses that had been attached to the two fittings on deck. Seven of these conveyors, each equipped with four telescopic funnels; a total of twenty-eight hatches were being fed at one time. Even so, loading took better than six hours.