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Page 7 THOROUGHBREDS by RICHARD GEBHART Of rich potpourri, the spring of 1909 on the Great Lakes combined elements of intrigue to all sectors of shipping. Shipbuilding was prolific, and on a single day, March 27th, from Ecorse to Lorain, a benchmark was reached when the steamers La Belle, Andrew S. Upson, Denmark and North Sea had their hulls immersed from fresh water for the first time. Remarkably, by the time these steamers slid from the ways, the number of vessels launched already that spring was nearing double figures. The winter had been mild, but union activism was not. Led by President Livingstone, the Lake Carriers Association, managers of numerous vessel fleets, including the monolithic Steel Trust entity, were pushing for "open shop" policies aboard lake boats. Targeted for the 1909 navigation season were members of the engineers contingent. After a bitter experience in 1908 in which a "welfare plan" was outlinedby the L.C. A. tocommence open shop policy, engineers and "black gang" workers began walking off the job early in April of 1909 in protest of open shop. Confrontations between union men and nonunion replacements increasingly sprang up, and when a strike was voted for in late April, violent outbursts echoed from the docks all along the lakes. Not only were fisticuffs common, but gang beatings as well. Vessels crewed by non-union men were stoned as they crept below bridges and viaducts. Gunshots would ring out. After a strike was ordered, ship jumping by union men was common as soon as vessels reached docks in various ports. At the Soo in late April as ice was loosening and passage through the locks was at hand, many vessel masters refused to allow shore leave to crewmen fearing they would join the strike. One ingenious captain posted a small pox quarantine warning on the cabin doors of his idled ore boat. (It would be a long, bitter strike. Further evidence of these times can be found in Dwight Boyer's Great Stories of the Great Lakes.) As news of the labor unresolve gobbled the headlines in marine news columns around the lakes, the sole trump card that could be dealt to gamer the attention of mariners and newspaper readers alike would be the one played by nature. As sparks flew dockside in lake ports where union men duked it out with scabs, and roostertails or sparks arced from hull plates about to be assembled into more new lake boats, then crystallized, icy, waterborne "sparks" were about to fly from the deep water of the lakes themselves. A harbinger of things to come was unveiled when the Cleveland-based fishing tug George A. Floss was overwhelmed by a quickly brewed gale on April 7th on Lake Erie. A month later the hulk of the Floss would be located and towed back to Cleveland. Seven men lost their lives when the Floss capsized, including two men who had booked passage on the Floss for a sight-seeing venture. What they saw they wouldn't live through. After fitting-out in Milwaukee, the steamer Eber Ward had steam raised by mid-April and departed for Chicago. After a considerable delay, the Ward was finally loaded with a grain cargo contracted for delivery at Port Huron, Michigan. Pulling away from Chicago late on the 19th, the Ward began her trip down the Lake Michigan under superb sailing conditions. Sailing conditions remained glorious the next day; clear, blue skies and wrinkle-free lake surface. The Eber Ward was under command of what certainly must qualify as one of the Great Lake's greatest names, Timese LeMay. LeMay himself was on the bridge when the Ward, about six miles west of the Straits of Mackinac, approached what LeMay perceived to be a field of slush ice. Under a full head of steam, the Eber Ward plunged into the ice field. To LeMay's horrors the ice pack was anything but slush, rather a wintry granite quarry, most of which was invisible and lurking below the surface of Lake Michigan.