backscatter

Ghosts

By Donald Christiansen

I recently attended a reunion of crew members and airmen who served aboard a World War II aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. San Jacinto. Sailors have a love affair with the first ship on which they served. This one, an Independence-class light fleet carrier, after the war was transferred to the reserve fleet, and did not succumb to the shipbreaker’s torch until 1972. Seven of her eight sisters were already gone, but one, the U.S.S. Cabot, was still afloat in 2000. The attention of historians and crew members then turned to her, in hopes of saving her as a naval museum. She was declared a National Historic Landmark. Though millions of dollars were allocated and/or donated for the purpose, government bureaucracy and salvagers’ greed were too much to overcome. She languished in a Texas ship canal while vandals and salvagers picked her bones. In 2002, photographed from above, she was a mere skeleton, and trucks were seen convoying her torched remains to someplace in Mexico. Now all nine carriers are ghosts — living only in the memories of their surviving crew members.

A Ghost in the Making

The image of my own ghost ship, the San Jac, was in my thoughts as I returned from the reunion, only to find Bob Lucky’s IEEE Spectrum column on the likely demise of the splendiferous Bell Laboratories Research facility in Holmdel, N.J. The Eero Saarinen-designed edifice, now owned by Lucent, once employed 6,000. By Lucky’s estimate, 1,200 or so may remain, and Lucent may put the building on the market, complete with its spacious campus and reflecting pond.

I toured the six-story research palace at the height of its glory, and remember well the glass exterior and impressive open foyer extending skyward and surrounded by numerous specialized laboratories, many of which I was privileged to visit. So I was sympathetic to Bob’s nostalgic fondness for the facility, which he saw for the first time as a new engineering graduate even before the structure was complete, and where he worked for the next 30 years.

If the Holmdel lab, including its 470 acres of landscaped grounds, is sold to a developer it may become another ghost, hallowed only in the memories of those who once labored there in inventive splendor.

A Happy Ghost

My own first job as a new engineering graduate was in a venerable Newburyport, Massachusetts, mill building erected in 1880. It had been acquired by Hytron Radio and Electronics Corp. (later the CBS Electronics Division) in 1941 for the manufacture of proximity fuse components and radio receiving tubes for the military, and later, television receiving tubes and cathode-ray tubes. Though I went on to work in the brand-new headquarters facilities in Danvers and the Minoru Yamasaki-designed semiconductor plant in Lowell, my heart remained with the old mill building. When CBS closed it in 1959, I worried. What would become of it? A number of small enterprises successively occupied it until, finally, it was abandoned. Upon my visits to Newburyport, I would cautiously approach the block in which it stood, afraid I would find a town parking lot in its stead. Or worse, what might a developer have replaced it with?

But on my most recent visit, lo and behold, it had been turned into a luxury condominium (“The Courtyard”) by a sensitive architect who had retained its classic exterior intact and incorporated its original massive mill beams into a central atrium easily worthy of recognition by McGraw-Hill’s Architectural Record. When I introduced myself to one of the residents, we discovered mutual interests and are collaborating on a history of the building. I am now partitioning a scale drawing of the building’s three floors to show its various laboratories, offices and manufacturing departments as they existed in the 1950s. As I walk through the building today, I can envision a colleague at my side, discussing the problems of decades past. In one of the apartments, I readily transport myself back in time, peering at a ‘scope waveform in a long-dismantled darkened screen room.

Why is it that we treasure ghosts like these with great fondness? Some of us are fascinated by the history of technology, industrial archaeology and the preservation of artifacts. But I think it goes beyond that, having much to do with the colleagues with whom we were privileged to work and the accomplishments that we were fortunate to take part in within these memorable, nurturing environments.

Whatever the reason, our ghosts linger in our subconscious, darting forth full blown at unscheduled moments to evoke times and events we are glad we did not miss.

Resources

For more on ghosts and ghosts-to-be:

Technology and Society, the quarterly published by the Society for the History of Technology.

IA, the biannual published by the Society for Industrial Archeology.

D. Christiansen, “The Last Survivor (U.S.S. Cabot),” p. 81, The Saga of the San Jac: The Aircraft Carrier U.S.S. San Jacinto (CVL-30) in World War II, privately published, 2005.

C. K. Hyde, “Ruin and Restoration: The Fates of Two Historic Auto Plants in Detroit,” Society for Industrial Archeology Newsletter, Vol. 34, No. 3,
Summer 2005.

R. W. Lucky, “Lab for Sale,” IEEE Spectrum, p. 92, North American edition, September 2005.

Donald Christiansen is the former editor and publisher of IEEE Spectrum and an independent publishing consultant. He can be reached at donchristiansen@ieee.org.