The dreamboat

A group of passionate amateurs has invested a quarter-century, and $3 million in government money, in rebuilding the steamship Nobska. Will it float?

by Ellen Barry

Two years ago, the SS Nobska was hauled into Dry Dock No. 1 of the Charlestown Navy Yard to the rousing accompaniment of the Boston Police Department Pipe Band.

Dry Dock No. 1, right beside the USS Constitution museum, is the maritime equivalent of the Walk of Fame -- it's where old ships become current events. And the Nobska was more than an event, it was an inspiring story: here, through the efforts of an amazing group of volunteers, was America's last coastal steamship, getting in shape to resume the route she ran for 48 years between New Bedford, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket. Senators John Kerry and Edward Kennedy had full-throatedly supported the project, as did every major news outlet in the area. FULL SPEED AHEAD! enthused a Boston Globe editorial. That day, the New England Steamship Foundation promised that the Nobska would be restored to "better than new" condition by the summer of 1998.

But the summer of 1998 has come and gone, and it doesn't take an engineering degree to see that the Nobska isn't going anywhere for a good long while. Ask museum volunteers about the ship, and they respond with blank stares and go rummaging through old publicity material. Although the US Department of Transportation allotted $3 million to the project as part of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA), work came to a halt about a year ago, when the last million was held up by Congress. While the ship was sitting untouched in Boston this spring, the Steamship Foundation's newsletter was asking members to raise funds to defray $175,000 in administrative debt incurred by renovating and operating its headquarters in New Bedford.

When the last million of the government money, which renovators expect to receive in October, runs out in the spring of 1999, the project will still need upward of $8 million to be finished by 2001 or 2002 at the earliest. Where that money will come from, no one is certain.

The Nobska's troubles don't end there. In the place where the ship still holds the greatest significance -- Martha's Vineyard -- local officials are arguing that the Nobska has no place in the modern transportation market. The possibility of the ship's ever obtaining a license to run its historic route looks increasingly distant.

But if you ask the stalwarts who have invested a quarter-century in the Nobska, who conceived their mission virtually the moment the ship was retired from service in 1973, they'll say the project is going according to plan. Or -- perhaps more significantly -- that any effort like this is essentially an act of faith.

"We've never been afraid of failing," says Bill Ewen, a commercial artist and part-time Vineyard resident who has been working on this project since 1975. "We're afraid of not trying."

But this is one of those junctures where faith may not be sufficient. The question that may determine the Nobska's fate now is not whether this group has the devotion and know-how to finish the project. It's more basic than that. With millions more needed to get her back in service, the question is whether this kind of perfect historical preservation is enough of a social imperative to be worth bankrolling.

Meanwhile, there's nothing very useful about a ship half-raised from the dead. Do we need the Nobska?

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The Nobska's defenders would say yes; she represents the last of her kind.

It is a strange truth that during the last decade of the 20th century, grown men can still lose their composure over a reciprocating steam engine. By 1950, steam engines had mostly been replaced by diesel engines, which were more compact, required far less labor, and eradicated the danger of landscape-flattening boiler explosions. Like the hundreds of other steamships sent to the scrap heap before her, the Nobska was retired because the diesel engine forced her out of the market. Everything about diesel was more efficient.

But to steam buffs -- a group of committed amateurs across the country who number upward of 12,000 -- efficiency is overbalanced by intangibles. A steam engine is referred to as "she," points out Joe Rice, editor-in-chief of Live Steam magazine, which caters to hobbyists; a diesel engine, by contrast, is an "it."

"Steam engines are honorary living things," says Aaron Isaacs, a former president of the Minnesota Transport Museum. "Anybody who has had any experience with steam will call every other power source impersonal. Mechanical," he adds, as if that were a bad thing to say about an engine.

These are the arguments that come up when members of the Steamship Foundation defend their project. Beyond the pure mechanics of the steam engine is a vast web of historical associations. Steam buffs link the steam engine with the ascendance of American industry, with the development of the American middle class, and, in some cases, with a time that to many simply seems better.

"Steam power built this country. The steam engine was what the microchip is now," says Ewen. "One of the reasons we feel what we're doing is important is that present and future generations will be able to experience what it was like. That's something that will [otherwise] be totally lost."

Of course, curiosity seekers can look at steam engines in museums. The Nobska project aims higher than that -- enthusiasts like Ewen actually want to preserve the experience of travel before diesel's efficiency changed everything. Cutting transportation time by two-thirds meant transportation ceased to be an end in itself. What's left today is the purely recreational cruise ship and the purely functional airplane flight. Technology has made the world safe for ValuJet: vinyl seats, foil sacks of peanuts. Contrast this to the graceful arc of the crankshaft, the haunting cry of a steam whistle. All these intangibles factor into the 25-year crusade of the Steamship Foundation.

"What women don't understand is that men fall in love all the time; they just fall in love with mechanical objects," says Isaacs, who has been involved in refurbishing steam locomotives. "I like to say every one of these trains has been restored by heartbroken men."

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If it weren't for the unwavering love of a small group of men, the Nobska would have long since been sold off for scrap metal. At the beginning of the project, it was just something a group of friends talked about. The first great initiatives included such sentimental activities as turning to people who remembered the Nobska in her heyday and asking them about details they recalled. The ship's fans went at it like do-it-yourselfers.

But the Nobska wasn't a scale model. It was a 210-foot ship, and it was deteriorating. Over the ensuing quarter-century, the group that began as the Friends of the Nobska has remodeled itself as the New England Steamship Foundation, and its dues-paying membership has climbed toward the thousand mark. But the price tag of the project has risen even faster.

A glance over old newspaper reports is enough to tell the story. During the late '80s, organizers thought they could do the job for a few million dollars. In 1994, project spokesmen were giving an estimate of $7 million; by 1995 it was $7.5 million. By July 1996, that estimate had crept up to $9 million. Now, organizers are estimating that they need an additional $8 to $10 million on top of the $3 million they have already received from the Department of Transportation. And in order to get the ship on the water by the year 2000 as a millennial event -- one possibility organizers have mentioned -- the Nobska project would require an infusion of an additional $14 million, according to Bob Lamb, the project's vice president for engineering, who has been involved in the effort for three years. That would bring the total price tag up to $17 million.

In dark moments -- and there have been moments darker than this one, according to Steamship Foundation standard-bearers -- the Nobska's supporters have generally fallen back on the supernatural force of their enthusiasm. Sometimes it has worked. One person they converted was Adam Spiegel, the Baltimore businessman who bought the steamship a few years after she was retired from service. Spiegel had his own plans, which included gutting the Nobska. He didn't know that his purchase came complete with a fan club.

"They made it known right away," Spiegel recalls. "They viewed any change as undesirable. They were always polite, but they just made it very clear where they were coming from."

After years of friction with the group -- at one point, says Ewen, Spiegel had barred its members from boarding the ship -- Spiegel's attitude began to change; his selling price for the steamship dropped from $600,000 to $350,000, and finally he practically gave it to them, Spiegel says.

"We'd heard rumors that someone said something to him. He ended up in effect donating it to us," Ewen recalls. "He turned out to be a hero."

And although Spiegel explains his choice at the time as the indirect result of an interest-rate hike, he also says he was moved by the activists' dedication. "The loving care that went into that ship, the care that went into polishing and oiling every part, you can't imagine. It was fantastic," he says. "Somehow, their enthusiasm seemed eternal to me."

From within the project, there's an optimistic sense that the obstacles already overcome are so great that the challenges before the group now are not so daunting. In the past, dark moments have come just before breakthroughs. There was the period when Spiegel started stripping and selling off the irreplaceable controls in the engine room -- and then changed his mind. Then, in 1995, the Nobska was in danger of sinking at her dock in New Bedford. That's when the Steamship Foundation secured its $3 million from the Highway Department as part of the ISTEA, which had allotted $1 billion to congestion- and pollution-easing transportation alternatives.

"It's been kind of surprising," says Ewen. "We've generally been very lucky at the right time."

Beyond the luck is pure determination.

"Hell, no, I don't intend to fail," says Bob Lamb, the engineer. "I'm not in this to fail. I don't like failure."

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That might be enough if it weren't for this peculiarity of the Nobska plan: the thrust of the project is to put her back on her old route, so that she is a viable transportation option as well as a "floating museum." That would mean squeezing her back into a market that has been crowded by diesel ferries -- as a novelty experience, granted, but also as a ferry transporting as many as 1000 people to and from the islands every day. Traveling to Nantucket on the Nobska would be more expensive than the regular ferry, at around $50, and slower, at three hours, but also what Steamship Foundation president John Aylmer terms "a nice alternative to rushing across Nantucket Sound."

But on Martha's Vineyard -- the place where the Nobska was practically a member of the family for almost half a century -- the foundation ran into a roadblock. Obtaining a license meant applying to the Woods Hole, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket Steamship Authority, and that didn't turn out the way the group hoped. The Steamship Foundation did secure a license in 1994 to run between New Bedford and Nantucket, contingent on getting the ship in the water by May 1999, although now that looks impossible. The Vineyard governor of the Steamship Authority, however, rejected their application from the beginning, arguing that the Nobska plan was more sentimental than practical.

"We all remember the old boats in these waters and we love the memory of them. But make no mistake: this is a business plan with significant negative implications," wrote Ron Rappaport, governor of the Steamship Authority, in a 1995 Vineyard Gazette editorial.

And despite considerable fondness for the ship, some people lost their enthusiasm when it became clear that the project was likely to depend on government money, says Eric Turkington, the state representative from Falmouth.

"I think people up here -- if you ask them, `Wouldn't it be nice to have the Nobska sailing?' -- I think in their hearts, people remember it fondly and it would be nice to see it," says Turkington. "But if you would ask them all, did they want $3 million of their tax money to go into this, you would not have gotten the same answer."

And although he is an unusual case, one former volunteer has gotten to the point of wishing the Steamship Foundation would just give up its quixotic pursuit. David Pritchard, a documentary film producer, spent years as the project's most visible spokesman, until he left last year because of friction with the foundation's board. The time has come, Pritchard says, to admit that the Nobska can't be rebuilt through pure love.

"Frankly, I wish the state would just step up to the bar and take it over," says Pritchard. "What we need to do is make this one big push and if we don't make it, give it to the Smithsonian. I don't think [the current Steamship Foundation board] will ever do that until [they are] absolutely forced to. That will be when a federal marshal comes and puts a piece of paper down."

As Pritchard sees it, the foundation's failing was that its members were never realistic about how much they could do themselves.

"They don't even know how people see them," he says. "They know enough to keep a dream alive."

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Of course, members of the Steamship Foundation would say their greatest strength was never recognizing their limitations. And all the naysayers will look foolish if the Nobska does steam out of New Bedford again someday, whistles blowing, and if she manages to generate surplus revenue over the long term, as organizers promise.

But there's still the matter of money up front. With the last million from the Highway Department, the project's engineers hope to finish the hull by the spring, so the Nobska will be able to leave dry dock and float again. Then, the Steamship Foundation expects to hear within three months whether the Maritime Administration will guarantee a loan to finish the project -- a precedent-breaking move, Aylmer says, since the Maritime Administration has never in its history extended such a guarantee to a historical preservation project.

If that doesn't work, it's back to the drawing board with private donors and foundations -- a route that has not yielded much money to date, judging from the debt the organization ran up while the government money was stuck in Washington. If the steamship license doesn't work out, "we would envision such things as wedding receptions, alumni reunions, corporate seminars, spend the day at sea, feed 'em, bring 'em back," says Aylmer. Some options have been dismissed outright: several times the foundation has been approached by gambling operations wanting to operate a casino on board, but Aylmer says that possibility has been rejected as "inappropriate."

Members of the Steamship Foundation are far from admitting defeat. But when pressed, some of the Nobska visionaries will speculate on why the project's progress has been so halting at times -- why, for instance, the Nobska has spent the last year accumulating dust at the Charlestown Navy Yard. Part of the problem, always, has been communicating to outsiders why re-creating history is important.

"I suppose I thought that there would be more interest from foundations and corporations," says Ewen. "It may be our fault that we haven't educated them enough. Because of my love for the project, and other people's, I wonder sometimes why more people haven't come forward."

And to Steamship Foundation board chairman Art Flathers -- who, when he was reached for an interview, was busy trying to rewrite a statement of the Nobska's mission -- all this resistance to the preservation idea is an element of the American character. In England, restoration of ships is a national preoccupation, he points out. Here, people don't have that urge.

"Americans have lived on the leading edge of change, and don't look back much," says Flathers. "Many historians say Americans don't understand and don't study history. Europeans live in the past. Americans have never learned to live in the past." It's a quality that has made America great, but it's also a quality that has gotten us into trouble -- say, during the Vietnam War, when the French experience could have affected our policies. Americans insist on rushing blindly forward, he says.

Meanwhile, the Nobska is waiting for a verdict at Charlestown Navy Yard. Certainly it is one of the most beloved vehicles in the history of this seagoing region, and certainly it is the last of its kind. The Steamship Foundation continues to issue newsletters and business plans in hopes that people will begin to understand why the Nobska should be immune to the market forces that first took her off the water. If diesel's efficiency made the Nobska obsolete, then to hell with efficiency, they say; the old way was better. In that sense, they are not just restoring history, but also fighting it.