The Philip D. Block

This is the ore boat that Carl spent the better part of his 1950 summer on.  He had finished his service enlistment in New York and a year of college before working on this Great Lakes ore boat to earn money to go back to school in the fall.  He was a deck hand, scraping paint and painting to keep the boat in ship-shape condition.  There was one old sailor who was especially interesting.  He was a watchman while she was sailing in the summers and fall, but during winter, when the ore fields closed, he stayed aboard the boat as a security guard.  He built ships and towns in bottles when he wasn’t busy with his duties.  On days when the weather was bad, he’d call Carl down to get paint for his bottle ships, a small quantity of brown or red or whatever he needed for that particular model.  On those days Carl was more than happy to sit down and watch him for a bit to get out of the bad weather.  It was a fascinating thing to see the models being built that way.  One trip, when they were traveling empty on their way north to Superior, Wisconsin to pick up some ore, Carl was doing some welding in he hold.  He had finished his job and was on his way up the ladder carrying all of his equipment.  He had his torch, welding rods and a broom in one arm and was grabbing the ladder rungs with the other as he climbed.  At the top, he reached to grab the bar and missed it, falling about 25 feet back onto the steel deck.  He didn’t try to move.  He could feel that he had hurt his back.  They hoisted him up in a basket and put him in his cabin until they got to Superior, Wisconsin.  He was in the hospital there until they could move him to Indiana Harbor, Indiana.  Inland Steel had at least one hospital floor there for their employees.  An x-ray showed a process fracture of one of his backbones so they wouldn’t let him walk.  Then he went to the Marine Hospital in Chicago.  There they let him walk some.  When he asked the lady doctor how long they would keep him there, she answered, “Can you walk OK?”  He said, “Yes”.  She said, “Then you can go home.”  So he did!  That ended his job at Inland Steel.  He started back to Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin in the fall.