The Apprentice Class of Thirty-Three

• Chapter 1 The Molder's Gate
• Chapter 2 Thirty-Three Heads
• Chapter 3 The Weight of Cold Steel
• Chapter 4 Red Rivets
• Chapter 5 The Blueprints of Mr. Vance
• Chapter 6 Slag and Salt
• Chapter 7 Chalk Lines on the Keel
• Chapter 8 The Pneumatic Chorus
• Chapter 9 Coffee in the Draft Room
• Chapter 10 Shift at Low Tide
• Chapter 11 Union Handbills
• Chapter 12 The Measure of Temper
• Chapter 13 A Pocket Full of Calipers
• Chapter 14 The Way of the Foreman
• Chapter 15 Scaffolding in the Fog
• Chapter 16 Midnight Overhaul
• Chapter 17 Broken Tongs
• Chapter 18 The Line at the Pay Window
• Chapter 19 Whispers on the Slipway
• Chapter 20 Ironclad Promises
• Chapter 21 The Strike Ballot
• Chapter 22 Misreading the Gauges
• Chapter 23 Sparks Against the River
• Chapter 24 The Final Fit
• Chapter 25 Launch Day
• Chapter 26 The Class Picture

The salt air off the James River didn't clean the smell of coal smoke out of a man’s coat; it just bound the soot to the wool so it stayed with him forever. It was October of 1933, and if you were nineteen years old with grease under your fingernails and an envelope from the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company in your back pocket, you felt like you had bought the only winning ticket in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

The Molder’s Gate sat at the eastern tail of thirty-fifth street, a black iron portcullis squeezed between a three-story brick pattern shop and the corrugated steel wall of the foundry. By six in the morning, two thousand men were already standing in the damp turnpike gloom, their breath coming off them in pale, ragged banners. They were men who had built the battleship Houston and men who had been laid off when the Navy froze the yards after the crash, now back with hollowed cheeks and patched boots, waiting for the whistle.

I stood near the brickwork, trying to keep my heels on the dry curb and my hands out of my coat pockets so I’d look alert. In my right hand I held the brass token they’d issued me at the employment bureau on Washington Avenue two days before. It was the size of a silver dollar, stamped with the number 4082 and the word APPRENTICE curved along the top rim like a sentence handed down by a judge.

"Keep it in your palm, kid, or some fella from the timber yard’s gonna lift it and claim he’s your cousin," said the boy standing next to me. He was shorter than me by three inches, with ears that stuck out from under a flat brown tweed cap like the handles on a galvanized bucket. His face was pitted with old chickenpox scars, but his eyes were bright, watery, and totally devoid of sleep.

"I’m Arthur," I said, offering a hand that was cold enough to stick to a crowbar. "Arthur Phelan."

"Benny Coyle," he said, giving my fingers a brief, dry squeeze before sliding his hand back into a brown canvas duck jacket that had seen better winters. "Machinist’s apprentice. Or I will be if the tall bastard with the clipboard doesn't find out my old man was in the boiler shop during the twenty-two walkout."

"They check that?"

"They check the teeth in your mouth if they think you're going to bite," Benny said. He leaned closer, smelling faintly of chicory coffee and lye soap. "Look at the gate. See the man with the gray felt hat and the blue pencil?"

I looked over the heads of forty flat-caps. Standing on a low oak bench just inside the iron pickets was a man whose coat looked as though it had been carved from the same slate as the yard office roof. He had a pencil behind his left ear, another between two fingers of his right hand, and a face that appeared to have been scrubbed with emery cloth and left to dry in a cold basement.

"That's Mr. Vance," Benny whispered, his voice dropping an octave into a sort of superstitious reverence. "Superintendent of the Apprentice School. He don't like three things: late boys, dirty brass, and fellas from North Carolina."

"I'm from Richmond," I said.

"That's worse," Benny said cheerily. "Richmond boys think they're clerk material. He hates clerks most of all. He thinks a boy who can read a ledger without a grease spot on it is just a thief who hasn't found his safe yet."

The yard whistle blew then—a long, wet scream that seemed to come straight out of the belly of the boiler works two miles down the slipways. It vibrated through the soles of my shoes, rattling the brass token against my knuckles.

The iron gate didn't open so much as it was pushed back by the weight of two thousand boots moving in unison. We were funnelled through four narrow wooden turnstiles that clicked like iron teeth. As I reached the slot, I held up my token. Mr. Vance didn't look at my face. His eyes, small and cold as lead buckshot behind thick-rimmed spectacles, dipped to my hands, checked the brass, dropped to my shoes—which I had shined with lard and lampblack the night before—and then swept to the collar of my shirt.

"Phelan," he said. His voice sounded like gravel sliding down a galvanized chute. "Arthur."

"Yes, sir."

"Your uncle was Thomas Phelan? The joiner?"

"Yes, sir. He was in the pattern shop."

"He was slow with an adze," Vance said, without looking at his pad. "He spent twenty minutes on every tenons because he thought the wood cared what he felt about it. Don't be like your uncle, Phelan. Steel doesn't have an uncle. Go to the loft."

He didn't hit me, but he didn't have to. He tapped the blue pencil against the wooden frame of the turnstile, and the pressure of the crowd behind me shoved me through before I could think of a single thing to say.

Inside, the shipyard didn't look like a school; it looked like a city that had been built by giants who had abandoned it midway through to go to war. High above us, the overhead gantry cranes—the "gallows," the old hands called them—strode through the yellow fog on legs of latticed iron, their cables humming with the strain of thirty-ton steel plates moving toward the ways. The ground was black cinder, littered with off-cut rivets, wire turnings that curled like silver pigs' tails, and puddles of grease that reflected the grey sky in oily, rainbow sheets.

Benny caught up with me by the corner of the pipe shop, his coat tails flapping as he dodged a mule team dragging a timber sled loaded with green oak knees.

"What'd he say to you?" Benny panted. "Did he hit you with the pencil? He marked three fellas from Newport News with red chalk. Sent 'em back to the employment ditch."

"He said my uncle was slow," I said, keeping my head down as a cloud of hot steam hissed out of an exhaust pipe four feet above my head.

"Well, was he?"

"He died four years ago," I said.

"That's slow enough," Benny said, completely unbothered. "Come on. If we aren't in the Mould Loft before six-fifteen, Vance’s assistants will have us cleaning the bilges on the old dredger down at Pier Four. The water in that thing hasn't moved since the Spanish War."

We ran up three flights of external wooden stairs that clung to the side of Building 102 like a rickety fire escape. The wood was slick with river damp and pitted with the hobnails of thirty years of shipbuilders. At the top was a double door made of heavy white pine, notched with thousands of initials, date marks, and crude drawings of anchors.

The Mould Loft was vast—a room three hundred feet long and eighty feet wide, with a floor made of clear, clear white pine that had been planed so smooth it looked like an indoor skating pond. There were no columns, no braces, nothing to break the stretch of pale timber except forty high arched windows that let in the weak grey light of the river.

Standing in small, shivering clusters across the floor were thirty-two other boys. Some wore high boots with the leather turned inside out; others wore low shoes with the soles tied on with copper wire. A few had brought small canvas tool bags, held tight against their ribs as if they expected someone to snatch them.

We were the Apprentice Class of Thirty-Three. There were supposed to be fifty of us according to the herald-journal back in July, but the yard had cut the quota twice as the Navy bills stalled in Washington. Thirty-three was all the company could afford to teach, and looking at the bunch of us, I wondered if the company hadn't spent too much even then.

"All right, you puppies!"

The voice came from a raised wooden balcony at the far end of the room where the loft master kept his long pine splines and ink troughs. A man with a neck as thick as a capstan was leaning over the rail. He was missing the pinky finger on his left hand, and his shirtsleeves were rolled up despite the chill, revealing forearms covered in blue ink tattoos of anchors and coil ropes.

"Line up on the center water-line!" he hollered. "And don't drag your heels! You scratch this pine, and I'll have you sanding it with a dry brick until your knuckles bleed!"

We scrambled into a jagged line along a black ink line that stretched the length of the floor. I found myself between Benny and a tall, stoop-shouldered boy who smelled strongly of horse liniment and had hands so big his wrists stuck three inches out of his sleeves.

"I'm Red," the tall boy muttered, without turning his head. "Red Brody. From Gloucester."

"Arthur," I said again.

"Keep your chin up," Red grunted. "Here comes the priest."

It wasn't a priest. It was Mr. Vance again, though how he had gotten from the Molder’s Gate to the loft so fast without passing us on the stairs was a mystery that made several of the younger boys look nervously toward the corners of

Mr. Vance didn't take the stairs. He emerged from a narrow trapdoor behind the loft master’s desk—a sheer drop with a iron ladder that he descended and ascended with the unhurried precision of a piston. He stepped onto the clear pine floor without a sound, his leather heels fitted with copper studs that left no mark on the wood.

He carried a narrow ledger bound in black oilcloth under his arm. Behind him came his assistant, a pale man named Mr. Clett who had a permanent squint and carried a bucket of yellow chalk cubes that smelled heavily of sulphur.

"Thirty-three," Vance said, stopping six feet in front of the centerline. He didn't look at his ledger. He looked at the row of heads. "We started with ninety-six applicants in July. By August, thirty had failed the arithmetic exam. Twelve were dropped for heart murmurs or flat arches at the company dispensary. Twenty-one walked off when they heard what a second-year rivet-heater earns in November when the north wind comes off the Roads."

He paused, letting the wind rattle the heavy arched windows. Out on the James River, a tugboat blew two short horn blasts, low and mournful.

"That leaves thirty-three of you," Vance continued. "Thirty-three heads to be filled with shop geometry, blue-line reading, boiler metallurgy, and the understanding that this shipyard was building three-deckers before your grandfathers had pants on. The Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company does not need you. The Navy does not need you. The President of the United States, whatever he thinks he’s doing up in Washington with his codes and his Recovery Acts, does not need you. But if you stay here four years without breaking a leg, burning a eye out, or getting caught with a union card in your hatband, you will be journeymen. You will be men who can turn an ingot into an engine shaft and a plate of steel into a hull that can take a torpedo and keep its fires burning."

He looked down the line, his eyes stopping briefly on each of us like a man inspecting bolts in a boiler casing.

"Mr. Clett," he said. "Mark them."

Clett stepped forward with his bucket. He walked down the line, stooping at each boy’s feet to grind a square box of yellow chalk around our boots.

"Don't move out of your box," Clett muttered as he worked his way past Benny Coyle. "You step over that yellow line before the six-thirty whistle, and that’s five demerits. Ten demerits, and you’re hauling scrap out of the wet basin."

When Clett reached me, he didn't look up, but Vance did.

"Phelan," Vance said, his gravelly voice cutting through the rustle of trousers. "You stand like your father."

"My father was a butcher in Henrico, sir," I said, my voice cracking slightly on the sir.

"I know what he was," Vance said coldly. "He stood on one heel because his right hip was shorter than his left from carrying quarter-carcasses out of the chill house. Put your feet flat, Phelan. You aren't butchering beef here. You’re holding up your end of a slipway."

I shifted my heels down immediately, the soles of my shoes scraping against the smooth pine. Vance made a small mark in his black book—a tiny stroke with his blue pencil—and moved on without another word.

Next to me, Red Brody let out a long breath through his teeth that sounded like a leaky steam valve. "Jesus," he whispered under his breath. "The man’s got a book with every dead relative in the Commonwealth."

"Shut up, Brody," Vance said from ten feet away, without even turning around. "That’s two demerits for mouth."

Red went stiff as a fence post, his knuckles turning white where he clutched his cloth tool roll.

For the next hour, we stood inside our yellow boxes while Vance read the roll and assigned our shop groups. The thirty-three of us were a mixed lot, drawn from every creek, county, and alley within fifty miles of the Hampton Roads, with a few stray boys dragged in from the coal hills of West Virginia by uncles who had worked the coal piers at Lambert’s Point.

There was Mel Dockery, a lean, hawkish boy from Bluefield whose father had died in a mine cave-in three winters back. He wore a woolen coat three sizes too big for him, held tight with an old leather harness strap instead of buttons, but his fingers were long and quick, already stained with coal-dust that no soap would ever quite fetch out.

There was Toby Sasser, whose father was a chief draftsman in the Hull Drafting Department up in Building 8. Toby wore a clean corduroy jacket with leather elbow patches and had a brand-new pair of starrett calipers sticking out of his breast pocket like a fountain pen. The rest of us looked at those calipers the way a hungry dog looks at a butcher’s window.

There was Joey Callahan, a round-shouldered boy from the East End of Newport News whose three older brothers were already riveters on Shipway Four. Joey had a black eye that was turning a sickly green around the lid—the result, Benny whispered to me, of a knuckle-fight behind the trolley barn over a five-cent nickel-plate knife.

And there were twenty-nine others: farm boys from Gloucester with milk-pale skin and red wrists; dock-walloper kids from the Southside with tough, square jaws and cheap boots; and two silent, solemn boys from Portsmouth who looked like they hadn't eaten a hot meal since the bank holidays in March.

"You thirty-three are Cohort A," Vance announced, closing his ledger with a sharp thwack that sounded like a small caliber pistol. "You will be split into three divisions. Section One goes to the Machine Shop under Mr. MacNair. Section Two goes to the Sheet Metal and Pipe Shops under Mr. Garris. Section Three—the ones who look like they have enough beef in their shoulders to swing a fourteen-pound sled—goes to the Mould Loft and the Shipways under Loft Master Callahan."

He picked up his blue pencil and pointed it directly at Benny, Red, and me.

"Coyle. Brody. Phelan. You’re in Section Three. Report to Callahan."

"Yes, sir," Benny said, nearly jumping out of his skin.

"Don't answer back, Coyle," Vance snapped. "Just move."

The Mould Loft floor was where the ship existed before it was steel.

It was an enormous, quiet space where thin pine splines were bowed between iron weights—"ducks," they called them—to lay out the curved lines of the hull at full scale. In an era before optical projectors or computer lines, every frame, every floor plate, every steam pipe, and every rivet hole of a six-hundred-foot cruiser had to be drawn out on this floor in ink and chalk, full size, by men kneeling on pads with long splines and steel straightedges.

Callahan, the loft master who had yelled at us from the balcony, was a short, thick-set man with white hair that stuck up in tufts like unspun hemp. He walked with a heavy limp—his left foot had been crushed by a falling deck frame during the building of the Pennsylvania in 1915—but he could move across that smooth pine floor faster than any of us could run on pavement.

"Listen to me, you pups," Callahan roared, circling us like a bull terrier looking for a ankle to bite. "This floor is holy ground. You don't spit on it. You don't drop grease on it. You don't wear hobnails on it. If you have a nail sticking out of the heel of your boot, you pull it with a pair of pincers or you walk in your stocking feet. You hear me?"

"Yes, sir," we chorused.

"This afternoon, you aren't laying out lines," Callahan said, gesturing to a stack of long white pine boards sitting near the south wall. "You’re making templates. White pine pine-wood strips, one-quarter inch thick, three inches wide. You’re going to plane them flat, square the edges, and bore the rivet points according to the draft sheet for Hull 358."

Hull 358 was the contract number for what would eventually become the aircraft carrier Yorktown, though none of us knew that then. To us, it was just a mountain of blue paper and thousands of tons of steel plates waiting out in the yards.

Callahan handed each of us a wooden jack plane, a six-foot pine batten, and a small brass try-square.

"The planes are dull," Callahan said with a sour grin. "The last class left them looking like butter knives. The oilstones are over by the window. If you don't know how to set a plane iron, ask the boy next to you. If he doesn't know, both of you can go haul slag."

I sat down on a wooden bench by the high arched window, the river gray and cold below me. Next to me, Benny Coyle was already spatting on a dark Arkansas stone, rubbing the tool steel in tight, fierce little circles.

"You know how to hone an iron?" I asked him.

"My old man taught me when I was seven," Benny said, without stopping his arm. "He said a man who uses a dull tool is just an idiot trying to muscle his way through life. Look at Vance up there on his porch."

I glanced toward the raised balcony. Mr. Vance was standing by the railing, his arms crossed over his chest, his grey felt hat pushed slightly back on his head. He wasn't watching the loft assistants; he was watching us. His small, hard eyes were fixed on the way we held our stones, the way we checked the bevel against the light, the way we handled the pine.

"He looks like he’s waiting for somebody to cut their thumb off," Red Brody muttered from my left, rubbing his forearm where a wood splinter had caught him.

"He’s not waiting for that," Benny said, lowering his voice until it was barely audible above the rhythmic shuck-shuck-shuck of the planes on the bench. "My brother says Vance has a ledger in his office where he keeps a score on every boy in the yard. Every time you drop a bolt, that’s a mark. Every time you’re two minutes late at the Molder’s Gate, that’s two marks. You get twenty marks in a year, and he calls your father in and tells him you're fit for nothing better than hauling coal for the Chesapeake and Ohio."

"He's just an old bastard who never worked a slipway himself," Red said spatting onto the shavings at his feet.

"You think so?" Benny leaned in, his eyes wide. "My old man told me Vance was a rivet-driver back on the old battleships in ninety-eight. Said he drove four hundred rivets a day in the double bottoms of the Kentucky until an iron beam fell on his shoulder and crushed his chest. They say he can’t lift his right arm higher than his pocket."

I looked up at Vance again. He was standing with his left hand on the balcony rail, his right hand tucked deep into his coat pocket, stiff and motionless. He looked immovable, like one of those granite pillars down at the main entrance of the yard office, placed there by the company founders to make sure nobody spent too much time thinking about six o'clock.

"He's mean," I said quietly, setting my plane blade into the wooden stock and tapping the wedge home with a small wooden mallet. "My uncle Thomas said Vance never gave a man a raise unless the man's wife came down to the gate and begged for it."

"Your uncle Thomas was right," Benny said. "He’s the company’s hatchet man. They keep him here to keep the union out and the wages down."

The plane iron bit into the white pine board with a clean, high zip, throwing up a thin curling shaving that smelled of sap and dry earth. I took three long, steady passes down the length of the batten, feeling the vibration of the steel right up through the palms of my hands into my elbows. It felt good. It felt like something real—not like school in Henrico where we sat at oak desks and wrote out sentences about the Virginia Colony while the rain ran down the glass. Here, if you took too much wood off one side, the board was ruined, the template was bad, and the steel plate down on the ways wouldn't fit.

By three in the afternoon, the floor around our benches was buried knee-deep in white shavings that curled like birch bark. My shoulders ached with a dull, burning heat, and my fingers were stiff and sticky with pine resin.

A shadow fell across my bench.

I stopped my plane mid-stroke and looked up. It wasn't Callahan. It was Mr. Vance.

He stood over me, his grey felt hat pulled down low over his brows. He picked up my pine template by one end, held it up against the light from the river window, and ran his thumb down the narrow edge. His thumb was broad and flat, the skin so hardened by decades of metal and cold that it looked like horsehide.

"It's high in the middle," Vance said.

"Sir?"

"The middle," he repeated, pointing with his blue pencil. "You're leaning on your left heel when you push the plane. You think you're going straight, but you're dipping at the start and dipping at the finish. That leaves a belly in the timber."

He laid the board back down on the bench. He didn't yell. He didn't issue a demerit. He just stood there, looking down at me with those cold, grey eyes that seemed to see right through my coat into my ribcage.

"A sixteenth of an inch on this pine doesn't look like much, Phelan," he said, his gravelly voice low enough that only Benny and Red could hear. "But when Callahan takes this template down to the punch shop and uses it to lay out a thirty-foot deck plate, that sixteenth becomes half an inch by the time they cold-rivet it to the frame. Then the plate buckles. Then the inspector from the Navy Department comes along with his blue ink and rejects the whole section."

He leaned down slightly, his coat smelling of dry paper, old tobacco, and cold iron.

"Do you know what happens when the Navy rejects a deck section, Phelan?"

"No, sir," I said, my throat dry.

"The company loses eight hundred dollars," Vance said. "And when the company loses eight hundred dollars, it doesn't take it out of the president's salary. It takes it out of the apprentice fund. It means the boys in next year's class don't get eighteen cents an hour. They get sixteen. You want to take two cents an hour out of some poor bastard's pocket from Goochland because you can't keep your hips level?"

"No, sir," I said.

"Then plane it again," Vance said. "And keep your heels down."

He turned and walked away, his copper-studded heels clicking against the pine like the steady beat of a small hammer.

Benny leaned over as soon as Vance was out of earshot. "Jesus, Arthur," he whispered, his eyes wide as saucers. "He almost gave you the boot right there. Did you see his eye? He gets that squint right before he sends a boy down to the timekeeper."

"He didn't give me the boot," I said, picking up my wooden plane with hands that were shaking just enough to make the steel wedge rattle against the pine stock.

"He will if you don't fix that belly," Red Brody said, looking over from his bench with a grin that showed three missing teeth in the back. "Don't worry, Richmond. If they bounce you, I'll take your pine. Mine's full of knots anyway."

By five o'clock, the light coming through the high arched windows had turned from grey to a dark, bruised violet. The electric lamps hung from the steel rafters in wide green enamel shades, casting sharp circles of yellow light down onto thirty-three workbench stations and thirty-three piles of pine shavings.

The long yard whistle blew again—three short, sharp blasts that meant the shift was over for the day workers. Down below on Thirty-Fifth Street, we could hear the thunder of four thousand pairs of boots hitting the cinder path, moving toward the trolley lines and the boarding houses on Washington Avenue.

Callahan stood on his balcony with a brass hand-bell, shaking it until the clapper rang out like an alarm.

"Tools in the boxes!" he shouted. "Planes unwedged! Sweeping squad one through six stay behind and clear the floor! The rest of you, line up for tokens!"

We backed out of our stations, our backs stiff, our knees cracking after six hours on the hard floor. We wiped our planes with greasy rags, backed off the wedge pins so the blades wouldn't stay under tension overnight, and placed them in the long oak chests at the end of the room.

We lined up along the centerline once more. Vance was waiting by the trapdoor with his black ledger.

As each boy passed him, he held out his hand, and Vance dropped a small cardboard slip into it—our shift ticket for the day. It was stamped with the date, the hour, and the letters A.S.-33.

When I reached him, I kept my eyes on his tie—a dark grey silk knot that was pinned with an old, worn copper rivet instead of a bar.

"Phelan," he said as he handed me my slip.

"Yes, sir?"

"Your board was straight the second time."

I looked up, surprised, but Vance’s face hadn't changed at all. It was still as cold and blank as a slab of slate in a rainstorm.

"Don't get cocky," he added before I could say anything. "It was only white pine. Tomorrow we give you oak. Oak doesn't care about your uncle Thomas, and it doesn't care about your heels."

"Yes, sir," I said.

I moved past him and down the steep wooden stairs that led out of the building. The air outside was freezing now, the wind coming off the James River carrying the smell of salt water, diesel exhaust, and wet coal ash from the power house.

Benny and Red were waiting for me by the corner of the brick pattern shop, their hands shoved deep into their pockets, their coat collars turned up against the damp.

"What'd he say to you?" Benny asked as we joined the tide of men marching toward the Molder's Gate.

"He said my second board was straight," I said.

Benny snorted, spitting a yellow stream of tobacco juice into a oily puddle beside the railway spur. "That's just how he gets you. He gives you one nice word so you don't jump off the pier tonight, then tomorrow he catches you three minutes late and takes two hours' pay off your slip. My brother says Vance hasn't said a soft word to a human being since 1926."

"He's an old devil," Red agreed, shivering as a gust of river wind hit us full in the face at the turnstiles. "Pure ice all the way down to his boots."

I didn't say anything. I slipped my shift ticket into my pocket alongside my brass token, feeling the rough, square edges of the cardboard between my thumb and forefinger. I looked back once over my shoulder through the iron pickets of the Molder's Gate.

High up on the third floor of Building 102, the yellow lights of the Mould Loft were still burning bright against the black belly of the Virginia sky. A single figure was standing by the high arched window, looking down at the long stream of black coats pouring out into the town. He looked small up there—no bigger than an off-cut rivet against the vast timber walls—but he didn't move, and he didn't turn away until the last of the thirty-three heads had passed through the gate and out into the dark.