I’m New Here: Week Twenty-Five…
August 9, 2019 by Stephanie Williams
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I began this post with a completely different musing on the world of collecting. However, one hundred and twenty words into it I received a query concerning the content of an issue posted on one of the web market places. After my research concluded, I cleared my page to begin again.
We had a 1927 New York Times listed for sale, and the request was to verify whether or not a name was mentioned within the feature story. And so, for the first time ever, I read about the USS S-4, a submarine that was rammed by a Coast Guard ship off of Massachusetts on December 17th. Of the forty on board, six crew members survived long enough to signal their location. For three days the divers heard sounds of life; then the tapping ceased. One of the rescue team almost lost his life attempting to attach an air hose to the cavity in which the small group had huddled. His buddy eventually received a medal for saving him.
It is horrible to follow the words of hope and heroic blow-by-blow efforts as diver after diver took a dangerous shift in the turbulence, spurred by the Morse signals from the submarine, “Is there any hope?” Finally, reluctantly, the tragic designation was issued, “lost with all hands.”
If I read the historical bits correctly, it took three months to raise the sub, which (“who” to all those in the habit of employing the feminine pronoun for a ship) was utilized for another five years following the disaster. My contact today was looking for the name of his grandfather among the divers who battled weather and odds in the hours following the crash. And he is there. The name I was commissioned to seek is nestled within the sentence, “First diver to the scene was ______________” For a full column the radioed conversations from command to scene are reported word-by-word. These were clearly the exchanges of men determined to save their fellow men, at great cost and against reasonable hope. And my imagination had me within that family, hearing bits and pieces of this epic event through the years. Perhaps he never talked about it at all. Either way, the very words spoken as one diver worked through the obstacles are here on the pages within an issue that we will carefully package and ship out to his grandson.
For me, this personal narrative embedded within a national tragedy eclipsed every other treasure found in a week packed with collectors seeking titles spanning from Virginia Gazettes to Village Voices.
I just had to share.
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- I’m New Here: Week Twenty-Seven…
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