Word: curran
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Maritime Mutiny? From Guadalcanal came an ugly story: the crew of one merchant ship had mutinied by refusing to discharge cargo on Saturday afternoon and Sunday. Quick to deny this charge was Joseph Edwin Curran, boss of the National Maritime Union, which up till recently controlled with an iron hand almost all sailors operating out of East Coast ports and some operating out of West Coast ports as well. Said Curran: "The report is a smear campaign...
True or false (and at week's end the truth was unclear), even the report of the strike came to Curran as a bitter blow. For it severely prejudiced two pleas which he had just made to top officials in Washington. One plea was that the Navy remove its gun crews from merchant ships and put common sailors in charge of the guns...
...Training Program. The second and more important Curran plea was that the U.S. Merchant Service decrease its merchant sailor training program which plans to graduate some 50,000 new merchant sailors this year. According to Curran only about 20,000 new seamen are needed. But with three to five Liberty ships coming off the ways every day, the Government is taking no chances. Besides schools in Florida and California, it has poured $14,000,000 into a new trainee school on Long Island's Sheepshead Bay which is geared to turn out some 10,000 graduates every 90 days...
...this experiment is tough, able Captain George Wauchope (rhymes with chalk-up). He was called to active service in the Navy after seven years as director of the American South African Line, and nearly 20 years of sea duty during which he once skippered a ship on which Joe Curran was serving as a common seaman. Under Wauchope's direction, trainees at Sheepshead get basic lifeboat-handling drill, elementary courses in deck seamanship, and engineering courses in which they stand regular watch at equipment duplicating conditions aboard Liberty ships...
...N.M.U. sees in this program a direct threat to its power. Most recruits are pink-cheeked, corn-fed youngsters from the Midwest who have never seen deep water, or been exposed to unionism. They are far different from the old-line shellback malcontents who were duck soup for Curran's earlier pinko type of organizing, and they are not obliged to hold union cards. Only 1,000 to 1,500 monthly swing over to N.M.U. This percentage is not big enough if Curran is to hold his grip...