A CONVERSATION WITH ...

	January 5, 2000
	Michael S. Sanders talks about his book, The Yard , which focuses on a Maine shipyard.

RAY SUAREZ: Michael sanders joins me now, author of "The Yard: Building a Destroyer at the Bath Iron Works." In an increasingly service and knowledge-based economy, highly skilled workers are still turning out ships in Maine, where the first ocean-going vessel was built nearly four centuries ago. "The Yard" takes us from the design to the dedication of a Navy fighting ship. Michael sanders, welcome. MICHAEL SANDERS, Author, "The Yard:" Thank you. RAY SUAREZ: Well, I think it would surprise people to find out just how much a handmade object a battleship is. MICHAEL SANDERS: That was one of the first things that struck me. We live in the Internet age, and everyone talks about dot-coms. But here in Maine you have these guys who work essentially with their hands. And you can see in what they're doing, these traditions of the craft that their fathers and grandmothers and parents did for hundreds of years before them. So it is a labor-intensive business, absolutely. You cannot do it any other way. RAY SUAREZ: You know, you go into the yard and you see lots of machines and big things that have to be swung around to carry heavy equipment, but the actual pieces that make up the destroyer are fabricated by people. MICHAEL SANDERS: They have to be. There's no other way of doing it. Ships are not like houses or cars. They're unique individual pieces, and warships especially, because the Navy changes the design in even minor ways every six months. So each one comes out unique, and part of that is definitely due to the handwork. RAY SUAREZ: Well, let's talk a little bit about the workers themselves. The Bath Iron Works is the largest employer in that town. Sometimes the way the people talk about it, the town and the works seem inseparable. MICHAEL SANDERS: It's the largest employer in Maine, actually, and the IW and Bath have been inseparable for more than 100 years now. If you take a walk down downtown Bath, all you have to do is raise your eyes to the horizon and you see these two enormous cranes. The shift changes, which you can hear the whistle for, you hear them every four hours no matter where you are, seven days a week. You can't escape it. It's an absolute, integral part of existence there. RAY SUAREZ: But there's not resentment about it. There is a sort of acceptance and an even affection for the yard that I think is striking. MICHAEL SANDERS: Oh, absolutely. The name of the high school football team is the Destroyers. There's a lot of pride there. And part of that is just due to the fact that Bath has been a shipbuilding town for so long. And the BIW is continuing that tradition, and it's very unique. You can't find a working shipbuilding town in the United States anymore. In New England... It's, in fact, the last one in New England, so they're very aware of that and they take pride in that, and you see that pride. You see that pride in the work that they do. I grew up in a dying steel town in Pennsylvania, and the blue collar workers who were my neighbors and the parents of my friends, they were very unhappy individuals. But at BIW, these guys... They speak about these ships sometimes with such raw poetry you can't believe it. They compare the launching of a ship to the birth of their child. They... It just touches something in them so palpably, and when that comes out, I was quite shocked. I did not expect that you see them, have dirt under their fingernails, they got tattoos, Harley-Davidson jackets, and you think, "oh, you know, rough and tumble bunch." But it turns out they really have an unbelievable pride in what they do, and they can tell you about it. They love to talk about their work. RAY SUAREZ: Well, and you are very careful to place their speech, unadorned, into the pages of the book. A kind of heroism emerges from the way they talk about their own work life. They're not bragging, but they also have a lot of pride in just how good they are. MICHAEL SANDERS: Well, they... first of all, I don't think that anyone had ever asked them about their jobs before. And that is something that does... that is true. In Maine, people take Bath Iron Works for granted. But at the level of the actual work that they do with their hands, yes, I learned...someone taught me how to weld when I was there, because I thought, you cannot write a book about Bath Iron Works with even entering into the world behind the mask, as they call it. The same with going out on a ship: How could you write about one of these ships if you didn't have the opportunity to actually take it out to sea and really see what the whole point of the exercise was? So you're absolutely right. RAY SUAREZ: Did you find yourself wishing you had paid more attention in metal shop when you were trying to learn to weld? MICHAEL SANDERS: Welding is something I will never, ever, ever be very good at. It just... I have utmost admiration for those guys who do it, because it's very difficult. RAY SUAREZ: A lot of detail in the book goes into describing just how difficult it is to get it from where it's built into the water. Why is it so hard? MICHAEL SANDERS: Well, launching a ship on waves, in the book I compare it to... Imagine a car rolling down an incline and the car is out of gear and has to be caught by a tow truck chasing behind and there's a train crossing at a railroad crossing 100 feet ahead. You can't launch ships under power. You just can't do that. So the ship has to be actually caught, physically caught, by tugboats. And in Bath, the river's just not that wide there, and guess what? Just upstream a little bit there's a bridge, so you have a very limited amount of time to grab the lines, turn the boat so it's with the current instead of against the current, so the current doesn't push it against the bridge and snug it up against the pier -- so a race against time from the moment they start to the moment they stop, because they plan their launches around the highest water for the period they want to launch, because the river is also shallow. So you have all of these elements of nature which are fighting against this thing that wants to happen. There's one of the old-time launch masters-- his name is Larry Albee-- used to say, of all the hundreds of thousands of miles this ship is going to travel, the first 200 feet are the hardest. And that's true. You know, these guys sweat bullets until that baby's... their baby's in the water. RAY SUAREZ: And the tension in your narrative. I mean, that's not just these people being extra-careful. Very dangerous things can happen. MICHAEL SANDERS: And they do. This is... this is very dirty and dangerous work, and accidents do happen, less often than you would think, given that they're essentially working with things which are very heavy and very hot. You know, welding involves high- temperature gasses. But they look out for each other. There's a real... there's a real sense of, "when we all work together, when we all do what we're supposed to do, not only does this thing go, but it goes well and it goes the way it should." And that's part of where that accomplishment comes from, too. Those guys will tell you, "I did 63 launches," or they all know, and they can name the ships and they... You can... Kingsley Barnes, who bends hull-plates, can take you down to the ship just before it's about to launch, and he'll point up and he'll say, "I bent that plate, I remember that, blah-blah-blah-blah, because I had this..." They just feel this very intimate connection. RAY SUAREZ: Well, as a journalist, as a writer, you'll probably never be able to look at a ship the same way again. MICHAEL SANDERS: No, no. I have not. It's been a while since I've been to Bath Iron Works, although I drive over the bridge all the time, and I must admit I do have that pang every time I drive by. It's true. RAY SUAREZ: And now the ship you wrote a out is fully commissioned and out on the sea? MICHAEL SANDERS: Yes, out there and actually already done its first tour and is back and even now has a new captain, things change so quickly. RAY SUAREZ: The book is "The Yard." Michael Sanders, thanks a lot. MICHAEL SANDERS: Thank you.

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