Friday, December 10, 2021

Lake Ship Johnstown Photo – Dec. 1971

I often joke about how today's Morning Journal always features an unusually huge photo on its front page, taking up valuable real estate that might better be devoted to hard news stories. These photos are inevitably of the ‘soft news’ variety, depicting volunteers at work, etc., with a headline above it that never makes much sense.

Well, back in the old days, the Journal used to have photos on the front page as well. But back then, the Journal had a staff of photographers who had a knack for capturing something uniquely ‘Lorain.’ So when there was a photo on the front page, it often depicted some aspect of life in a steel town on a Great Lake.

Below is one of those types of photos. As the caption notes, ‘The lake ship Johnstown glides beneath the Central High Level Bridge in Lorain on its way to a winter berth on the Black River.

“The 682-foot-long ship, part of the Great Lakes fleet of Bethlehem Steel, will spend part of the winter at the National Gypsum Co. docks and then move into drydock at the American Ship Building Co. for a regular five-year inspection."

I like that a few lines of the opening verse of the poem, On the Quay by John Joy Bell was included with the photo.

4 comments:

  1. man, its crazy seeing that article. They would have dragged you to the asylum if you told someone "in 30 years, all 3 of those companies wouldn't exist anymore"

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  2. The " Johnson " is gone also. Scrapped in 1985... Bill N

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  3. The Journal is pretty much gone too.Not a presence at all in Lorain.Printed by an out of town vendor.The old Journal building stands as a reminder of how it used to be

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  4. Sorry for the confusion on the ship’s name in my blog write-up. I’m a fairly good typist but after I post these things, I’m always finding words that either auto-correct changed or my own poor eyesight sabotaged. As Bill noted, the Johnstown was scrapped. You can see a photo of it in drydock in Toledo here on the shipspotting.com website:

    http://www.shipspotting.com/gallery/photo.php?lid=89294

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