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MARITIME REPORTERS:

ARE THEY NEEDED TODAY?

 

It was one of those slow, boring Sunday afternoons that day in early

November, 1980, and Robert R. Frump was looking for a story. Technically he

was the Philadelphia Inquirer's maritime writer, a post he had taken out of

curiosity late in 1979 after several draining years of covering

controversial Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo. But on weekends he doubled as

a general assignment reporter, which could mean spending long, news-less

hours sitting at a desk. This day was shaping up into one of those times --

until Frump got a call from Fred Cusick, Inquirer police reporter.

Cusick had learned on his rounds that the Coast Guard had just begun a

search for the steamship Poet, an aging freighter that had sailed from

Philadelphia 10 days earlier with a load of 13,500 tons of grain for Egypt.

No one had heard from the ship since, and Henry Bonnabel, the New Jersey man

who owned it, had asked the Coast Guard for help. Cusick relayed the news to

Frump.

"I called Bonnabel that day," Frump says. "I talked to maritime people I

knew in port. They said if the thing was gone for 10 days, it was gone."

Frump's story the next day said an old ship had been missing for 10 days and

probably had sunk. Furious relatives of the Poet's 34 crewmen called the

reporter to complain that he was being too pessimistic too soon. But Frump,

it turned out, was right. Two weeks later, the Coast Guard called off its

fruitless search. In early December, it formally declared the seamen as

"presumed dead."

The stories Frump wrote in the wake of the ship's disappearance and certain

sinking focused federal attention on an unintended disgrace in the American

maritime industry and eventually won the Inquirer a national journalism

award. They, and the many stories Frump wrote (and writes) on other maritime

topics, illustrate the kind of copy a maritime reporter can produce: human

interest, economic issues, situations that cry out for correction.

But a hundred miles north, in the nation's leading port, there are no

reporters like Frump. No one in the sprawling bistate port of New York and

New Jersey, the largest general-cargo port in the United States and a center

of the American maritime industry since the early 1800s, covers the

waterfront. No one on New York City's three general-circulation daily

newspapers covers it at all on a regular basis. In neighboring Newark, N.J.,

one reporter makes it his business to watch out for maritime stories, but it

is not a formal job and the man's title is not maritime writer but general

assignment reporter.

Nor is New York alone, maritime industry officials say. General-interest

newspapers in many -- though not all -- American ports do not staff a

maritime beat. (Baltimore, New Orleans and Norfolk, Va. are three

traditional exceptions.) Thus the kind of stories Frump wrote about the

Poet, and the broader, more troubling contexts in which they occurred, might

well be missed by papers and readers in many ports.

Are maritime reporters necessary at modern American newspapers? Should there

be a maritime beat in seaports? The questions are more complicated than they

appear; their background is tangled and the possible answers vary. One way

to begin is to consider the situation in Philadelphia, then move up the

coast to its larger competitor, New York.

"Sailors to their Graves"

The sinking of the 35-year-old Poet triggered hearings and months of

investigation by the Coast Guard and the National Transportation Safety

Board. They were unable to decide exactly what had happened and why.

Eventually each issued a report that noted an unusually fierce storm had

swept the East Coast and North Atlantic shortly after the Poet left Delaware

Bay. But the agencies said the sinking itself was due to undetermined

causes.

Long before the federal agencies handed down their conclusive findings,

however, Bob Frump had turned up a number of disturbing facts and

possibilities. His stories made more than a few businessmen and government

officials squirm uncomfortably and probably were an important factor in the

decision of the U.S. House of Representatives' Merchant Marine and Fisheries

Committee to hold hearings on the sinking.

The stories told how Henry Bonnabel owned other World War II-era cargo ships

and maintained them so shoddily that it was not uncommon for them to lose

power and wallow helplessly at sea for days; how 38 percent of U.S. merchant

ships are older than the 20-year period the insurance industry considers a

ship's life span; how a government policy aimed at strengthening the

U.S.-flag merchant marine actually encouraged the use of dangerous old

"rustbuckets" like the Poet; and how the Coast Guard and American Bureau of

Shipping looked the other way and allowed such ships to slip through

inspections even if they were not up to government standards.

In February of 1983, another U.S.-flag ship of advanced age and in dubious

repair, the collier Marine Electric, owned by a New York-based company

called Marine Transport Lines., rolled over and sank during a winter gale

off the coast of Virginia. Thirty-one of its 34 crewmen died. Frump and

Timothy Dwyer, a reporter from the Inquirer's bureau in Camden, N.J., went

to work and over a period of weeks wrapped it all together -- greedy

businessmen, faulty government policies, indifferent government inspectors,

job-hungry merchant seamen -- into a series that subsequently won a

prestigious George Polk Award for courage and resourcefulness in gathering

information and for skill in conveying it. The Inquirer reprinted the

stories in a special tabloid section with a headline that concisely, if a

bit melodramatically, summed up what Frump and Dwyer had discovered and

documented:

DEATH SHIPS

How the U.S. sends rustbuckets

to sea, sailors to their graves

Frump doesn't concentrate exclusively on ship sinkings, however. He and

Inquirer Executive Editor Gene Roberts see the beat as a mix of business and

general stories. Frump's record illustrates it. In another notable series,

one that won a Gerald S. Loeb Award for distinguished business journalism,

he exhaustively explained why the ports in greater Philadelphia were losing

business steadily and how they could reverse the decline. He covered a

mutiny by Indian and Pakistani crewmen aboard a Liberian-flag tanker. He

delved into the exit of a local shipyard from the shipbuilding business. He

was riding on a tugboat one day when, because of a sudden mishap, it

narrowly missed slamming into the bridge that supports Interstate Highway

95; he wrote an account of the heart-stopping experience.

"City editors can send their reporters to the end of the pier and they have

a whole new world down there," Frump says. "There's such drama down there,

aside from the importance of the issues -- and there's plenty of them."

The Waterfront Loomed Large

The failure of general-circulation newspapers in New York and elsewhere to

pay attention to port activities is a relatively new phenomenon.

Historically, the waterfront loomed large in the consideration of newspaper

editors. From colonial times to the development of the trans-Atlantic

telegraph cable immediately following the Civil War, ships physically

carried the news from abroad. Even after the success of trans-Atlantic

telegraphy, ships continued to be the only way to travel aboard. Newspapers

in New York, the U.S. trans-Atlantic travel capital, maintained staffs of

reporters who would ride a government cutter out to meet incoming passenger

ships and interview celebrities.

The development of trans-Atlantic airliners doomed the passenger-liner

industry. But well into the 1960s, the maritime industry was covered as a

business, if nothing else. Then interest in the waterfront waned as

automation moved ship and pierside operations from crowded city centers to

low-profile outlying areas with the space to handle new equipment and

processes.

Many New York City newspapers also were going out of business. By the late

1960s, only three newspapers existed in the city: the New York Times and two

sensationally-oriented tabloids, the Daily News and the New York Post. Only

the Times still had a maritime beat, and when the last reporter on the beat

retired in 1978, the newspaper did not replace him.

"There Wasn't Much Interest"

The Daily News and the Post lost interest in matters maritime when ships no

longer provided opportunities to take photos of traveling celebrities and

starlets. Times editors don't recall why they never assigned anyone to

succeed maritime writer Werner Bamberger (and Bamberger doesn't know); they

voice little interest in the subject. Requests to executive editor A.M.

Rosenthal for comment were referred to William Humbach, a pleasant assistant

managing editor who considered the question for a moment and said, "It was

quite a while ago. I can only assume the decision was made because it was

determined that there wasn't much interest in it [the maritime industry]."

Industry participants and observers long ago became resigned to the lack of

news coverage of shipping. But, when asked, they ponder and offer a variety

of possible reasons that no one finds them interesting.

Anthony J. Tozzoli, port director of the Port Authority of New York and New

Jersey, and George Panitz, public relations vice president of the New York

Shipping Association and a former Journal of Commerce maritime editor,

speculate that the Times considers itself a national paper and doesn't want

to bother with a parochial subject like port activity.

Werner Bamberger, the last Times maritime reporter, theorizes that

advertising revenues from the post-passenger shipping industry may not

justify assigning a full-time reporter to cover maritime news; the view is

echoed by N. Nick Cretan, executive director of the Maritime Association of

the Port of New York.

Patricia Ryan, a public-relations woman and former shipping reporter for the

now-defunct New York Herald Tribune, says the industry is well-covered -- by

the Journal of Commerce, a specialized daily that has five full-time

maritime reporters, and by various weekly, monthly and quarterly trade

publications.

Barbara Spector Yeninas, a maritime public-relations specialist and former

maritime editor of the now-defunct Newark (N.J.) News, just gives a snort at

the Times, the respected daily that bills itself as New York City's

newspaper of record: "The Times is saturated with airlines and railroads.

They do not realize that 78 percent of the world is water."

Tozzoli and others point out that sparse news coverage of shipping is not

exclusive to New York. J. Ron Brinson, executive vice-president of the

American Association of Port Authorities, says the national media often

"tend to overlook the importance of ports." He says much of this is

attributable to the fact that advancing marine technology has physically and

psychologically moved shipping operations from highly visible places at city

centers to relatively remote areas. Paula Furniss, public relations director

of the National Maritime Council, agrees: "The rule of thumb is 'out of

sight, out of mind,' and the shipping industry operates pretty much out of

sight."

And Al Filitrault, executive secretary of the Propeller Club of the United

States for the past 18 years, adds that the decline of the American merchant

marine is a factor in the decline of news coverage. At the end of World War

II, he says, there were some 5,000 ships in the U.S.-flag fleet. Today,

there are fewer than 700 -- fewer, ironically, than the number sunk in the

war. There are many more ships operating, but they are run by companies

headquartered overseas.

"People Begin To Wonder"

A convincing argument could be made that there is no reason that New York

(or any) general-interest newspapers should cover shipping and ports

regularly today. Passenger liners no longer ply the Atlantic, and even the

cruise ship industry, which uses its luxury vessels as floating resorts

rather than means of travel, is fleeing New York for warmer climes. Most of

the cargo activity takes place not in Manhattan or Brooklyn, but in vast

industrial areas on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, which has the

open land needed for modern freight handling. The general public, moreover,

does not exhibit much interest in the maritime industry.

"It's hard for people to relate to the fact that many of the things they buy

off the shelf are imported, and that people wouldn't have those things if

they hadn't come in through the port," port director Tozzoli says.

Tom Young, a Port Authority information officer who has been dealing with

the press and public for 28 years, says the average person just doesn't seem

interested in the facts about the large number and wide range of jobs

generated by marine activity. Once the romantic and familiar job titles have

been brought up, most persons' interest, if any, flags quickly.

"After you get past 'tugboat captain' and 'longshoreman,' people begin to

wonder: What is a `marine insurance specialist'? What is a `freight

forwarder'?" Young says. "The general consumer doesn't understand that,

doesn't get excited."

But regardless of the disinterest with which the general public and

general-circulation newspapers view the maritime industry, shipping and port

activity play a major role in the economic life of the metropolitan New

York-New Jersey-Connecticut region. According to the Port Authority, the

industry is directly and indirectly responsible for nearly 250,000 jobs, one

in every eight jobs in the region. Tozzoli says the average person might

think that the most maritime employment is found on the port's piers, where

about 5,000 longshoremen are at work on any given day. But 154,000 jobs are

directly related to ocean transportation, he says.

On a national level, merchant ships transport most of the goods exported

from, or imported into, the United States. Air transportation of cargo is

expensive and used primarily for high-value, time-sensitive goods and

documents, officials say. Ships are what carry the oil, the grain, the

lumber, the automobiles, the orange juice, the bottled beer, the clothing,

and a great many other food products and general merchandise. According to

government figures quoted in the National Maritime Council's book, The U.S.

Maritime Industry, ships carried 67.2 percent of America's imports and

exports in 1979. And that is a conservative estimate because it is based on

dollar value rather than tonnage.

"The Only Kind of Coverage"

The maritime news-coverage picture was quite different not so long ago.

"Twenty-five years ago, the coverage the maritime industry got [in New York]

was a lot more intense than you get today," says Tozzoli. "Now the only kind

of coverage we get is when there is a national issue connected with

something that's going on in the port."

Or when a problem reaches crisis proportions. Tozzoli and Young recount the

issue of channel-dredging as an example. Modern cargo and passenger vessels

are too big to operate in water that is fewer than about 30 feet deep. The

natural depth of much of New York Harbor, however, is much less than that --

often about 18 feet -- so deep channels are dredged into the harbor and up

to the ship terminals. But because silt is constantly settling to the harbor

bottom, the channels must be re-dredged periodically in a process called

maintenance dredging. A few years back, the port officials say, an

environmental dispute over where the dredged material could be dumped caused

a long delay in issuance of dredging permits by the Army Corps of Engineers.

The silt continued to settle and the channels steadily became more and more

shallow.

The situation was covered solely by the Journal of Commerce and trade

weeklies and monthlies. The silting problem became worse and worse in

certain areas, notably the under-used Passenger Ship Terminal in Manhattan.

Then Port Authority personnel announced that if they didn't get the dredging

permit for the terminal soon, the liner Queen Elizabeth II would be unable

to make a scheduled call.

"When you finally get to the point where the QE2 can't dock, then you'll get

the Daily News and the Post running stories saying `QE2 Can't Make It,'"

Young explains. "Only when you reach crisis proportions will the general

papers consider it weighty."

"The Worst Public Relations"

If the maritime industry regrets its lack of news coverage, it does little

to reverse the trend. With the exception of the Port Authority and various

trade organizations, most sectors of the industry -- cargo ship lines,

terminal operators, stevedores and related businesses -- seem to care as

little about the public as the public is interested in them.

"Even in its heyday, the American merchant marine was lousy at public

relations," says Helen Delich Bentley, a consultant who was maritime editor

of the Baltimore Sun from 1948 to 1969.

Adds David F. White, the author who as a Times man tried in the late 1970s

to become a maritime reporter and failed: "I think the maritime industry has

the worst public relations of any in the constellation of industries." If

the American oil industry were covered as scantily as the maritime industry,

he says, "I think the chairmen of the boards of the Seven Sisters would form

a committee and call up [Times publisher] Arthur Ochs Sulzberger and say,

`Let's have lunch.'" The maritime industry apparently hasn't done that.

Frank O. Braynard, curator of the American Merchant Marine Museum and a

Herald Tribune ship-news man from 1948 to 1952, says that some steamship

lines never had any idea of how to deal with reporters. He recalls the time

an official of the now-defunct Isthmian Lines notified the Herald Tribune,

the Times and the Journal of Commerce that a news announcement was imminent.

Three reporters, Braynard among them, dutifully trotted over to the line's

office, where they were shepherded into a room that was empty except for a

table, three chairs, a bottle of liquor and three glasses. "They left us

there for an hour," Braynard recalls with a laugh.

Today, that same lack of adeptness is more the norm than the exception.

Patricia Ryan, a Herald Tribune maritime reporter from 1957 to 1961 and

subsequently a public-relations specialist who has numbered many steamship

lines among her clients, voices puzzlement.

"One thing about the shipping industry I don't understand: It has all that

sophisticated technology and international savvy -- and it hasn't got the

vaguest idea of what communications is like," she says.

On the other hand, she adds, the U.S.-flag ship-line segment of the industry

is so small today that business officials "can call up whomever they want if

they want to talk." And, she adds, if the officials in any sector don't want

to talk about something, they have little worry; there is little likelihood

a reporter will call them up and ask about it.

Maritime News Contradictions

The maritime industry and news coverage of it thus represent a set of

contradictions. It is difficult to deny that the industry is important to

the economy of the New York City region and that of the nation at large, so

coverage of maritime news would seem well warranted. The public, however,

doesn't seem to be interested in the maritime industry. And a large segment

of the industry doesn't seem to care that the city's general-circulation

newspapers pay it no heed, if the lack of public relations is any

indication.

It is possible to argue that this is something of a chicken-or-egg

situation. Did the public's lack of interest in the modern maritime industry

lead New York's newspapers to drop their coverage of the industry, or did

the scuttling of maritime coverage cause New Yorkers to lose interest in

their waterfront? At the industry level, did the maritime sector's lack of

communications skills keep New York newspapers from realizing the importance

of the industry, or did the newspapers' keen interest in the celebrity

interviews of old blind them to the nuts-and-bolts industry's newsworthiness

-- and abet the industry's shyness, to boot?

Without getting bogged down in endless debate about who did what to whom and

how, it seems logical to say that the Times, the only newspaper that bills

itself as New York City's paper of record, simply does not consider the

harbor or the maritime industry newsworthy. There may have been a rationale

behind dropping its maritime beat, but that decision was made long enough

ago that no one appears to remember why. The lack of interest in matters

maritime appears to have become an ingrained, self-sustaining attitude.

Humbach of the Times, for example, didn't really stop to consider whether

the maritime industry should be covered in light of its major role in New

York's economy; he merely said that at some time in years past a decision

must have been made that it no longer was newsworthy. And, without

attempting to quantify the statement, it seems logical to assume that many

other port-city newspapers share that ingrained attitude.

That is unfortunate for the newspapers and the public, both of which miss

out on some good stories. Research and interviews indicate that there are

two legitimate, productive ways to handle waterfront coverage: on a business

level, though the business desk, and not necessarily on a full-time basis;

or on a hybrid business desk/city desk basis.

A good argument also could be made for ignoring the waterfront unless

something happens or a feature story presents itself. The shipping industry

is a low-profile part of a city today, the general public exhibits little

interest in its activities and the competition for space on newspaper pages

is fierce.

But first a newspaper must make a decision. It must ask itself whether

shipping and the waterfront are worth covering. And before it answers, it

must marshall the economic and human-interest facts about maritime activity

and review them closely.

"Containerization Revolution"

Even as New York City newspapers were rapidly losing interest in the

maritime industry a decade and more ago, the industry was undergoing a

revolution that would seriously jolt shipping and the metropolitan region's

economy -- and affect news coverage of shipping by making maritime

activities less visible. That was the "containerization revolution."

Briefly stated, it meant that goods and products would be carried from point

of origin to point of destination in a 20-foot or 40-foot long metal box

instead of being individually loaded off trucks or trains and into a ship's

hold at one end of a voyage and having the process reversed at the other

end. The trend was born in 1956, blossomed in the late 1960s and early '70s

and today is the dominant mode of shipping general cargo.

Because container operations require a great amount of space for container

storage and maneuvering, the revolution took shipping out of such congested

areas as Manhattan and much of Brooklyn and moved it across the Hudson River

into remoter, largely vacant areas of New Jersey and Staten Island. It cut

port time for freighters by 75 percent or more. It cut work opportunities

for longshoremen by half to two-thirds, and led to contract provisions that

now threaten New York's competitive position.

Journal of Commerce reporters say the Times' coverage of the continuing

evolution of the container trend and its far-reaching impact has hardly been

extensive.

"In recent years they've covered it sporadically, not covering labor

developments or the impact of [longshore union] container rules or trends or

that sort of thing," Alan Schoedel says. "They did run some very big stories

about the beginning of the Justice Department's investigation of corruption

on the waterfront."

Adds Charles F. Davis, Schoedel's colleague on the Journal of Commerce

maritime desk: "There's a hell of a lot of good business news, or

interesting news, that comes out of the port that's ignored by the Times --

except if the Journal of Commerce has been carrying it for five days."

"At Least One Reporter"

Schoedel and Davis say the impact of shipping trends and policies is large.

National shipping policies play a hidden but important part in world trade

in areas ranging from the cost of transportation to government treaties.

Shipping rates and the way they are set have an impact that starts on the

national level and reaches all the way down to the pricetag on imported

items in supermarkets and department stores. Shipping has an immediate

impact on employment in port cities, and labor practices and agreements have

an important effect on a seaport's competitive position and business

prospects.

But unlike the more prosaic business sectors, shipping is not easy for a

newcomer to master. Rooted in arcane international traditions that evolved

over centuries, the industry is highly technical in terms of its physical

equipment, vocabulary, legal system, financial practices, business

management and governmental issues, the reporters say. Some newspapers, say

Panitz, Schoedel and Davis, attempt to include shipping in a transportation

beat. But that is not successful unless the person or persons covering

transportation make a major effort to learn the physical, financial, legal,

labor and management issues involved. More often, they say, a puzzled

business reporter will try to write a story on a maritime development and

end up making major errors.

Says Mrs. Bentley of Baltimore: "The industry's a very hard one to

understand. You need people who live with it over a period of time in order

to understand the big stories that break, like strikes or certain trade

issues."

Yes, the current and former reporters say, port-city newspapers should cover

the maritime industry at least on a business-beat basis. But they must also

make sure they do it accurately.

"Things that used to give it [shipping] pizzazz have disappeared but the

economic importance has not," Schoedel says. "Any major paper in a coastal

city should have at least one reporter who has a background that enables him

to write maritime stories, even if he doesn't do it full time."

"Closest to the Heart of It"

A few executives of large general-circulation newspapers see that need and

more. One is the Philadelphia Inquirer's executive editor, Gene Roberts, who

says today that he was very surprised when he came to the newspaper in 1972

to find that Philadelphia's waterfront was ignored by its newspapers. The

port, he says, "was almost the reason for being of Philadelphia."

Roberts was no stranger to shipping. He had been a maritime reporter himself

in the late 1950s at the Norfolk, Va., Virginian-Pilot before going on to

bigger papers and assignments that included covering the Civil Rights

struggle in the South and the war in Vietnam. He took the maritime beat by

choice, he recalls.

"I came to the paper and my big ambition was to cover the maritime beat,"

Roberts says. "That's because it was a port city and you'd come closest to

the heart of it if you covered the waterfront. And I was right. It may have

been the best beat I ever had."

In Norfolk, he says, covering the waterfront included writing business

stories, police-beat type action tales involving the Coast Guard, and labor

articles, to name a few categories.

"And if you really take it seriously and go on and off ships, you'll

encounter some of the most interesting human-interest stories you'll ever

bump into," he adds.

Roberts decided that was the kind of coverage the Inquirer should have and

began trying to interest one of his reporters in the job. He had limited

success at first, however, because those few who wanted to try the beat

tended to view it strictly as a business assignment or exclusively as

feature writing. It wasn't until Frump took the beat that Roberts began

seeing the kind of stories he wanted. Even then, there was some

organizational adjustment before Frump settled into the arrangement he has

today: He reports to the business editor, but also writes many stories for

the metropolitan editor.

The Philadelphia Inquirer isn't the only paper that has approached the beat

as a hybrid business-feature assignment. Barbara Spector Yeninas covered the

waterfront for the Newark (N.J.) News from 1963 until the newspaper folded

in 1972. At first she did so on an informal basis. From 1968 to 1972,

however, she held the title of maritime editor. She wrote for the general

public, not just business people.

Yeninas, who calls the waterfront beat "the best job I ever had," says the

things she covered included the evolution of major federal legislation and

its effects on ship lines; labor issues; developments at ocean terminals;

the "birth of containerization"; and many feature stories. She adds that New

York City newspapers today are missing many good stories in their failure to

cover the waterfront.

"If I were out there covering it, I could bring a general-circulation paper

a story a day," she says thoughtfully. "There are a million stories to be

told."

A dean of modern-day maritime writers is Mrs. Bentley, the consultant. She

began covering the maritime beat in Baltimore at the suggestion of the Sun's

editor in 1948, after several years during which the paper had no waterfront

reporter. She left in 1969 when she was appointed chairman of the Federal

Maritime Commission, a position she held for six years. Early in her years

on the beat, she also began hosting a weekly half-hour television show,

cosponsored by various maritime businesses, called "The Port That Built the

City and State." It ran for 16 years until it was killed when the sponsors

decided it would be too expensive to produce in color. She covered features,

hard news and business and says today she was instrumental in getting a

public port agency established by the state.

"I could go out today and write three features a week," she says. "There is

enough for a reporter to do these days. There are enough stories down there

if somebody wants to go out and dig. But that's what it takes -- digging."

"The Post Has Learned"

The glory days of the ship-news reporters who boarded incoming passenger

liners to interview celebrities and convince starlets to hike their skirts

ever higher for the photographers are long gone, never to return. (Some,

like Braynard of the American Merchant Marine Museum, predict that the

cruise trade will generate more news coverage, but that has not yet

materialized.) The maritime industry, however, remains a sprawling,

economically important segment of American business and American life -- one

that is all but ignored by most modern American newspapers.

Perhaps if New York City's general-circulation editors sat down, addressed

the subject and attempted to evaluate it, the situation would be different.

Perhaps not, but in that case they at least would have made a conscious

choice. Then there wouldn't be the times like the week this March when a

maritime story spilled into the pages of all three general-circulation

dailies in both its business and its human-interest manifestations.

Greek-owned Hellenic Lines had gone broke, and the U.S. marshal was

auctioning off the Hellenic Star, the fifth of the line's ships, one Friday

afternoon when a shabbily dressed, unemployed merchant seaman named Robert

Owen O'Brien ambled into the federal courthouse and joined the bidding.

Officials eventually found out that O'Brien didn't have any money -- but not

before he had driven up the final price of the ship by $380,000.

The Times, which had written one story some time earlier noting Hellenic's

financial failure, un-typically covered the auction and printed a dry story

on a business page the next day, Saturday. The Journal of Commerce, which

does not publish on weekends, carried a business-oriented article on the

sale in its Monday edition. The Post noticed the human-interest angle later

in the week and ran its account Wednesday afternoon beneath a big headline

that went:

PENNILESS DRIFTER OUTBIDS

BIG BANK FOR $1.6M SHIP

 

Attributed "The Post has learned," the story went into great detail about

how O'Brien was dressed. It failed, however, to name the bankrupt ship line

or the ship itself. Thursday morning, the Daily News had a similar story,

although it had the thoroughness to name the line and the ship.

Tim Neale, the Journal of Commerce maritime reporter who had been covering

the Hellenic Line story for weeks, shook his head and laughed at the O'Brien

tale. "This has gotten more publicity that the bankruptcy," he said.

And if the Times had stuck to its ordinary attitude about shipping, none of

the general dailies would have had either a business story or a

human-interest feature.