Charlestown Navy Yard: A Culture of Innovation

The extremely skilled workers of the Charlestown Navy Yard worked with advanced technology of their time and became renowned for their craft. Many of the oral histories collected by the National Park Service over the past few decades highlight that culture of innovation at the Navy Yard during World War II and up until the closing of the Yard in 1974.

Explore different topics below and read through oral histories that share stories of innovation.

Making Moorings

A secure mooring is critical to the safe operations of a Navy ship as it keeps the ship secured to a pier or to an anchor. This Yard specialized in both rope and anchor chain for the entire Navy, which were used for moorings. The advantages of anchoring with iron chain as opposed to hemp rope led the Navy Yard to develop this technology in the 1800s. Not until the 1900s did the Yard become leaders in iron chain production.

When Albert M. Leahy, Carlton G. Lutts, and James Reid invented die-lock chain here in Charlestown, their method insured that workers would be producing chain here for the foreseeable future. Even in the testing of that chain we see skilled workers using their creativity to solve problems and ensure the chains were sound. Master in the Forge Shop Paul Ivas commented on this process:

Yeah, but you see we couldn't test our chain. We would have had to find a new facility for testing our chain. That's the oldest piece of equipment in the building that I know of, that two-million pound testing machine. In that, there are a lot of innovations that we had to do simply because they don't make these parts anymore.

...This is original. These are testing machines. These are the machines I was telling you about. All chain was tested, you know, pulled up. 100% inspection was done there. But periodically and randomly we took pieces of chain and pulled them to destruction. You know, to see if they were meeting physically. There are two tests. One of them is destructing it, and among some of the other tests is taking a three-link chain and suspending it in between five tons weight and pulling it up at various distances. It can go way up to 50 feet, and allowing it to fall freely. And the cross arm there would stop the fall. This block wouldn't be there; it would stop the fall and the chain would be given a sudden jar. Cast steel would only take the one blow. Wrought iron... would hit the ground and keep going to China! On die lock, you know, it took specified number of blows. This was to simulate a chain type thing that could happen on board a ship (unintelligible). In other words, where the chain got lodged in the… The other one there is, a 1200 pound weight was allowed to fall on a single link. These are home-made things.¹

Remote Sensing

Why was this Yard known as the most experimental yard in the Navy? The presence of technological pioneers in the Boston and Cambridge area certainly helped. The Submarine Signal Company, located right across the Charles River on Lovejoy Pier, employed Reginald Fessenden as a consultant from 1910–1921, and he quickly patented inventions to both create surface-to-submarine communication and detect undersea objects. Building on this technology, in 1948 the Navy Yard became the East Coast Sonar Transducer and Hydrophone Pool Repair Facility.

George McGrath, a sheet metal worker in the Yard, recalled:

This shipyard really worked a lot of sonar. This was probably the prime yard for sonar. …The Goodrich company would make them and then they'd ship then in and install them. The ship had to be, you know, modernized. This here that's cut away on the bow they'd do something like that only instead of bringing that up and welding it to the ship they’d have a big flange and bolt the rubber to the flange.

... The shipyard was probably the most known of the experimental yard in the Navy. Anything was going to be new they tried it here first. They had the first bowed domes, the rubber bow domes put on the shipyard here. The tripod mast that you see on all Navy ships now was developed here. They had people here that was involved with the NASA's first space shot recovery. The electronics people were right on site when that dropped down into the ocean. I knew many of those guys.²

That tripod mast was necessary to carry all the advanced remote sensing systems being developed here. Down the river a bit further, scientists worked on radar in MIT's famous Building 20, and these systems, too, were fitted onto ships from across the Navy.

Beneficial Suggestion Program

The Beneficial Suggestion Program rewarded yard workers for new ideas on how to solve problems or work more efficiently. Several workers spoke with pride about the program, and for Dominic Fucile, it was a lifeline:

As a matter of fact, I was lucky enough to be a member of the 500 Club, which was people who earned five hundred dollars or more in beneficial suggestions. … I was always thinking about ways of doing things easier or better [unclear] metal because if you did and you come up with a good one you got a piece of change. And back in those days every piece of change was good especially if you had five kids, you know. It wasn't easy.³

Paul Ivas, supervisor of the Chain Forge, had a different perspective on the program. He believed it wasn't necessary:

The Beneficial Suggestion program never got off the ground here because the people had a sense of pride, and they thought it was part of their work to make these things. I mean, some of you would say make a sign that said men's room only, and they’d get $5 for it. These guys made their own tools and everything else. They did this stuff. We generally located some of the things, you know the machines, but we never told the men how to handle a piece. … Teamwork, just making this chain. It's really fantastic. These guys, we never told them how. They in their own way found out how to do it.⁴

Apprenticeship

How does one pass on institutional knowledge and train new workers? When you're working with ships such as the USS Albany, which was converted to a Guided Missile Cruiser at the Charlestown Navy Yard from 1958–62, assembling the incredibly intricate systems required thousands of workers. According to Lawrence Furnari, who worked as a machinist in the Navy Yard, it was like the story of the nail and the horseshoe—For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost and want of a horse the kingdom was lost.

But the irony was, here's three thousand men, the personnel of that ship, and all this equipment and a missile cruiser that, I mean, can devastate the world with their power. And they can't go anywhere because they don't have a little spring to blow their whistle, you know. [Laughs] It was funny.⁵

Workers depended on each other, and assembling an efficient team was a big undertaking. During World War II and in the years afterwards, men and women could take a placement test to determine which shop appropriately matched their skills. In some cases, they would be given a choice of shops and they could determine which one to work at based on their interests. Some also entered into the apprenticeship program.

I had a few jobs that were outstanding in my mind that I consider my pride and glory. But best of all, I even was instrumental in getting the director of the apprentice school to send me some apprentices whenever I would get a large order of springs so that I could teach them what I had learned.
And I knew that they had no such program in the apprentice program. And I convinced them that the program was totally lacking in this one subject and that it would be an asset to have these people learn this here so that this knowledge could be carried forth.
I had a theory. Knowledge is not ours to keep. We’re only custodians. And it is our duty to pass it on to those that come after us. So with this thought in mind I was only too willing to teach these boys the art of what I had learned.
And of course being innovative and experimental and whatever, it was natural for me to do into doing this. And I’ve always been considered a good teacher. And maybe I should have taken that up as a profession. I don’t know.⁶

The apprentice program at the Navy Yard also benefitted from experienced workers from Scotland. Frank J. Orlando recalled working alongside these individuals:

Now I have to mention this. The ship fitter shop—maybe the other shops were the same way—were fortunate that all our supervision, most of the high supervision from the leading man, from the master, the foreman, and quarter man, were trained on the Clyde. We called them bagpipers in Scotland, the River Clyde.
And they knew shipbuilding. And they knew the apprentice system. And they knew that we were there to learn and they were there to teach us because this is how they learned their trade. So we always got respect from most of these. There were some that were a little jealous and all that.
I had in mind a Jock McIver. He still had a brogue after leaving Scotland I’d say thirty years. And we were walking some place at the waterfront. And I was right aside of him. He says, “Boy,”--. We were apprentice boys then regardless of how old we were. “Walk two paces behind me, lad.” And, but with their experience and, and, and—they developed the know-how that we came to do a terrific job at the shipyard.⁷

During Frank Orlando's years at the Yard, Boston Naval Shipyard entered the computer age. His story is an example of the rigorous training that followed a worker throughout their time in the Navy Yard and of the intersection between the private sector and the government. All the while, workers like Frank had to make sacrifices at home, at times working 16 hour days, seven days a week.

About ’60, 1960, I was appointed the P and E division representative. We had a shipyard data processing committee. And Washington had directed us to develop a management information system for the shipyard and get ready for installing a computer, shipyard wide computer.
Now these computers were to be all uniform, the same, the same programs. And Boston was assigned the first one.
At that time I took the exam given by the data processing management association. And I passed and became a certified data process--. This is something like the equivalent of passing the bar. The exam was countrywide. There’d be a couple of hundred that would pass it.
But I had terrific training. By being on this data processing committee, we had people from IBM, from Univac, from Honeywell. They were all vying to be selected for the computer that’s going to all the shipyards. So they leaned over backwards to give us training.
In other words they begged us to send people to various schools they had. And they were great. They were great schools and we really learned. Yeah. We were to be the first shipyard to install a standard computer to be followed by all the shipyards. When we got the computer--.
Oh, I missed ’61. I took an exam for the data processing department. And I was selected as head of the control and scheduling branch. And Boston was assigned the first computer.⁸

"Gee, I made that out of nothing"

Spatial thinking is key to shipbuilding. Being able to work from a two-dimensional plan to a three-dimensional figure required a lot of hands-on manipulation of materials. The apprentice program gave young workers that experience. Workers could also express a sense of pride for their work and talent, as Dominic Fucile recalled:

You know, the one thing I was [unclear] about my trade was you could always step back and look at what you made and say, "Gee I made that out of nothing."
In other words, the sheet metal trade was one that required imagination. I don’t know [unclear]. But it’s not like on many other trades. On sheet metal trade everything starts off like a flat sheet of paper. And then it has to be fabricated into whatever it’s going to be whether it’s a cylindrical, conical or rectangular. It’s going to have to take the shape of whatever you’re going to make whether it be a locker or anything, a hood over a galley range, or berthing for the crews to sleep in. And I always enjoyed it.⁹

Robert T. Casoli, a boiler man, journeyman, mechanical systems inspector, and planner also recognized how workers at the Navy Yard developed their own tools:

All these here tools were like designed here in the yard. Everything was done here. And everything they did in this yard that was done here usually stayed here, you know, unless somebody--. Like the other Navy yards used to come here and say, “Well Boston did this. Let’s go see how they did it”.
Like, like, like they built some new ships back in, in the 1970s, brand new destroyers. They call them pressured fired. You know, now they got gas turbine and they got nuclear and stuff. But back then the, the latest thing was pressured-fired boilers.
And on the pressured-fired boiler what they did was, it was like, it looked like a big tank. But nobody knew how to repair the super heater in it. There’s like a super—what they call super heated steam. That there’s what they used to make the ship go. Okay.
So nobody knew how to take it out to repair it because it was all encased. So they worked--. They had [unclear]. They were looking at the blueprints. There was a--. Anyway, they decided that they were going to remove it and how they were going to remove it.
So certain people made decisions. Engineers, our own engineers--. It’s the first time one of these super heaters was ever removed from a destroyer and repaired. So they went ahead they took all the interferers out whatever. And they dropped it down. They took it out.
The next thing you know every Navy yard in the country, which was eleven at that time, they all wanted to see how we did it. So what they did was they came to Boston to learn how to do remove one of those out because we were the first to do it, see. And that’s the way it was.
This yard was, was probably one of the best yards. It had the best apprentice program in the country.¹⁰

Footnotes

1. Boston National Historical Park Oral History. Paul Ivas, Master, Forge Shop, interviewed by Peter Steele and Arsen Charles about Smithsonian inventory of Forge Shop. August 29, 1978. Ernie Erickson, forge shop employee, also present.
2. Interview with George McGrath for the National Park Service, Boston National Historical Park Charleston Navy Yard, Navy Yard Workers Reunion by Phil Lupsiewicz on September 2, 2000. McGrath worked at the Navy Yard from 1953-closing as a sheet metal worker and designer.
3. Interview with Various Navy Yard Workers for the National Park Service, Boston National Historical Park Charleston Navy Yard, Navy Yard Workers Reunion by Janet Levine on September 3, 2000 [Dominic Fucile]
4. Boston National Historical Park Oral History. Paul Ivas, Master, Forge Shop, interviewed by Peter Steele and Arsen Charles about Smithsonian inventory of Forge Shop. August 29, 1978. Ernie Erickson, forge shop employee, also present.
5. Interview with Lawrence Furnari for the National Park Service, Boston National Historical Park Charleston Navy Yard, Navy Yard Workers Reunion by Janet Levine on September 1, 2000. Furnari worked at the yard from 1965 to 1973.
6. Unclear
7. Interview with Frank J. Orlando for the National Park Service, Boston National Historical Park Charleston Navy Yard, Navy Yard Workers Reunion by Dan Gagnon on September 2, 2000.
8. Interview with Frank J. Orlando for the National Park Service, Boston National Historical Park Charleston Navy Yard, Navy Yard Workers Reunion by Dan Gagnon on September 2, 2000.
9. Interview with Various Navy Yard Workers for the National Park Service, Boston National Historical Park Charleston Navy Yard, Navy Yard Workers Reunion by Janet Levine on September 3, 2000 [Dominic Fucile]
10. Interview with Robert T. Casoli for the National Park Service, Boston National Historical Park Charleston Navy Yard, Navy Yard Workers Reunion by Janet Levine on September 2, 2000. Casoli worked at the Navy Yard from 1952-1974 as a boiler man, journeyman, mechanical systems inspector, and planner.

Sources

Bither, Barbara and Boston National Historical Park. (1999) Images of America: Charlestown Navy Yard. Acadia Publishing, Charleston, SC.