'You've got a whole new generation now:' Lorainites remember American Ship Building heyday, look ahead to submarine dry dock proposal

LORAIN — For nearly 200 years, shipbuilding dominated Lorain's industrial waterfront. Myron Wicks remembers growing up in the 1970s on West 19th Street. Every time an iron ore ship or steel ship came into port on the Black River, its horn would echo over the International City. "My mom would load us up in the station wagon and drive us down to the pier and we watched them come in," he said. "It took forever for the ships to maneuver and the drawbridge to go up and for them to get past the drawbridge and the drawbridge to close. "It was just one of those things that being a resident of that city was remarkable." Lorain's shipbuilding industry started with wooden sailing vessels built on the west side in 1819. As technology pushed forward, the yard moved to the east side of the river, eventually home to the Lorain Yard of the Cleveland Shipbuilding Co. — the largest dry dock on the Great Lakes. Cleveland Shipbuilding gave way to American Ship Building Co. in 1898. For decades the din of work on ore carriers, freighters and Navy vessels dominated the dry docks off Colorado Avenue. Thousands of men worked in the yard at a time, making up eight different unions from boilermakers and pipefitters to electricians and machinists. They sweated in the summer — baking in the sun to fabricate 1,000-foot vessels from the ground up — and froze in the winter doing the same — huddling around salamander heaters. For 10 years, John Sekletar was one of those men battling the elements. During his time, in the last decade of the industry's stint in Lorain, there were about 1,200 people working at the yard, he said. "In the summer it was hot, in the winter it was cold," Sekletar said. "It was hard to be a shipyard worker here in Ohio. … It was challenging, but I liked it because if you can imagine just seeing a flat piece of steel, which was the deck, evolve. Next thing you know there's walls and bulkheads and it's building and building and just to see it happen in front of your eyes you're like wow, this is really amazing." He was vice president of Boilermakers Local 358, and sat across the table from company attorney Anthony Giardini — which meant grappling with unpredictable weather and company demands for flexibility from the union workers. "It was pretty intense," Sekletar said, reflecting on his first job after coming back from the Navy. The Lorain native served on the USS Saratoga and thought it'd be fun to work in the yard after getting home. Sekletar's father-in-law, John Veroni, was in charge of the hull department. He had an uncanny ability building ships, Sekletar said, one of the numerous craftsmen employed at the yard until it shuttered in December 1983, taking those thousand-plus jobs to a yard George Steinbrenner owned in Tampa, Florida. During the sunset of the yard, tension grew between the company and unions. Strikes were frequent and hours spent at the negotiating table dragged on. "We feel they made mistakes at corporate. They didn't plan things right, they didn't build the ships properly, they didn't have enough planning behind them," Sekletar said. "They tried to blame it on the wages, and the fact that we didn't have the flexibility to continue work "It was actually bad corporate policy, I would say." When the yard closed in December 1983, Anthony Giardini remembers the office break room was littered with half-filled coffee cups waiting to be picked up again. "That sticks in my mind more than anything else," he said. "For me it was a dark day." Like Wicks and others, he'd grown up with the industry in the background, mammoth freighters sliding effortlessly into the Black River. His father, Bernie Giardini, worked at the yard in high school — he'd lied about his age to get a job painting Navy vessels before school. Before standing in the break room, Giardini had stood in front of Sekletar and other union negotiators, imploring them to understand the position the company was in: Take a benefit cut, take a pay cut, or lose your jobs. He had his orders from company owner Steinbrenner. "We got to this sticking point and I looked at (Boilermakers local President Paul Blanchette) and I said guys, 'I'm not joking, Steinbrenner will close this place if I can't get this done.' He looked at me and says, 'Then tell him to close it.'" In hindsight, the writing was on the wall, Giardini said. The cuts may have kept the the yard alive for for a couple of years, but it wouldn't have stayed in Lorain much longer. "I think it would've made a difference for a period of a time … there wasn't any indication that we'd be building any freighters again, (with) the steel industry starting to decline and these new ships were more than capable of handling cargo needs that existed," Giardini said. "There's not much to maintain and repair. Would we have been around a lot longer? Probably not. Maybe another two or three years." It was a domino effect, Wicks said. He's seen his hometown through good times and bad — Am Ship's move to Tampa was part of the latter. Spitzer Great Lakes bought the property in 1985, trying for some time to bring a casino to the space. As it became clear the project wasn't going to pan out, they pivoted to what is now Harborwalk condominiums — all with Giardini at the legal helm. The 1980s, '90s and early 2000s saw Lorain slump. Its downtown idled like the south side mills and the Ford Plant closed in 2005. "Crime rate went up, hospitality didn't exist anymore — it was just an overall stress for the city of Lorain that people could not cope with not having the businesses striving like they were so they could support their families. It was a rough time." The haze of Am Ship's closure might lift as Lorain's first industry looks to return to its riverbanks. Bartlett Maritime Corp., owned by former Navy Capt. Ed Bartlett, wants to bring 3,000 union jobs to the city if the Navy greenlights plans for a submarine dry dock. Bartlett's plans for a dry dock in the Midwest came after a report highlighted the Navy's need for submarine shipyards for repairs and overhauls. That U.S. Government Accountability Office report noted that from 2008 to 2018, more than three submarines were idled continuously for maintenance, overdue for completion or awaiting overhaul at any given time. The proposal has sparked attention and support from local congressional leaders, including U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Toledo. But for those who remember the industry's former heyday in Lorain, it's the opportunity to see the city come back to stronger. Wicks is quick to note the city is not dead. "You've got a whole new generation now," he said. "They really didn't have much to look forward to in the city of Lorain. But this here is a big achievement for the city and the people in it. Now they've got something to look forward to, they've got a reason to get up in the mornings. They've got a reason to go to the beach again and be happy — that's how it was when I was a kid." Hundreds of miles away from his hometown, Wicks hasn't forgotten his roots, or watching the freighters amble into Lorain's port. He works for Riley Power Group, a full-service welding, machining and quality control company that has done work in the defense, nuclear, oil and gas industries. Riley Power Group senior project manager Brian Hargett said Wicks wants nothing more than to see the project take off in Lorain — and Riley Power Group would be interested in helping make that happen. Hargett understands Lorain's ebb and flow of jobs. After his time in the Marine Corps, he came home to South Carolina to work in the cotton mill. But his work was outsourced overseas. He went to technical school and learned to weld, eventually getting a chance to go to a school Riley Power Group was running after he didn't qualify during their weld test. With the potential jobs coming in to the city, Hargett suggests residents interested in the work get the initial training to be able to develop skills. Bartlett Maritime Corp. plans to partner with Lorain County Community College to rebuild the legacy of skilled tradesmen in the area. After American Ship Building closed, Sekletar bounced around industries, eventually retiring from Amherst Schools. While repairs are short-term jobs, the Navy's backlog should keep a steady flow of subs coming in along the St. Lawrence Seaway if the project comes to fruition, he said. "They're so backlogged at keeping these vessels up that one will be done and another will be coming. … I'm sure if they put that industry in people would come from other places too," Sekletar said, excited at the possibility. Giardini said the project has the possibility to change the economic outlook for not just Lorain, but all of Northeast Ohio. "We've already got a lot of our swagger back with some of the things that've been going on downtown … but to get back into shipbuilding or ship repair will be very cool," he said. "The emotional benefits of that, the attitude we will get, I don't think we'll get a price on it. … I don't think I'm overstating it when I think it will be a game changer." Motion creates motion, he said. Not only would the dry dock bring stable, good-paying jobs, but the sailors stationed on submarines in the docks would also need somewhere to live — creating jobs in construction, increasing enrollment in local schools and creating a different kind of domino effect: everything building off one another, rather than the shock of industry after industry leaving the area. "We get this shipyards in addition to all these other things, I think we'll have a lot of envious mayors and I think the jokes will stop," Giardini said. "We'll go back to the old days when some of our highest wage earners may have lived in Avon, Avon Lake, Elyria, Amherst but they made their living in Lorain. People shouldn't forget that, that Lorain dealt with the smoke and environmental issues, our river that we used suffered during those times and a lot of these guys made their living. We protected them with our fire department — one of the best in the region — an excellent police department. We provided a lot of people to make a living and that's part of our pride too. … Getting back a major industry, one that goes back to the 1800s, would put us at the forefront in our region and the county." Contact Carissa Woytach at (440) 329-7245 or cwoytach@chroniclet.com.