Showing results by author "John Merriam" in All Categories

Shipping out in the 1970s These tales of adventure, told in 10 separate stories, provide a snapshot history of the 1970s from the author’s unique perspective as a merchant seaman traveling around the United States and to ports around the world. Starting in 1969, the first story describes a journey from Seattle to a waterfront resort in Maine, to a vegetable oil factory in New Orleans, and across the Pacific to the red-light district of wartime Saigon. Others describe shoveling coal to power an ore carrier on the Great Lakes, a ship of the same type and on the same run as the ill-fated ...

This is the second in a series of six sea stories based on the author's experience in the merchant marine. John is forced off one of the prototype container ships, running between Seattle and Alaska, by the start of what turned out to be the longest strike of West Coast longshoremen in U.S. history. Desperate for summer income with which to pay college tuition, so that he can keep his student deferment and avoid being sent to Viet Nam, the author hitchhikes to the Great Lakes to try to get a job. The job he got was in the engine room of an ore carrier like the Edmund Fitzgerald -- later ...

Around the time of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, the U.S.-flagged merchant ship S.S. Del Oro departs Tacoma, Wash. bound for ports in Central and South America. Some unmarked crates in one of the holds are to be delivered to the Del Oro's first stop after the U.S.: Nicaragua. The narrator, Oiler on the 8-12 watch in the engine room, had promised to smuggle a parrot from South America back to his girlfriend in Seattle, risking prison to impress a beautiful woman. Against a backdrop of the collapsing dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, read how a merchant seaman combs ...

This is a story of travels across America, spanning more than 10 states from Hawaii to New Hampshire, as a prodigal son returns to his New England home by hitchhiking and working on merchant ships. The tale describes his adventures along the way in the oil fields of New Mexico and on rivers, oceans and the Gulf of Mexico.

This is the fourth in a series of five sea stories based on the author's experience in the merchant marine. The S.S. Summit was one of the prototype containerships running up and down the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. During winter, that's probably the most miserable route for U.S. merchant ships. John signs on as Wiper, the lowest form of life in the engine room. After trying to save his work partner from a marijuana bust, John ends up sitting beside him in jail in Cordova, Alaska. Unable to make bail, John concludes that he'd need to be a lawyer himself to get out of jail. That realization ...

Set in 1969-70, this is a chronicle of a young man's flight from the Viet Nam draft and potential arrest on unrelated charges. The story starts in Seattle and goes to the coasts of Maine, a vegetable oil factory in New Orleans, the red light district of wartime Saigon and ends up with hitchhiking on Route 66 to get back to Seattle from New Orleans.

John Merriam was part of the crew for the S.S. Producer when she put in to Bandar Abbas in early 1972, the first U.S-flag ship to visit that godforsaken port. The Shah of Iran was still in power and tension was in the air. Unannounced, and seemingly from nowhere, a man named Mike Costello walked out of the desert. He came aboard the Producer casually as if he were part of the crew, pushing a handtruck stacked with cases of soda--awelcome sight in that parched region of the Persian Gulf. John wouldn’t know until later, when he unwittingly became Mike’s mule, that Mike was a professional ...