The church was packed with friends and employees for the simple service. Reverend John O. Mellin, a personal friend of William Francis Gibbs, delivered the eulogy, praising a man who “revealed to those around him a loyalty of perfection.”17
Vera Gibbs employed her characteristic graciousness and composure to greet mourners at the viewing and service and to hear expressions of their sympathy. Son Francis Gibbs attended his father’s funeral, but his brother Christopher decided to stay in California. He wrote a note to his mother, saying that his teaching load and his own fear of flying kept him from coming. “This reason, ‘per se,’ may sound rather strange and even callous in a way—but, after considerable meditation on my part as well as recalling my last year’s visit with Dad, I came to the conclusion that he wanted me to carry on ‘Full steam ahead,’ to coin a phrase.” Although he hinted at a reconciliation of sorts with his father, Christopher’s letter to Vera still pointed to a strained relationship. “Although the loss of Dad has affected me in certain specific ways,” he wrote. “I nonetheless feel that each of us continue to handle our lives as seems most suitable and appropriate. We must each reach our own decisions, whether right or wrong in the eyes of others.”18
Many others wrote to Vera. Lewis Lapham, former president of the Grace Line (and father of the editor of Harper’s), wrote about the service that “all he was and stood for was there, strong and abundant.”19
One condolence note, scrawled in script, came from the man once known as the greatest mariner in America. “The world has lost a great man,” retired United States Lines commodore Harry Manning wrote. “Personally I had a great admiration for him. He cannot be replaced.”
The naval architect would have most appreciated the sentiments of the Chief Engineer Bill Kaiser. “I miss the old so-and-so,” he said, “asking every morning how things were going and how many revolutions we are making.”20
On September 22, John J. McCloy, a onetime poor boy from Philadelphia and now president of the Chase Manhattan Bank, watched United States head out to sea from his office window, followed by Queen Mary—the old British liner was leaving New York for the last time. McCloy then composed one of the last notes Vera Gibbs received: “With your father who was the top of his profession and with your husband who was the leader of his, you have had a rich association with men of such outstanding quality…. We all know how much that ship was a part of his life. It brought back many memories as she went by.”21
William Francis Gibbs was buried in Princeton, New Jersey, next to his mother, Frances. The body of his father, William Warren Gibbs, lay in faraway Hackettstown. Soon after the burial, the contents of Gibbs’s desk in the Glass Menagerie—honorary degrees, sketches, newspaper clippings, his passport, a childhood book of psalms, keys, even a stray pack of chewing gum—were boxed up and shipped to the vaults of the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia.
The same month William Francis Gibbs died, Queen Mary sailed her last transatlantic voyage. After thirty-one years of service, the great Cunarder would return to Southampton and then to her final port of calclass="underline" Long Beach, California. The city had purchased the ship for use as a permanently moored convention center. Queen Elizabeth would follow suit within a few months, destined, first, for Port Everglades, Florida, and then to Hong Kong to be refurbished as a floating university. But in 1972, just as the refit approached completion, the renamed Seawise University burst into flames and capsized in Hong Kong harbor. The wreck was scrapped the following year.
On November 7, 1969, United States docked in New York after completing Voyage Number 400. Awaiting her was an ominous piece of news: the upcoming fifty-five-day Pacific cruise—during which the ship would pass through the Panama Canal for the first time—had been canceled.
Still, Commodore Alexanderson sailed the Big Ship down to Newport News for her annual overhaul. When she arrived at the shipyard, the usual army of workmen swarmed aboard, as they had every year for the past seventeen years. They checked the engines and winches, vacuumed staterooms, replaced wiring and lightbulbs, polished railings and doorknobs. Two teams high up in chairs hanging on ropes began repainting the funnels.
But then a foreman from the shipyard ordered the men to stop everything and leave the ship. Hundreds of perplexed men dropped their paintbrushes and toolboxes, and shuffled down the gangways. Slowly, the sound of voices died out in the public rooms, staterooms, corridors, and engine rooms, and the ship went silent.
They would be back tomorrow, the shipyard workers thought.
The next day, they found the gangway doors sealed shut.
Commodore Alexanderson had received a call from the superintendent of the yard. “He said, ‘I want all the crew laid off,’” Alexanderson recalled. “Some of the crew never believed the ship was going to be stayed laid up, so left their things aboard the ship… figuring they’d be called back. They never were.”22
29. SECRETS TOLD
The United States Lines was forced to retire United States when Congress did not renew operating subsidies for fiscal year 1970. “Our gross revenues today on the United States are $18-million, about the same as in 1953 when the vessel first came out,” said one United States Lines executive. “But in the meantime our expenses have skyrocketed, wages and fringe benefits have skyrocketed, maintaining the ship has skyrocketed. We just can’t make a go of it because of these high costs and the airline competition.”1
Because of the ship’s original and still potential connection to national defense, the Navy hermetically sealed her, installing a dehumidification system to preserve her interiors and machinery. The United States Maritime Administration took full title from the ailing company, which had stopped making payments to the government on the outstanding loan. After a short tow across the James River to Norfolk, Virginia, United States would sit undisturbed and forgotten for the next decade. In 1976, Norwegian Cruise Line, hoping to add a large ship to its hugely profitable Caribbean cruise fleet, made an offer to buy United States and refit her as a modern cruise ship. The Maritime Administration refused, citing the ship’s still top-secret design features. Norwegian purchased and renovated the idled transatlantic liner France instead. Renamed Norway, she became one of the most successful cruise ships of all time.
It was not until 1977 that the Navy decided to declassify the ship’s design features. The man who made them public was John R. Kane, a retired vice president of Newport News Shipbuilding, who had almost lost his job once for refusing to divulge the ship’s top speed to Admiral Hyman Rickover. Now, freed to talk, he presented a paper on November 3, 1977, to the Hampton Roads section of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers.
The first revelations were visual. For the first time, published drawings showed the ship’s hull shape and propeller configuration. Kane illustrated his paper with previously top-secret photographs of the ship in dry dock, as well as diagrams of the model tests. The unique, below-the-waterline hull contours that Gibbs had guarded so zealously, the anticavitation propeller design he kept from public view, and his key engineering specifications were now available outside the “need to know” community.