Home Is the Sailor

A problem no longer to Mrs. J. Borden Harriman, the German Navy, and Russian and Norwegian authorities, the freighter City of Flint was safe home in Baltimore at week's end. With three months' pay and a bonus in their shoregoing pants, safe were her seamen in "Mae's Tavern," "Joe's Place" and the "Jolly Spot." Home was the sailor, with yarns to tell.

They told them: how they had once wanted to attack the German prize crew which boarded their ship and forced them to sail her north to Murmansk; how Captain Joseph A. Gainard, lean, softspoken, restrained them; that the Nazi crew were "damned good sailors" but ate themselves stupid on U. S. cooking; how in Murmansk they had seen the liners Bremen, New York, St. Louis, Hamburg.

Bare as a fresh-scrubbed deck was the story of First Mate Warren W. Rhoads, who wrote a solemn, copyrighted history of the trip for the New York Times and the North American Newspaper Alliance Inc. Of their stay in Bergen: "Mrs. Harriman, our United States Minister to Norway, came aboard, a very fine lady. She thanked us all for the way we conducted ourselves . . . and said our State Department was grateful. ... I was badly in need of a haircut and so were the rest of the crew, so we asked for a barber." Ashore went First Mate Rhoads to have Thanksgiving dinner with Maurice P. Dunlap, the consul: "After drinking all of Mr. Dunlap's cider we played rummy for several hours, then returned to the ship."

During the three weeks the City of Flint was in Bergen harbor, busiest of her crew was Junior Third Mate Carl C. Ellis of Newtonville, Mass. When he finally sailed away, he had the promise of 22-year-old Norwegian Ruth Englesen to marry him, if he can arrange for her entry to the U. S.

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