Background: I've had this ship on my mind a bit, for no obvious reason beyond having coincidentally run across a few videos online about her recently. I can't remember whether I've told this story here before, but many years ago, I nearly found myself very closely associated with her. Here's the story.

Back in the mid-2000s, after the newspaper I worked for went out of business, I did some freelance public relations writing for a number of industrial companies here in Maine. One of those companies was Cianbro Corporation, the general contractor, a fictional version of which has turned up a few times in the UF universe. I'm not going to say I exactly had an "in" with management there, but they knew who I was because of some family connections, and I had a couple of contacts there and a pretty good working relationship. I wrote some articles for their company magazine (it was really too grand a publication to call it a newsletter), some press releases about various projects, and so forth.

This was around the time when Norwegian Cruise Lines had bought what remains of United States and was talking about starting a US-flagged subsidiary to operate in compliance with the Jones Act, which is an awkward bit of legislation that requires shipping between US ports to be conducted by US-built, US-flagged ships crewed by US citizens. I say it's awkward because although that sounds very fine and patriotic, in practice all it's really done is drive overseas every single bit of the shipping trade that possibly could be driven overseas.

Anyway, Norwegian wanted to do something that would have required Jones Act compliance, I forget what--a route between San Francisco and Honolulu or something--and they needed an American-built liner to do it. Well, there's basically only one of those left in the world, and she's rusting at a pier in Philadelphia, so in the grand style of early-2000s businesses, they bought her and then started figuring out how they were going to do whatever they were trying to do.

At roughly the same time, Cianbro was looking at branching out from its usual lines, industrial and highway-and-bridge jobs, and getting into marine construction. I'm not sure why that particular pivot; the company's president at the time, Peter Vigue (since retired), was a graduate of Maine Maritime Academy,* so that might have had something to do with it. Whatever the reason, they'd bought a facility on the riverfront down in Brewer for building and repairing oil rigs, and there was talk of acquiring and reviving the old New England Shipbuilding yards in South Portland, where they built Liberty ships during World War II, and trying to bring back commercial shipbuilding to southern Maine. Ambitious, but Pete always liked to think, talk, and at least attempt on that kind of scale.

You can probably see where this was heading. Sometime in 2006 or 7, I forget exactly, my contact at Cianbro called me and said something to the effect of,

"You can't tell anybody about this until it's announced, but, we're bidding on the job to refit the SS United States for Norwegian, and Pete thinks we're going to get it. We'll bring her to South Portland and do the work in the World War II docks, it's going to be a huge, huge thing for the community. Pete wants you to be the public outreach guy for the whole project, and when it's done he wants you to write a coffee table book about it. You'll have total access, we want you in there from day one. We'll get you a photographer, maybe a videographer to work with. The whole thing should take two, maybe three years. Are you in?"

Hell yeah I was in! Are you kidding me? For a job like that I'd even move to friggin' Portland.

Aaaaand then 2008 happened and nobody got the contract to refit United States for Norwegian. Far as I know, Cianbro is not building Liberty ships (or whatever) in the old New England Shipbuilding yards in South Portland today. And I am not a maritime revival historian.

But yeah! There's some parallel universe where I'm the guy who literally wrote the book on the resurrection of the SS United States, and all those videos that have lately been made about the parlous state of the ship instead feature a scene where the videos' makers and I kick back in the first-class lounge, sipping umbrella drinks while I tell them the story of what a pain in the ass it was to track down all those mid-century modern café chairs and buy them back. :)

--G.
* Fun(?) Pete Vigue fact: Many years later, after retiring from Cianbro, he chose to show his enthusiasm for his alma mater's football team by taking a small cannon to a game and firing it to celebrate a touchdown, which became a problem when the wadding from said cannon hit a referee in the head. The referee was not seriously wounded and the charges against Pete were dropped when he made a donation to a local veterans' organization. Maine! It'll getcha if you ain't careful.

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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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