We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
THEY SPAN THE PACIFIC
191
softly explained to the woman's attorney that it is physically impossible for a ship to stop suddenly at sea. The suit was dropped.
Most Matson passengers are wellbehaved, but there is always a small quota of men for whom a little liquor goes a long way. Matson bartenders have orders to refuse requests from passengers who have obviously had enough. If a passenger gets difficult about it, the bartender summons a ship's officer, who takes the offender on deck for persuasion. If the drunk starts swinging, they lower the boom, and he finds himself in the ship's brig until he promises to be a good boy.
Rich college boys, sent to Hawaii by their indulgent fathers as a reward for not having flunked out, sometimes make life difficult for Matson stewards. One group celebrated the voyage by smashing all the drinking glasses on board, necessitating the substitution of paper cups for most of the trip. Their fathers were told about it, and presented with a stiff bill for the broken glassware. It was paid without comment.
Mischievious small boys are often an equal problem. Recently one seven-year-old got into the ship's print shop while the printer was having lunch. He did a carefully neat job of scrambling the type case. When the printer returned, he set type for a dinner menu, without looking at the type as he withdrew the letters out of each compartment. When he stared at the proof he pulled, he wondered if he had gone quietly mad.
On one of the older Matson ships,
with reduced bathroom facilities, a nine-year-old boy once showed an amazing genius for getting a whole ship in an uproar. Just before breakfast he gathered several pairs of his father's shoes and took them to the men's room. He put one pair in each compartment, so that the toes showed beneath the door of each, which he locked. Then he crawled out from under the last compartment.
After breakfast the men passengers began to file into the men's room. They waited impatiently, eyeing the shoes under each locked compartment door. Finally one man could wait no longer and fled toward the ladies' room. He bumped into a woman just coming out, and she screamed. The scream brought passengers, stewards and ship's officers running. There was utter confusion, and for a while no one knew what was happening.
The hoax was finally discovered, along with its perpetrator. The ship's captain was so thoroughly provoked that he lost his temper and warned the ingenious boy's parents if they didn't restrain him from any future experiments of this kind, Junior would be tossed in the clink.
With more than 700 passengers on board each trip, it is obvious that one or more are going to provide a unique problem for the ship's personnel. On a recent trip of the Lurline, a dining room steward began to miss one of the passengers, a nice quiet young man. He went to the passenger's cabin and found the door locked. Worried, he phoned the bridge and an officer came down to investigate.
They forced the door open and found that he had unscrewed every