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1904 schedule between Boston and Bar Harbor for a complete stateroom, there is a great spirit of coordination of activities between members.
Members of the SHSA are in constant touch with each other. If the lone member of the Society in Yank' ton, South Dakota, uncovers an item of particular interest to one of the two members in Alaska, she notifies him through the Steamboat Bill of Facts, now the official publi' cation of the organization. And in that way all members know of the discovery.
The magazine was founded by Jay Allen, now a professor of music at the University of Illinois. As a boy, he took frequent trips on the steamer /. T. Morse. "That ship was my first love, and I've followed her ever since," Allen says as he points out on his scale model a portion of the deck that was altered after a change of ownership.
Allen has published a complete history of the /. T. Morse. Still, he car' ries on a constant search for unpublished photographs, hidden news stories or other items that might reveal an unknown incident in the steamer's history.
Allen has thousands of clippings and photographs of the Morse, name plates, time-tables, and a life preserver. Something of the proud look of a sea captain comes to his face when he points to the steam whistle which he located after 16 years' search. The Bar Harbor Times for November 21, 1914, said, "The steamer /. T. Morse surprised the townspeople when her whistle was
np May -June, 1950
heard about 12 Saturday night." In somewhat the same way Allen plans H to surprise his wife some foggy morning by rigging up the whistle to a steam pipe.
"I knew the glory of the Mississippi River steamer would live forever in the works of Mark Twain," Allen will tell you, "but who was to record" the equally glorious history of the coastal steamer?" Allen looked around and sent out the first call in his initial issue of the Steamboat Bill of Facts, which was a mimeographed affair in 1940 when it went to only 26 inter' ested persons.
"So some of us got together and formed the Society," says Allen, a quiet man, holding the first copy of the magazine in one hand and his pipe in the other. "I am still amazed at our growth." Today the Society has members in many foreign countries,all helping to coordinate the activities of collectors and historians of power' driven vessels.
The group often takes action when some nautical item of historic value is threatened with oblivion. Such an item was the S. S. Wolverine, formerly the S. S. Michigan, which in 1944 lay rotting because of a 20 year tie'up between the Navy and the city of Erie, Pennsylvania. The Navy refused to spend one cent on mainte < nance because the ship was loaned to the city, and the city refused to keep it in repair because she was owned by the Navy.
The Steamship Historical Society of America thought the S. S. Wolverine I should be preserved because she was America's oldest and first iron-hulled-