FRED FREEMAN: A distinguished artist and historian casts a loving look at life along the banks of the Connecticut River by Peter Stanford. Pictures and captions by Fred Freeman Illustrator and designer of a number of naval books, including the Naval lnstitute's histories of destroyer and submarine operations in World War II, and Scribner's classic Picture History of the US. Navy, Fred Freeman has regularly gone to sea on naval exercises in the decades since World War II , and was the first to depict the awesome visage of a nuclear submarine. He comes by this interest honestly, having commanded various small naval craft in the Pacific during World War II , in far ranging missions from the Tasman Sea to the Aleutians. His far-ranging intere~ts have carried him in spirit into outer space, and his work hangs in the permanent collection of the National Air and Space Administration (NASA) . For almost a half century (since 1938) he has lived in the quiet River Town of Essex . These pages suggest the depth and range of his interest in the life of the Connecticut River on whose banks he lives . Freeman is a formidable historian as well as artist, as anyone who has worked with him on historical projects can attest. He does not rest easy with easy answers -he wants to get to the hard truth of any situation and will move heaven and earth to do so. One of his projects is to get at the true story of the frigate Trumbull, built upriver during the Revolution, which had a hard time getting over the bar at the river mouth-she was held up for over two years until finally she was floated over with pumped-out barrels. We look forward to his account of his researches into that near-fiasco in a future issue. Here, Fred Freeman shares with us a
unique, robust and withal gentle view of the life of the River he loves.
* fitting-out * * time* for *the sailor, Springtime, is a time of youthful aspirations and dreams of distant voyaging. Fred Freeman catches all this in his "Stepping the Mast;' which is accompanied by one of his inimitable essays about what's in the picture. The practical details are all accurate (you can trust this artist-historian for that) , but you'd have to have a heart of stone to miss the feelings moving through this scene. Now for "Flora and the Walrus ," the splendid scene across the way; right away you know you're in for a yarn, a fable or fairy story on the lines of "Beauty and the Beast." The scene is a boat race become a sea fight, like the "toro bufo" bullfight your editor remembers seeing once in a small port on the north coast of Spain (Ribadeo? I'm not sure) , wherein no blood is shed and the contest collapses at the end in general confusion and laughter. Like everything in Freeman's work, this records something that really happened, but by the time he's through with it reality has been heightened to mythological status. "Did Walrus catch Flora?" he asks. We don't know-the two are forever in the chase, like Keats's youth and maiden on a Grecian urn. The warmth and intimacy of life in a River Town as Fred and Katie Freeman live it is brought to glowing life in the snowbound "Essex-in the Winter of Seventy-Eight." There is no one mentioned in the essay whose life is not interwoven with the f reemans' from Governor and Ambassador to India Chester Bowles, to local waterman Giff Warner.
FLORA and the WALRUS: The Race : Between these ships, berthed in nearby slips and working the same waters, a spirit of rivalry was bound, sooner or later, to assert itself.. .to germinate and finally to explode in full blast in a race that will not be soon forgotten along the banks of the Connecticut River. The Uiilrus, owned and operated by contractor Beldon Libby is a lighter pushed along by a powerful CB type outboard at (some say) 20 knots. She builds the finest shoreline structures on the river. From docks to sea-walls to breakwaters there is little heavy work she does not execute superbly. The Uiilrus is macho, slow to maneuver but fast enough on the straightaway, 60 feet in length by 20 foot beam-that dimension holds at the bow, the midsection, and the transom. Flora on the other hand is pert, she's pretty and she's lithe and almost acrobatic. Built in 1906 as an oyster boat she's now the workboat for the Essex Boat Works and workboat or no she prances. She's very red on top, she embraces an upright piano clawed into her foredeck and amongst her part-time crew she boats a tuba and its player, a guitar and guitarist and other musicians. Her master, Stu Ingersoll plays a ferocious banjo. And they have a Whitehall tender which the whole band crowds into to serenade the fleet.
SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1985
CAPTAIN WILLArM COIT TROD THESE COBBLF.S!
Imagine encountering this formidable and angry skipper in a poster on a tree trunk! It makes you straighten up and-almost-salute. Freeman put these up around town to help advertise an Essex art show, and to remind the latitudinarian inhabitants that they came of a proud and worthy ancestry. (Coit was the first captain of the Oliver Cromwell, built two hundred years earlier as the first warship of the Connecticut Navy at the foot of Main Street, where this poster was put up.)
The race took place from Essex anchorage to Hamburg Cove about liUO on the 14 day of September just as the setting sun pushed the shadow of Essex's Book Hill up the rise of Cooper's Hill on the Lyme side. As the gallant pair approached Nun 2 off Hamburg, Flora , highstepping, frisking her white water-heels, was slightly ahead of thundering, pounding Walrus; leading by just a piano-length. But they were still together and things got a little tense as the finish line came on. The truth is that fire hoses were broken out and water was exchanged in the narrow passage past Brockway's Island . And, also, firecrackers were launched and in fact everything that was loose around the opposing decks and that could be thrown was thrown, up to the piano; Ingersoll was conning Flora from its top. Mercifully, the two vessels passed in the lee of Brockway's Island and in the smoke and watery fray the outcome of the race has never been officially recorded. Did Uiilrus catch Flora? History does not say. But latterly Uiilrus and Flora have been seen in the wee hours to be quietly nestling across the waters of the Island Marina in moonlit nights and there has been heard the tinkle of a piano, fingered in the breeze, and the rumble of an outboard-and there has been no more talk of racing.
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