Around 1915, native Californian Edwin “Ed” J. Lang left the Pacific Coast and headed east to Boston seeking his fortune. A restless Lang “took to the sea at an early age” joining American Hawaiian Steamship Company in 1904, which at the time operated nine ships largely hauling sugar outbound from Hawaii and manufactured goods on the inbound leg from the mainland.
Lang’s passage East was a reversal of the half century trend of New Englanders heading West seeking their fame and fortune in the gold fields of California. The Boston to which Ed Lang journeyed in the mid-1900s was still thought of as the “Hub” – a moniker Oliver Wendell Holmes anointed Boston in 1858 celebrating the intellectual and commercial prowess of the city. But in truth, metropolitan New York City had already stolen the march over Boston and especially in shipping.
In 1919, the Boston Marine Guide formally began weekly publishing as a large oversized broad sheet with an annual subscription cost of $5.00 per year. One of the unique and ingenious attributes of the newly minted port paper was its presentation – the initial subscription included a split wooden hanger similar in design to those used to hang dress pants. The hanger allowed the reader to see all vessel arrival and departure schedules for the Port of Boston – and of course all the supporting surrounding advertisements – and with a simple flip of the hanger, the reader could peruse the editorial content and of course see more ads.
The shipping schedules were the centerpiece of the entire endeavor. Virtually the entire shipping community needed to know when ships were arriving and departing and there was no central public clearing house for this information.
The Port of Boston’s port commission annually appropriated money to publish the schedules in the Boston Marine Guide, stating the publication was “The Port of Boston’s shipping paper, a directory and guide to the sailing to and from Boston.”
Lang’s World
In the aftermath of World War I, the city’s shipping fortunes slipped but business recovered with the “Roaring Twenties.” However, the recovery was largely confined to imports as exports sagged – a familiar problem even today. The trade imbalance problem was attributed to adverse rail and ocean freight rates. Unfair freight rates became a cause celebre for Boston’s maritime community, as the port’s export prominence plummeted. The Boston Maritime Association and the Boston Chamber of Commerce brought the case to the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) in 1924 but lost in a landmark case.
The Boston Marine Guide was cited in the Congressional Record and over the ensuing decades was immersed in many of the high-profile battles of the Boston shipping community.
And there was plenty to report on in Lang’s early years. On March 12th 1920, the ILA (International Longshoremen’s Association) strike spread from the Port of New York to virtually all ports on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. For Lang, the strike wouldn’t be the last labor dispute in the pages of the Boston Marine Guide.
Another notable event in 1920 was the inauguration of what is colloquially known as the “Jones Act” – a cabotage law defining U.S. flag shipping in U.S. waters. The Jones Act is still drawing ink to the pages of the American Journal of Transportation like it did for Lang during his tenure. In fact, the debate over the Jones Act has intensified in recent years (for example, Stas Margaronis wrote an informative piece on the future of US shipping in the Sept. 27th 2010 edition, “The compelling case for the US Marine Highway”) and stands to become an even more controversial slice of legislation as offshore wind farms and supporting services develop on the US East Coast in the coming decades.
Of course, for anyone living in the 1920s, arguably the most memorable event was the January 17th – conveniently after New Year’s celebration – declaration of Prohibition banning the sale of liquor in the United States. In Boston, the vastly unpopular law spawned a war between Rum Runners and the U.S. Coast Guard. But Prohibition did little to stem the flow of liquor in the City of Boston.
For Lang and the shipping crowd, T-Wharf was the go-to place to mix business, politics and beverages. Nominally speaking, T-Wharf was home to a small fleet of Italian and Portuguese fishing vessels. But T-Wharf was also the bohemian heart of the City before succumbing to “revitalization” in the 1960s. At the wharf’s peak, there were some sixty plus “apartments” which regularly flooded on high tides. Notably, located at the end of T-Wharf was the “Waterfront Club” speakeasy (a night club selling illegal alcoholic beverages) which catered to Boston’s political and business elite. Later the Blue Ship T-Room inherited the role as the waterfront’s very “own” dive. Lang retained a lifelong affinity for T-Wharf and would count high among his accomplishments his “membership” in the “T-Wharf Yacht Club” – a very loose association of members keeping small craft and sailboats at the pier. [Editor’s note: Ironically, as a child I was introduced to Ed Lang on T-Wharf during the early 1960s, a few years before demolition. At the time, there was a barrier up forbidding entrance but a denizen had placed a sign reading: East Berlin-West Berlin expressing the waterfront community’s feeling over the death warrant placed on the pier.]
Pivotal Year 1956
Ed Lang’s Boston Marine Guide did well to survive the Great Depression from 1929-1933 and the entry into World War II. Many of the issues Lang wrote about in the early years of the publication persisted into the 1930s and well beyond. Questions over freight rates - especially inland rail freight rates - and freight using Canadian gateways would continue to be germane in the newspaper for many decades after Lang’s period. These were critical issues for the Boston port community and the US at large. Most of these problems were never truly resolved with the Great Depression and shortly after World War II creating overarching events eclipsing any domestic shipping quarrels.
But in the 1950s many of these issues that had been put on hold for the War bubbled back to the surface. During WWII controls on longshore labor were put in place and while many waterfront employers had a “Good War” the unions (ILA and ILWU) wanted their own version of a “New Deal.”
What neither waterfront labor nor the unions could foresee was the containerization revolution. On April 26th 1956, Malcom McLean’s SS Ideal X, a converted T-2 tanker, left Newark, NJ for Houston, TX with 58 containers. From this modest beginning was launched a new industry – containerized shipping – which would replace the way ocean carriage had been conducted for generations.
In the same year, Thomas “Teddy” Gleason became President of the ILA, an office he would hold until 1987. The waterfront unions believed containerization and the automation of shifting ocean freight was an arrow aimed at their membership. Gleason euphemistically described the containers as “ILA coffins” and the adoption and adaptation to the box business became an ongoing point of contention between waterfront labor and management to this day.
The first big confrontation came in December of 1962 when the ILA went on strike for 34 days idling East Coast and Gulf ports. Two years later there was another strike and strikes, wildcat strikes and the threat of strikes became fodder for not only industry papers like the Boston Marine Guide but city newspapers like the Boston Globe.
On the local level, another significant event occurred when the Massachusetts Port Authority, better known as Massport, was formed ending the City’s domain over public piers. The formation of Massport included Logan International Airport as well as other assets. Ironically, the airport became the economic driver for the Authority as the public piers were vested with the challenge of building a competitive containerport.
These three events taken together altered the scope and coverage of the Boston Marine Guide. Almost immediately, Logan and air freight became a part of the coverage. The difficulties in building competitive container facilities against the backdrop of burgeoning container business in places like New York/New Jersey and even Montreal and Halifax became a regular feature of news. Indeed, the coverage of the newspaper had to grow and New England was drawn into the news beat during the 1960s.
End of an Era
When Lang died in 1968, the change in the publication, and indeed the business itself, was already underway. Richard “Dick” Hurley, who had worked on the Boston Marine Guide in the summers as a kid, took control of the publication. The publishing operations were combined with another trade newspaper, the venerable Commercial Bulletin owned by Al McCarty and both weekly newspapers were domiciled in 88 Broad St. William “Bill” Ruff, who was already editing the Commercial Bulletin added the Boston Marine Guide to his duties.
The October 18th 1968 edition, appropriately carrying Ed Lang’s obituary, was the last oversized broadsheet Boston Marine Guide. Subsequently, the new format for the Boston Marine Guide was as an oversized tabloid on newsprint. Perhaps a fitting epitaph for Lang’s work is what he wrote of the Boston Marine Guide: “The finest paper in the East.”
