I met Jimmy Jazwinski at sea in the summer of 1966.
Or really, we met near Le Havre, France, on our way out to sea. We were each about nine and headed across the Atlantic on board the SS United States — a luxury ocean liner in her prime, with a capacity of about 1,900 passengers and a crew of over 1,000, operated by the United States Lines.
My family and I were returning from a year spent in Poppenbüttel, Germany, a suburb of Hamburg, where my father, Larry, conducted wave-resistance research at the Hamburgische Institut für Schiffbau, and I went to a German elementary school. My brother, Chris, was a toddler, so he was at home with our mother, Grace.
Larry had been trained as a naval architect and spent the academic year 1965-1966 away from his teaching duties at Webb Institute of Naval Architecture in Glen Cove, N.Y. He had graduated in 1948 from the University of Michigan with a degree in naval architecture and landed a job soon after at the renowned Gibbs & Cox. The New York-based naval architecture firm was run by the almost obsessively dedicated design genius William Francis Gibbs, who had undertaken to design and supervise the building of what would be the largest and fastest luxury liner ever launched in the U.S.
Dad worked in the sprawling drafting department, drafting plans for tourist-class staterooms, the smallest and most plainly adorned of the public accommodations. It was in one of these modest cabins that the four of us — me, my father, my mother, and my brother — crossed the Atlantic in just a few days aboard the record-breaking SS United States. The vessel bragged nearly 250,000 horsepower, capable of sustaining an astonishing 35-plus knots for the entire crossing to Europe, and nearly that on the return voyage.
But back to Jimmy.
He and his grandparents had visited family and friends in Poland, barely twenty years after the end of the war in Europe. They were returning home to a town not far from Glen Cove, where we lived on the Webb campus.
Jimmy and I had free rein of the public spaces aboard the 990-foot United States — above deck (our favorite spot was on an outdoor deck that gave us a view of the crew on the bridge) and below (sneaking about in the luxurious salons and long hallways). We did our best to put it all to good use, playing various spying and cops-and-robbers games.
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The history of the SS United States begins decades before our voyage, when William Francis Gibbs first dreamed of designing what would amount to a superliner. According to a history prepared by the SS United States Conservancy, Gibbs and his right-hand man, William Norman Zippler went to see the Normandie, a French liner visiting New York Harbor. They signed up for a tour of the public spaces, but quickly snuck into the crew area, exploring the engine rooms and elsewhere they were not supposed to be. When they were done, Gibbs dictated to Zippler — head of the Electrical Engineering Department at Gibbs & Cox — for three-and-a-half hours, the Conservancy reports. Zippler recorded everything they had observed, for the purpose of furthering their own project, which became the SS United States — launched in June 1951.
The liner made her maiden voyage on July 3, 1952, leaving from New York and setting a trans-Atlantic speed record for her passage to Europe and setting another on the return trip. The United States enjoyed a long career carrying passengers (including me and my family and Jimmy and his grandparents) until 1969, when she was removed from service, just two years after William Francis Gibbs died in New York. She lay unused, sealed by the U.S. Navy, until 1978, when she was listed for sale. A series of proposals for the ship — including one to turn her into oceangoing time-share condos, and the most recent to rehabilitate her for the Norwegian Cruise Line — had all failed by 2009.
The Conservancy was able to buy the ship, saving her for the time from the scrap heap, and landed a grant to pay for some upkeep. But more recently, the 53,330-ton liner foundered in Philadelphia, her proud paint fading, her steel rusting. The Conservancy tried mightily to find another home for the great liner, longer than three football fields, but could not. Recently, she was evicted by the Philadelphia pier’s landlord.
And so, on Feb. 20, 2025, the SS United States began her final voyage — this one not under her own power. Instead, she is being towed by a tugboat to the Gulf of Mexico, where she will be scuttled off the coast of Florida’s panhandle to make an enormous underwater reef.
A regrettable, if unavoidable, end for a grand ship.
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For a more complete history of the great liner and the Herculean efforts to save her, click here.
Words of War 