The Messman

#156: Then & Now, Art (fire and water), Jason Serafino-Agar (Kularts), Ritwal Waters, Mina Stone, Errin Ironside, Palestinian Artists Consortium, Jeremy Matthews, Vintana artists, & Trailer Park Boys.

Jul 29, 2024

THEN & NOW: “The Messman”

Today’s issue is a day late because I spent part of yesterday working on a nonprofit newsletter. I posted it in the afternoon, but found that my my get-up-and-go to publish my own newsletter had got-up-and-gone.1 So this is appearing as a Sunday issue.

The S.S. Maui in its earliest incarnation as a passenger ship, 1917 (Image from Wikipedia, public domain).

Early on in the process of working with my parents’ letters, I had been scanning and placing them in archival sleeves—being more or less organized about it. But when I changed the operating system on my computer, I found that installing the scanner drivers was going to be quite complicated. So that’s delayed.

Since then, I’ve been going through my parents’ letters randomly—which is reflected in how I’ve been writing about them in this newsletter. If you want to get the story in chronological order, you’ll have to buy the book (if and when it’s ever published)!

But today I got tired of losing track of certain letters, so I started organizing them by decade in their boxes. I’ve also started making lists of all the ships my father worked on, as well as all the addresses of my mother’s family in Manila (and thereabouts) between 1945 and her move to the United States in 1950. I started making lists and notes on certain people of importance in my parents’ lives. Maybe I’ll use Notion or something similar to set up a database for my research.

I read a letter Dad wrote to my mom in Manila, in 1946. He was in Portland, Oregon and had recently transferred from his job on the U.S.A.T. (formerly S.S.) Maui, and began working on the S. S. Clyde L. Seavey, of the Isthmian Steamship Co. The Maui was a very old ship, built in 1916, and after serving as an army troop ship during the War, it was being retired to the shipyards at Olympia, Washington.

Dad was glad to find a job on a newer, smaller “liberty cargo ship,” since there were only thirty-six men (seven of whom were Filipinos) on the crew of the Seavey, rather than the usual hundreds on troop ships.

He explained his routes to my mother in the letter. The ship’s destination depended on the cargo they were transporting:

If our ship will load a cargo of lumber, then there is a possibility we may go to Manila or any parts of the Philippines. But if we take in loads of grain, then we might go to Europe . . . Our ship is liable to be assigned as a tramp ship. A tramp ship is always scheduled to go around the world. If it’s the case, then in due time, we shall eventually touch Manila. Somehow, wherever I may be, I will always keep in touch with you, think of you, and keep your love dearly and deeply in my heart.

Mom was living on Misericordia St. in the Santa Cruz district of Manila at the time. Her beauty parlor business interrupted by the war, she had just restarted the parlor in 1945 at a new location on Rizal St., within walking distance of Misericordia.

As I read the letters, I’m becoming more aware of a great difference in viewpoint between my mother’s experiences in the Philippines, and my father’s incredibly rough and nomadic work life, first as a laborer in the agricultural fields of Hawai’i and the western U.S.,2 and then as a seaman, crewing navy and merchant marine ships around the world as a messman or steward. Based on Uniformreference.net, Dad started at the very lowest rungs of the messman/steward branch, and slowly worked himself up, over the years, to the positions of Cook and Chief Steward.

And, at least in the 1940s and early 1950s, I don’t think Mom understood the racial implications of the labor that he performed on American ships. She and her siblings were educated in American colonial schools by American teachers who taught them only in English, and who promoted “American values” which promised equality and endless opportunity in the States. I imagine she may have begun to understand when she got her first job in the U.S. at a shirt factory, followed by a cannery, and hospital laundry—but she didn’t talk much to me about her work.

During World War II and throughout the 1950s, the military shipboard positions Dad held were not given to white men. Only Blacks, Filipinos, Chinese, and a few other “foreign nationals” held those “service” positions. There is little information online about Filipinos in the messman/steward branch specifically during World War II or earlier. But I did find a training video for stewards (aimed at Black crew members) in the mid-1950s. The film’s racist and presumptive positioning of Blacks as servants to white men is difficult to watch:

OK, I guess I’m getting slightly obsessed with ships’ galleys and the people who work in them, and even the food they served. I also found a contemporary vlog, Chief MAKOi, about the work of Filipino seamen, and his video “Into the Galley of a Cargo Ship” explains the life of those who work in the galley of a large ship. The entire crew seems to be Filipino, serving a mostly Filipino menu.

Nowadays, women can work in galleys as cooks, too. I guess some folks have finally gotten over the centuries-old dumb idea that women jinx ships. Sissy Payment works as Chief Cook/Steward on an iron ore freighter ship sailing the Great Lakes:

My father grew up in a country that thrived on oceanic trade. As a child he lived in the seaport town of Dipolog on the northwestern shore of Mindanao, the Philippines’ “bottled sardines capital,” where the sea was nearly at his doorstep and he was frequently in the waters or on a boat fishing with family members. Once he escaped from the grind of agricultural labor in the U.S., working on a ship must’ve seemed like a step up, offering the possibility to raise his pay and move up in the ranks, despite the limitations.

My mother and I saw him only two or three times at year, at most. He sacrificed a lot to provide a home for us, and for himself in retirement. Since the labor seemed continuous and hard, I hope he at least got some enjoyment out of his life of constant travel.

Eulipion Outpost

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