A raw oyster in one weathered hand and an amber brew in the other, Carl Elliott Thompson watches the crowds strolling the Inner Harbor promenade -- but sees the harbor of his youth.
His mind's eye recalls the yellow necklace of banana boats that puttered along the water's edge at Pratt Street, and he remembers a bygone era when the city's wealth dangled from the slings of great ships, and the cargo hook was the longshoreman's badge of honor.
"I loved my work -- it was all muscle and pride," the 65-year-old retired cargo handler and dock gang leader said from the comfort of a Harborplace restaurant. "If I didn't do my job well, I was very disappointed with myself."
Mr. Thompson's voice is one of many to be heard in a two-year oral and video historical project designed to capture a colorful way of life fading now that containers and giant, computerized cranes have replaced the cargo hook.
Automation, international competition and a changing economy have reduced the ranks of Baltimore's longshoremen to about 1,500, far below the 4,000 at work on the docks in the peak years of the mid-1970s.
The International Longshoremen's Association, founded in Chicago in 1892, still has a national membership of 80,000 in ports on the East Coast, Great Lakes and Gulf of Mexico.
But the people who load and unload vessels know their jobs are disappearing, or changing in ways their fathers would never recognize.
To make sure no one forgets the way things were, the Eastern Baltimore Chamber of Commerce and Maryland Port Administration, with help from private industry, have engaged a cultural historian to document the dockworkers' stories.
"I already see a tremendous amount of pride in those folks who are capturing a time 40 or 50 years ago," said Tom Carroll, a folklorist from Pittsburgh.
Mr. Carroll has taught at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and has undertaken projects for the Library of Congress and National Park Service.
"They represent a generational flow, a real sense of local orientation. As I move through the town, sit with people in the coffee shops, I meet people who speak with a real feeling -- there is an edge to their experiences," he said.
The historian got an early jolt of Baltimore culture taping an interview with Mr. Thompson, who was known as "Junior" on the waterfront.
"I was an A-rab before I went on the docks," he remarked.
Tom Carroll frowned. Mr. Thompson laughed.
"Oh no, nothing like that," the Longshoreman said. "I sold produce from a wagon that went around the streets. I guess you don't have A-rabs up where you live."
'Had to be thick-skinned'
By the time he got to the docks in 1947, Junior Thompson sold newspapers on city streetcars, set bowling pins on Howard Street, hustled scrap iron and tin and hawked fruit and vegetables from a rented, horse-drawn wagon.
Mr. Thompson, who is black, joined Local 858 of the International Longshoremen's Association because he wasn't welcome in the all-white Local 829. The locals remained segregated until 1971.
"You had to be thick-skinned, but we all worked in the same cold and heat," Mr. Thompson said. "And you'd ride to and from work with the white guys, go have a drink together. Sometimes it seemed like management wanted you to be at each other's throats."
When he started, Mr. Thompson said, he earned $1.66 an hour. Over the years he worked almost every job, from deckman and ship foreman to tractor driver and winch operator. Last year, when he retired as an assistant chief clerk of the checker's union, he made more than $100,000.
"It was tough, no doubt about it," he said. "If one gang unloaded 30 ton, you wanted to unload 40 ton so you would get hired the next day. It was highly competitive, and your work said if you would work the following day."
Mr. Thompson said unloading cargo was "backbreaking work. You could be working bags of sugar that weighed 100 pounds each or steel and pipe, which was the hardest to move because it was tough to get into the hold of the ship.
"The weather made work even more dangerous. Chains or steel wires got frozen, snapped in two, and it could kill you. I got hit in the head with the end of a pipe and almost fell down the hold. One day while I worked the winch, my nose turned black from the freezing weather and my hands were frostbitten a couple of times."
Enduring those hardships through nearly five decades, Mr. Thompson supported his wife and six children. One became a schoolteacher, another a lawyer, and one son is a longshoreman.
'Relentless thrift'
"In the early 20th-century immigrant families, women and children worked the packinghouses while the men worked the waterfront," said historian Linda Shopes, co-editor of "The Baltimore Book: New Views of Local History."
"There was relentless thrift and ruthless underconsumption, .
combined with the dogged labor to provide for themselves. We have little appreciation for the hardships people suffered in the past."
Michael Cataneo, 81, came to the docks in that generation. At 14, he was living with his immigrant parents and six brothers and sisters on Aisquith Street when he quit school to tie up ships on Clinton Street's Pier 6.
"My dad had a lunch wagon but it closed down because the longshoremen who he let have credit never paid their bills," said Mr. Cataneo, who now lives in Dulaney Valley. "So he started tying up ships in 1906, and I decided to help him."
Like those in other waves of ethnic minorities, the younger Mr. Cataneo developed strong arms and an effective punch to combat abusive treatment.
"I developed a practice early on to hit first and argue later," he recalled. "There were few Italians, and I was called all kinds of names. The Poles and Irish really gave it to you in those days because they were picked on, too. But I was a big, strong kid. They called me Iron Man Mike."
"Because I was one, I liked to help the underdog," Mr. Cataneo said. "The blacks got a lot of the dirty work, iron ore, manure. I defended them and people didn't like it, but I related to them."
Once, in the late 1920s, a gentleman from the docks of New York City named Kevin McNamara traveled to Baltimore to look up Mr. Cataneo and test his reputation.
"I got one of my pals to take McNamara to Byrne's Cafe on Fort Avenue and fill him up with double shots of whiskey, because that's what he liked," Mr. Cataneo said with a sparkle in his eyes. "McNamara loved those double headers -- that's what we called 'em. My guy got him drunk and I walked into the bar.
"Well, he saw me, staggered out to the street," Mr. Cataneo said. "I hit him, he fell and hit his head on the curb and was knocked out. He went back up to New York and I was the most respected guy on the waterfront.
"All that was important then," he said. "The strongest guy I ever saw on the docks was 'Moco' Daley, back in the late '30s. He once bent a thick iron fence with one hand."
Mr. Cataneo concedes that life on the docks is different today. "Yeah, it's changed for the better but it was some time back then," he said. "I seen certain things I can't talk about today. If I did, I'd be dead in 48 hours."
Walt Benewicz, 52, is a fourth-generation longshoreman who works as chief clerk at the state-of-the-art Seagirt Marine Terminal. He'll tell you containers are safer for the workers on the waterfront -- and more efficient for shippers. It once took longshoremen two days to unload a vessel. Now a containership can be emptied in eight hours.
Recalling a romantic time
But the old waterfront is in his blood, and he admits that he longs for the times when "men were steel and ships were wood. It was a romantic time, actually. You expected to see Rod Steiger or Marlon Brando come out of the fog.
"I grew up a half block from the union hall on Hull Street in Locust Point," he said. "Within a one-block radius of my little rowhouse where I grew up, there were nine bars.
"The street led right to the docks. When an ambulance would come down my street, I remember as a kid watching all the mothers and wives rush to the front doors with rosaries in their hands, hoping it wasn't their sons or husbands injured or killed."
The weather was uncompromising, he said. Before the days of high-tech, insulated clothing, longshoremen wrapped newspapers around their chests and legs to retain body heat.
"And everybody had a Jesse James story, one guy was tougher than the next," Mr. Benewicz said laughing. "You have these power lifters on television now, but most of the men on the docks were strong as oxes and loved to drink and sometimes fight. That's pretty much gone by the wayside now."
Richard Hughes, a union firebrand who is now general vice president of the Atlantic Coast District of the ILA, said Baltimore had a reputation for heavy lifters who could handle difficult and awkward loads of steel.
"Heat and cold, each weather condition had its demand and toll," he said. "But there was a certain pride in how longshoremen approached the job. There were deaths and injuries. To me, it's ** amazing how some of those guys lasted as long as they did."
'Greed has replaced honor'
Long before she embarked on her political career, U.S. Rep. Helen Delich Bentley knew every hawser in the port of Baltimore and fought to increase the port's safety and productivity.
She was maritime editor of The Sun and chairman of the U.S. Maritime Commission -- but she was best known as the host of a television show called "The Port That Built a City and State." It ran on Sunday afternoons from 1950 to 1965.
"Longshoremen once had the most hazardous job, according to insurance carriers," Mrs. Bentley recalled, "but that is only official recognition of a job that was one of the toughest in the world.
"They were great workers, very honorable people who at first worked catch as catch can, hand-to-mouth. They could handle those big slings coming off ships like it was set to music. Did you ever try to carry a stem of bananas?"
"They were immigrants who came here thinking the streets were paved with gold. When they discovered that wasn't the case, they still were grateful because they were leaving a tougher life behind in the old country," she said. "The longshoremen were symbols of how people improved and in so doing helped shape the port into the most powerful economic force in Maryland.
"But things change, evolve," she said. "Waterfront communities like Fairfield and Curtis Bay are different places now. And greed has replaced honor in our society. These men represent a simpler time, when things and people worked for America. I don't know if we'll ever see that again."