John Delach

When I was researching my piece about Liberty Ships, I discovered that one of these ships was named the S.S. George Handley after a man who served in the 1^st Georgia Battalion of the Continental Army where he rose to the rank of captain. He was taken prisoner at Augusta, Georgia in 1780. After the war, Handley served as Governor of Georgia from 1788 to 1789 and was instrumental in the drafting of Georgia’s state-constitution. He died in 1793 at the age of forty-one.

The SS George Handley was the second Liberty ship of over three dozen of her sisters constructed at the Southeastern Shipbuilding Corporation’s pop-up yard in Savannah, Georgia. Designated. Hull No. 342, construction began on May 28, 1942 and the Handley was launched on December 7, 1942, the first anniversary of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.

George Handley never entered commercial service. The government agency, War Shipping Administration Transport, (WSAT), requisitioned the ship and turned it into a troop carrier to be operated by the U.S. Army Transport Service, (USAT). Handley transported European Axis prisoners to POW camps that sprang up in various rural parts of America including Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. Imagine how lucky these POW’s felt escaping the war to perform manual labor in the lap of luxury far from the fighting.  

Handley had a carrying capacity of 550 men per voyage. There is no record, I could find of what Handley carried on its outbound voyages. Neither is there any record about its post-war career, if any. I did find that George Handley was scrapped in 1964 and it is reasonable to believe that the ship spent those 19 years mothballed in one of those reserve fleets like those on the Hudson River south of the Bear Mountain Bridge or the James River in Virginia.     

Ordinarily, the saga about this ship would peter out right here. However, by a curious coincidence, when I first joined Marsh & McLennan in 1971, the manager of the firm’s world-wide marine operations was George W. Handley.

George was bigger than life and a natural leader. You knew Handley was present every time he entered the room. As one of my colleagues put it, “Working for Handley is like working for a combination of George C. Scott as Patton mixed with Coach Vince Lombardi!”

Our George was a force that influenced and motivated all who fell under his spell. I was beginning to come of age at the firm when I became his go-to-guy for international business. George would travel to Europe and the far East to acquire shares of insurances for me to place in our domestic hull market. Soon, I came to realize that I was his assault trooper who was certain to fail in making the deal to convince marine underwriters to take a share of the latest international fleet that George sent me out to peddle.

Sometimes, more aggressive underwriters gave me a lewd and blasphemous message to take

back to Handley. I never told him about these messages and, when I’d report back to him that John Blackman, Terry Deeks, or Bill Petersen essentially threw me out of his office, he would thank me for my efforts and say, “I’ll get back to you later today.”

Later those afternoons, George would tell me over the phone to come up to his office. I was on nine, he was on eleven, at our head-quarters at 1221 Avenue of the Americas. I took the closest stairway two steps at a time.

One time, I vented my frustration to him. I said, “You know, George, it can be tough being your sapper who throws himself on the enemy’s barb wire with an explosive charge to create the path to glory.”

George got my message, In, 1974, I was promoted to Assistant Vice President before anybody else. George, as was his style, sent me his leather folder that the Marsh & McLennan directors received at their meeting in Dallas. It contained a personal note to me that read:

TO: JJD

From: GWH

Congratulations. It was a close vote, but I voted for you.

George Handley passed away in 1975 from a heart attack

The ironic part of this story is that in the 1960s and 1970s Liberty Ships reached the end of any usefulness and were being scrapped in droves. One maritime entrepreneur thought up the idea to make scale model Liberty Ships cast from the steel from the actual ships being scrapped.

George loved the idea and started collecting these steel models to give away to visiting customers and overseas brokers when they visited his office. I asked him one day: “George, I wonder what the Japanese and Germans really think about you giving them models built from the steel of the ships that helped to defeat them?”

My comment received a super scowl!

George never learned that one Liberty bore his name. There would have been no living with hm had he made this discovery.

Grant me this aside. George had a wicked sense of humor and loved to brag when good things were said about him. Sometime in about 1973, a short interview with Marsh’s CEO, Jack Regan,  appeared in Time Magazine when Time was an important news source. The piece quoted Regan as saying:

“Even Exxon, with all their expertise counts on Marsh & McLennan for their needs. For example, they depend on the advice of George Handley for their extensive marine operations.”

When George became aware of the piece, he let us all know, “Isn’t it nice. Time mentioned all four of us, Jack, Henry (Marsh), Don (McLennan) and me”

I informed those of us still around who knew George back in the day about my discovery. I voiced my opinion that had he known about that ship; he would have commissioned a heroic portrait of the SS George Handley fighting its way through rough seas on the North Atlantic in pursuit of victory.

Perhaps he would have had lithographs made, framed for VIP customers, rolled up copies for the rest of us. Maybe, even Christmas cards!

The best reply to the idea of a framed original oil of the SS George Handley hanging in GWH’s office behind his desk came from his former secretary, Diane Robertson, “John, you are absolutely right, and guess who would have had to feather dust that stupid painting every single day!”

Before I tell you this story, I must explain that my memory of it was on the verge of disappearing into oblivion. It is not uncommon for me to forget names, especially when I am telling a story. I know the name when I begin telling my story, but this all-important item slips away before I get to it leaving me lost and speechless. This is not uncommon for us Octogenarians.

Today’s story takes the failure of not remembering names a step further. In this instance, my entire story revolves around a man who was almost completely forgotten.

I was having a telephone conversation with my good friend, Geoff about his old job in marine insurance. “You know, John, I worked for a guy who was quite a character. I don’t mean, Bill Smith, this guy was Smith’s boss.”

“Sorry, Geoff, Damned if I can remember him.”

We kept on talking and as we did, snippets of information and memory of Mister X began slipping back into my consciousness. “Hold on, Geoff, things about that guy are coming back to me. Wasn’t he a big man and wasn’t he independently wealthy?”

“Yes,” Geoff exclaimed, “He also lived in Central Florida where he had a cattle ranch.”

We failed to take this further, let it go and finished our conversation. After we hung up, more and more snippets popped into my head including his last name that first made it self-known to me in bits and pieces. At last, I remembered his complete last name, Klineoder!

“Son of a bitch”, I said out loud as I picked up the phone to call Geoff. He answered on the second ring and, before I could say anything, he shouted out, “Klineoder!”

We laughed like school boys as we proved that not-so-great minds can also think alike.

Re-discovering Klineoder’s last name was the key to my almost forgotten story, The Craziest Bet I Ever Made.

The Giants were doing well during the 1990 season and, with about two-thirds of the regular season games already played, a radical idea popped into my head. For some unexplainable reason, I became convinced that my team would not only make the playoffs; they would also defeat the two playoff opponents and be victorious in Super Bowl XXV.

I decided to call an executive I knew in the marine insurance industry who had a reputation for being a betting man. That man was Klineoder. I picked him to see if my proposition would fly. My fear was my proposal to bet $100 wasn’t enough to catch his interest.

I gave him an outline over the phone leading him to invite me to a lunch that was most likely to turn into an all-afternoon affair. To limit the damage, I prearranged our destination to be the Club at the World Trade Center using my membership. Hey, I knew what I was doing. I knew that he would restrain himself if I was paying the bill.

“I am proposing an interesting bet. You know how big a Giants fan I am and I have supreme confidence in this year’s team. I am willing to make a bet here and now that they will win the Super Bowl. In other words, I will take the Giants and you will have the rest of the NFL to beat them.”

“Interesting, John. How much are you willing to put up?”

“One hundred dollars.”

“Okay, and what odds do you want?”

Ah, the most important question. In my heart, I wanted 6 to 1, but I didn’t want to turn him off so I blurted out, “Four to one.”

“I’ll take it.”

Okay, the bet was made. So how did it go?

Two weeks later, the Giants lost their premier quarterback, Phil Simms to a season ending leg injury. Their fate fell into the hands of Jeff Hoestler, their back-up QB. He managed to win the last two regular season games and then beat the Chicago Bears in the Giants first playoff game at home in Giants Stadium.

Next up, the two-time Champion San Francisco Forty-Niners at their home field in Candlestick Park. A brutal struggle and a near defeat until LT, (Lawrence Taylor) stripped the ball from the 49ers running back, Roger Craig. This possession allowed the Giants kicker, Matt Barr, to kick the winning field goal as time expired.

A week later, Big Blue took on the Buffalo Bills in the Big Sombrero in Tampa, Florida. Defensive Coach Bill Belicheck engineered a remarkable defense that greatly limited the Bills pass-happy offense while O.J. Anderson, the Giants ancient running back ran both like the wind and as a battle tank that earned him MVP honors.

Between OJ, Geoff Hosteler and the Giants defense, they gave Big Blue the lead as the game clock ticked down. Still, it came down to the Bill’s kicker, Scott Norwood, to win the game. He faced a field goal kick of 47 yards, a bit beyond his range. I held my breath. His kick was like a bad golf shot sliced out to the right and it wasn’t coming back.

Lucky, lucky me. I collected my winnings while learning my lesson well. There is no such thing as a sure thing.

When Brooklyn Burned: December 1960 

John Delach

April 2026 (Originally published June 2014)

Disasters sometimes seem to have an awful habit of happening in a closely spaced series of events. Air crashes coming in threes is a popular belief. Legend, perhaps, but strange as it seems, multiple events occur far too often to be coincidental. The New York City Fire Department (FDNY) went through such a sequence, two unprecedented catastrophes and two other large fires in an eight-day period in December of 1960.

It was a rotten month weather-wise described in the NY Times as, “…numbing cold and roadways made virtually impassable by snow and ice.” The first and the worst of the disasters happened on just such a day, December 16^th. Snow turned into light rain and fog. United Airlines Flight 826, a DC-8 out of Chicago on approach to Idlewild (now JFK) overran its designated holding pattern over South Amboy, NJ striking TWA Flight 266 occupying its own holding area for arrival at LaGuardia Airport. One of the DC-8’s four jets engines fell off as it struck the Constellation from behind crashing into its triple tail and fuselage tearing it apart and forcing the airplane into an uncontrolled dive. Debris and at least one poor soul trailed the falling flight that smashed into a corner of Miller Field, a small, retired airbase on Staten Island killing all 39 passengers and the crew of five.

There was no evidence that the United crew retained control of their mortally damaged jet which managed to stay in the air for nine more miles as it descended over Brooklyn where it violently came down at the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Sterling Place in the heart of Park Slope setting ablaze the Pillar of Fire Church, ten brownstones, the McCaddin Funeral Home, a Chinese laundry and a delicatessen. Six people on the ground were killed, the church’s caretaker, two men selling Christmas tress, a sanitation worker shoveling snow, a store keeper and a man walking his dog. All of the 77 passengers and seven crewmembers died including 11-year-old, Stephen Blitz, who was thrown onto a snow bank surviving the impact. He succumbed to his burns and injuries the next day. FDNY units from every borough except The Bronx responded to the Park Slope plane crash which claimed a total of 134 lives and would remain the deadliest U.S. commercial aviation disaster until 1969.

Three days later, on Dec.19, a forklift operator moving a metal trash bin on the hanger deck of the USS Constellation under construction in the Brooklyn Navy Yard shifted a steel plate that ruptured a diesel fuel line. Once the leaking oil came into contact with “hot work” being performed on lower decks, the insides of the aircraft carrier were transformed into an inferno that took 350 firefighters 17 hours to conquer this ten-alarm blaze. Most of the nearly 4,000 shipyard workers on board managed to escape using two main gangways connected to the aircraft carrier. Others escaped in more dramatic fashion. Several shed their shoes and heavy clothing and jumped into the East River where they were rescued by tugs that raced to the shipyard.

A crane operator lifted a thirty-foot narrow gangway to workers stuck on deck cut off from the gangways. He began lifting them off of the flight deck a few at a time. As firefighters made their way through the smoke, darkness and oven like heat to reach men trapped below, this gangway became their vital escape route. When survivors and victims were brought up on deck, an FDNY officer would signal to the operator whether the next lift was for the living or the dead; thumbs up if alive, thumbs down if dead.

Once the fires were extinguished and the searches completed, 49 dead workers had been carried off the Constellation. Paul L. Bua made it 50 when he died on Dec. 29^th from injuries sustained in the fire. Three hundred and thirty workers and firefighters were injured in the mazes of construction scaffolding blinded by darkness and smoke.

While the worst was over, fire crews had to contend with two additional major fires on Dec. 23. The first began in the early morning hours of that cold day when units from Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens responded to an eight-alarm fire at two lumber yards in Williamsburg, cheek by jowl with the Navy Yard. The fire raged across properties belonging to the Bridge Lumber Company and the Driggs Plywood Corporation beginning at five A.M. that forced the evacuation of the convent of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Roman Catholic Church and closures to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, disrupting morning rush-hour traffic.

The day ended with a final conflagration, a four-alarm fire in a gas station at the junction of Coney Island Avenue and Avenue L that began at 6:50 P.M. This final act destroyed the station and ten cars in the adjacent European Motor Cars building.

The one silver lining to this tale of destruction is that not one FDNY firefighter’s life was lost in any of these blazes.

This story begins in 1978 when my then boss, S. Hobbie Lockett, advised me that I was entitled to a “company car” meaning my firm would allow me to buy a new car and they would pay X amount for it. If I went over their limit, I’d have to pay the difference. I was amazed both by this opportunity and the generous amount that I was allocated. I chose a Chevrolet Caprice and my budget was large enough that it enabled me to load it with extras. One of the extras I selected was for one of those new cassette players. Curiously, when it arrived, GM had outfitted it with  an eight-track player instead of the cassette player I ordered.

“Oh well,” here I am with this brand-new beauty and I’d be crazy to make a stink. Sadly, eight tracks were already on their way out. Like Sony’s Beta version of VHS tapes, eight-track turned out to be the American Flyer equivalent of electric trains. Lionel ruled electric trains and cassettes ruled modern sound.

One of the eight-tracks I bought was by Linda Ronstadt that included her recording of  a “Long, Long Time” written by Corey White.

Ronstadt recorded the song in 1970 and it was her first big hit. By the time I received my eight-track, the song had faded from the public eye, but it struck me; I found the cords and her rendition to be heart wrenching and “Long, Long Time,” is to this day, one of my favorite Linda Ronstadt recordings.

As time went on, the only time I heard this tune was when I sought it out from my collections of Ronstadt’s songs.

Curiously, “Long, Long Time” was resurrected back in 2021 for use in a TV show called “The Last of Us.” The producer decided to use Linda’s song in an episode to enhance a point of sadness and it took off from there, increasing in requests for playing time by 5,000%.

Fast forward to Madison Square Garden on Valentine’s Day, 2026. Our daughter, Beth, and her husband, Tom, attended a Brandi Carlile concert where MS Carlile sang “Long, Long Time” in honor of Linda.

Beth texted me the video of her performance. After listening to it, I replied:

“If you had just sent me the recording without the video, I would have done the biggest double take of all times! WOW!

I made a copy of the lyrics that are set out below. I do believe, you will get a sense of the song by reading them, but, if it’s possible, I recommend you listen to Linda singing this song as you read the lyrics.

The lyrics:

Love will abide

Take things in stride

Sounds like good advice

But there’s no one on my side

And time washes clean love’s wounds unseen

That’s what someone told me

But I don’t know what it means

Cause I’ve done everything I know

To try and make you mine

And I think I’m gonna love you for a long, long time.

Caught in my fears

Blinking back the tears

I can’t say you hurt me

When you never let me near

And I never drew one response from you

All the while you fell all over girls you never knew

Cause I’ve done everything I know

To try and make you mine

And I think it gonna hurt me

For a long, long time

Wait for the day you go away

Knowing that you warned me

Of the price I’d have to pay

And life is full of flaws

Who knows the cause?

Living in the memory of a love that never was

Cause I’ve done everything I know

To try and make you mine

And I think I’m gonna miss you

For a long,  long time

Cause I’ve done everything I know

to try and make you mine

And I think I’m gonna love you

For a long, long time

April 2026, originally published 2008

A recent article in Newsday stopped me cold. The headline read, “Power cables laid in Sound.” The article reported that new cables were being installed in trenches on the sea bottom in order to strengthen the electrical grid connecting Connecticut and Long Island. I sat back, amazed and soon found what I was looking for, the exact location of these cables. They were laid between Norwalk and Northport. The article stated that these new cables would replace aging, battered cables that were unreeled along the bottom of the Sound in 1969. “Those are my cables,” I laughed to myself.

In April of 1969, I quit my job as a claims adjuster at the Atlantic Mutual Insurance Company and joined a small independent marine surveyor, Donald M. Lamont & Co. I’d only been there a little more than one-month when Lamont took me aside for a new assignment as soon as I walked into the office. He related in his thick Scottish brogue, “We just received an emergency job to survey damaged electrical cables being laid in the Long Island Sound as soon as possible. I cannot go because I have to be in Philadelphia for another job and nobody else is around.”

            “Don, I don’t know anything about electrical cables.”

“That’s okay. We don’t have a choice. All work has been stopped until the cables are inspected. There’s a crane barge, tug boats, workers and divers all hanging around doing nothing. Pirelli is the contractor and they need you up there, today.”

“Up where?” I asked.

“Norwalk, Connecticut. You’ll have to drive. Do you have a car available?”

“I don’t know. My wife has our car. If she’s home, I guess I can go.”

I called Mary Ann and tracked her down at her mother’s house in Flushing. “Great,  I have to go up to Connecticut to do a job for Lamont. Meet me at home and please make sure the car has a full tank of gas.”

I didn’t bother to ask Don what I should do. I figured I’d just wing it. The drive up to the Norwalk was easy, the sun still high in the sky on a nice June afternoon as I exited from Interstate 95 in Norwalk. I followed a two-lane highway toward a large power plant with an imposing smoke stack that loomed in the distance. The Connecticut Power and Light plant that was at the end of that road and it seemed to float on the vacant wetland that lined the Connecticut shore. About 500 yards from the power plant, I pulled up to an intercom positioned outside a massive gate. A detached hollow voice demanded to know who I was. “I’m the surveyor from Don Lamont’s office here to inspect the damaged cable.”

Instead of a reply, the cyclone gate opened allowing me to drive a short distance to a second gate. The first gate closed trapping me until the second one opened. I drove up to the plant where I was directed to a parking space close to the plant’s dock. There, a boat with inflated rubber pontoon sides and a wooden bottom awaited me. I handed my camera to a crewmember, stepped into the boat and barely seated myself before the twin outboard engines roared to life and off we went into the Long Island Sound.

            I could see the barges and workboats clustered together about a half-mile away and I felt a pang of disappointment that the ride was going to be so short. Too bad, this was fun. The damaged cable had been hauled out of the water and on to the deck of a barge. I saw that it was leaking fluid from a long, jagged cut where it had been sliced open by an anchor from a handling boat. I took out my notebook and took a statement from an engineer who had been appointed spokesman. He explained that they planned to cut away about 100 feet of cable, drain the remaining fluid that may have been contaminated with sea water, splice in a new piece and pump in new fluid.

Who was I to argue? Any questions I asked would show off my ignorance. I wrote down everything I thought he said and took enough photographs to satisfy Don and the

insurance company then departed for my ride back to the dock.

            After I left the power plant, I headed toward a lobster shack that I had noticed on my ride in and bought two 1½ half pound lobsters for dinner.

            I called Mary Ann from a pay phone that I found nearby. It was about 7 p.m. “I just finished my survey. I think it went well. Listen, I know it’s late, but don’t make anything for dinner. I should be home in about two hours and l have picked up something special for dinner.”

The ride took a bit longer, but Mary Ann was not displeased when I walked in the door with two lobsters.

Don wasn’t displeased although I didn’t receive any praise either. In fact I never heard a word about my report or photographs, so I guess the insurance company was satisfied.

The article in Newsday confirmed that the cables lasted 39 years so the engineers must have done a good job splicing them.