Built five years before the Titanic, Blizzard of the North

[Andrew Clarkson]

Ricky Nelson, Frankie Valli, Frankie Avalon, all those guys, the singers, the Hollywood teen heartthrobs, they had it made, at least in the imagination of Eric Conroy.

Parading about the big screen with American girls in tight-fitting sweaters and pointy-bosomed brassieres. Canadian girls seemed meek in comparison, and they definitely were not from Minneapolis, not like the young lady sitting with her parents in Eric Conroy’s section that night in the dining room of the S.S. Keewatin.

She had a tight sweater, a pointy brassiere — and big hair. And she talked to him, a lowly waiter, some kid from a Toronto suburb who had never kissed a girl and was strictly forbidden from speaking to passengers unless spoken to first and doubly-forbidden from arranging a 10 p.m. rendezvous on the ship’s foredeck, near the white steel door marked “Crew Only,” in the shadows beneath the captain’s wheelhouse.

“She put her arms around my neck and leaned in and kissed me,” says Mr. Conroy, now 67, bubbling with laughter, standing in the exact spot where his inaugural smooch occurred some 50 years before. “And I kissed her back, I thought. Then she said, ‘You don’t do that much, do you?’

Read more; http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/06/16 ... to-canada/

[James Jack]

Andrew,

This is a better article than one we read in yesterdays Toronto Star. The ship name is familiar to me but I know I never saw the ship and interesting to find it is a rare bird that hasn't been scrapped. My wife and I are probably going to make a trip next Saturday to where she will port.

Cheers

Jim

[Andrew Clarkson]

Take your camera!

[James Jack]

Andrew,

You can count on it, digital photo camera and our hi-def video camera. We love to record historic things.

Enjoy.

Jim

[VW1956]

Hello. Such a happy story about an old ship. And she has a buff coloured funnel. Ken.