The daughter of the naval architect who designed and built the first U.S. submarine has lived to see her father's century-old prophesy come true: The submarine that had its beginnings in a New Suffolk shipyard has come to play a vital role in world armament.
"You wait and see, after we're gone," Arthur duBusc said to his daughter, Grace, in the early 1900s, "this will become bigger and bigger every year." Grace, who was born in 1898 and at 101 years has lived in three centuries, has witnessed the growth of interest in the submarine that she and the neighborhood kids played on at Goldsmith-Tuthill Shipyard in New Suffolk.
One hundred years after the U.S. Navy accepted the SS Holland, April 11, 1900, birthday balls and memorials are planned for every submarine port in the country, with a special blessing of the underwater fleet at the Navy Memorial in Washington, D.C., issuance of five U.S. stamps illustrating the history of the submarine, and a year-long exhibit by the Smithsonian Institute.
And in the hamlet where it all started - New Suffolk, the first submarine base in the country - a granite monument will be dedicated on Saturday, April 8.
Grace, a tiny woman who has an extraordinary vitality for her years, is delighted to see the attention being lavished on the beginnings of the U.S. submarine fleet but she's not sure her father would have been happy with all the hoopla. "I'm glad Papa is getting the recognition he deserves," she said last week when a friend and I visited her in Reston, Va. "But Papa was such a modest man. When anyone talked about his work, he would always give the credit to Mr. Holland. 'He did it,' he would say. 'If I can help him, I will.' "
John P. Holland, for one, recognized her father's skill, at one time writing, "I can truly say that I have never met a more competent man in his business. He is an expert naval architect and shipbuilder ... a man of strictest integrity, a hustler and born manager of men."
She gets a kick out of the fact that inventor Holland, an ardent Irishman, and her father, a staid Englishman, worked together on what was originally an Irish project to blow up the English Navy. They met in an Elizabeth, N.J., shipyard in 1896. The inventor needed an engineer/contractor to build a sixth submarine for the Holland Torpedo Boat Co. The engineer was newly arrived from England where he'd worked on boats ever since being apprenticed in a shipyard at age 13. He'd Anglicized his ancestral name to Busch. It wasn't until after World War I that he changed it back to the French duBusc.
They teamed up, becoming lifelong friends, said Grace. The following year they launched the Holland VI, which became the first U.S. submarine.
The Navy contracted for another five Hollands. By then the company had reorganized as Electric Boat Company. The boats were built in the New Jersey yard and moved to Goldsmith-Tuthill Shipyard in New Suffolk for further testing.
"That was when Papa wrote to my mother that he wanted the family to come out to New Suffolk," Grace recalled. "He said it was a paradise. It was 1903. I was 5. There were six of us kids - two had died as infants."
They moved to the house on Fourth and Main Streets now owned by the Leland Brandes family, and they lived there until she was a teenager. She has lively recollections of rowing and swimming and playing around the submarine "until we got caught," she said with a smile.
The only one of the children still living, she now rents a four-room apartment in a retirement community in Reston. She never married but keeps in close touch with her 10 nieces and nephews. A diminutive figure in a coral knit dress with pearls at the throat, she appears doll-size, sitting erect in an upholstered chair in the living room.
She admits that she's lost height and weight from the days when she was a nurse in a Newark hospital. Once 5 feet 2 inches, she now tops out at 4 feet 6 inches and weighs 95 pounds. "But I don't get tired," she says cheerfully, attributing her energy to doing her own housework and daily walks, although these, she acknowledges, are getting shorter each year.
She has no secret for longevity except "good genes." Her father lived to 90 and her mother to 94. The only concession she makes to the current fitness craze is to drink two teaspoons of honey and one teaspoon of cider vinegar in a glass of water daily.
Over a plate of homemade cookies and glasses of juice, we chatted on about submarines and life in New Suffolk in the early part of the century. She remembers the little steamboat, "Josephine," that her father had built to carry congressmen and other VIPs out to the submarine proving grounds in Peconic Bay. "It was an outstanding boat, beautiful lines," she remembers, "Of course we kids were never allowed on it."
A year after the family settled in New Suffolk, her father had to go to Japan to deliver five submarines ordered by the Japanese government. This was during the Russo-Japanese War so the assignment had to be carried out in great secrecy, she said. The submarines were dismantled, transported by train to Seattle and then by freighter to the Yokosuka shipyard in Japan where they were rebuilt.
Her father was much impressed by the Japanese people. " 'They're clever,' " she recalls him saying. "'They pick up things quickly. We must watch out for them.' "
Until recently she had the sterling silver tea set and teak tray that the Japanese government gave her father upon completion of the work in 12 months. She kept it and other family treasures in the mahogany china closet that had been her mother's. When she gave the set to a niece, she had it appraised for insurance. It was judged "priceless."
Mulling over her father's contributions to the shipping industry, which totalled nearly 200 vessels either designed and built or designed and supervised for the U.S., Japan, Russia, Austria and other foreign nations, the one device she thought deserved more public attention is what's called in submarine circles the "air and soup line," which has saved countless lives.
When a submarine with 40 crew members sank in 1927 off Providence, R.I., her father was so upset about the men trapped in the sunken boat that he immediately went to work to design a pipeline installation to bring air and food to captives until they can be rescued. When he completed it, he gave it to the government at no cost. It's now standard equipment on every submarine in the world.