George Bass
Although we had collaborated for nearly a decade, since Dick wrote to me in 1963 asking if he could build a research model of the seventh-century Byzantine ship I had just written about in National Geographic, it was a trip to the New Jersey shore in late 1971 that changed our lives. Susan Langston, a woman whom we did not then know, called to say that a storm had uncovered part of a wooden hull on the beach outside her house, and wondered what it was from. By then Dick had spent considerable time in Cyprus, working with Michael and Susan Katzev to reassemble the thousands of fragments of the ancient Greek hull the Katzevs had excavated and raised off Kyrenia. He and I agreed not only to have a look, but to make a day of it by driving there with our wives, Lucille and Dick from Denver, PA, and Ann and I from Philadelphia. As Susan Langston wrote much later in the AINA Newsletter, Dick “said that there was not enough of the hull to enable him to project the lines, but that the construction was similar to that of downeasters built between 1880 and 1910.” From archival research, Mrs. Langston had learned that the hull was from the George R. Skofield which was indeed built in Maine in 1885 and stranded (and photographed) on the beach in 1920!
On the drive home that day, Dick, ahead of me, pulled his car off the highway and motioned for me to stop. He then walked back to my car and told me that he had decided to give up his family’s electrical contracting business to become a professional ancient ship reconstructor. I told him he was crazy, that he had a wife and two sons to think of, that they would starve. He responded that he could always return to the electrical contracting business, but he had to give this a try, for he would only live once.
Fred van Doorninck, who had also been collaborating with Dick on the Byzantine ship, and I had been musing about the possibility of establishing a private institute that would be devoted solely to shipwreck archaeology, but at that point neither of us had taken any concrete steps toward its formation. Surely Dick’s words, his courage to follow his passion, served as the catalyst that finally made me do something, to resign a tenured position on the University of Pennsylvania faculty to follow my dream. Just as Lucille stood behind Dick’s decision, Ann stood behind mine.
The headquarters of this new institute devoted to shipwrecks, now INA, was on Cyprus, where Dick was working on the Kyrenia hull, so we could be together with the Katzevs. But following the outbreak of war on that island, we all moved away. Ann and I moved to Denver, PA, to be near the Steffys. Daily, usually over coffee, Dick and I talked about the future of the institute. When the University of North Carolina offered us a base, we drove together from Pennsylvania to Wilmington, NC, to look for homes to buy, talking all the way down and back about the future. Then Texas A&M University made a counter offer that was better, so we came to College Station instead, soon joined by Fred. There, at first, Dick and I lived even closer together than we had in Denver, for by chance we bought houses just around the corner from each other. We saw one another frequently outside of our offices, our families often sharing Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner.
The rest is known to anyone who reads this. INA and the Nautical Archaeology Program at Texas A&M grew and succeeded beyond our expectations. How different both our lives might have been without that drive to the New Jersey coast.