Exploring the Titanic

This newspaper feature I wrote tells the story of seafarer Reuben Baker, who delivered an exploratory crew to the site of the Titanic.

The journey began when a small white submarine slipped off the end of a research vessel into the North Atlantic. The captain of the vessel, Reuben Baker, stood at the helm of his ship, the 210-foot Atlantis II, and watched on a small television screen as the submersible was lowered from the ship's stern into a calm sea.

Captain Baker, a sailor for over 40 years, likes to call the television screen on the bridge his "rear-view mirror."

After descending for two-and-a-half hours to 12,500 feet, the undersea craft Alvin reached its destination on the ocean floor—the White Star liner Titanic, which struck an iceberg and sank on its maiden voyage in 1912, about 500 miles off the coast of Newfoundland.

The 25-foot submersible Alvin, along with a remotely operated vehicle named Jason Jr, and Angus, a towed sled containing three still cameras, would give the world its best and closest look at the Titanic since the luxury liner sank to the bottom of the sea.

Captain Baker, who has lived in Wellfleet since he was 15, said the 12-day Titanic expedition is the high point of his career at sea. He joined the U.S. Maritime Service at age 17, first serving as a mess boy on a merchant ship out of Baltimore that transported U.S. servicemen back from Germany and Italy at the end of World War II.

After the war, he stayed with the merchant service and moved up through the ranks, eventually getting a job with the United Fruit Company—which had been founded by his grandfather, Lorenzo Dow Baker. He remained with the United Fruit Company until the early 1970s, when he became a licensed sea captain. After working for several private shipping firms, Captain Baker began towing and servicing oil rigs off the coast of South America and off the Pacific coast of the United States, among other places.

Since 1983, he has been the captain of the Atlantis II, the flagship vessel of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's (WHOI) research fleet.

As such, Captain Baker delivers scientists to various points on the globe for biological, geological, and in the case of the Titanic, historical exploration.

Captain Baker said his prime concern on the Titanic expedition was simply to ensure that his ship functioned properly.

"I felt sure that we were going to be successful," Captain Baker said.

"I didn't give too much concern as to the outcome. I just wanted to make sure that everything was going along every day as it should, with sub launching and recovering, and that my men were doing their jobs, and that the vessel was being navigated properly."

It was on the way back to Woods Hole, Captain Baker said, that he found "time to sit down and reflect on what we'd actually done, and what our successes were."

The outcome and successes were spectacular.

The Titanic was originally found September 1, 1985, by another research vessel, the Knorr, also operated by the oceanographic institution. The Knorr photographed the Titanic with a sonar and video system called Argo, which was towed behind the ship at a depth of about 12,500 feet. The Argo system takes wide angle film and video pictures as it floats 50 to 100 feet off the ocean floor.

It was the undersea craft Alvin, with its crew of three, and the other equipment, Captain Baker said, that gave him reason to believe the mystery of the Titanic was finally to be solved during the Atlantis II's 12-day expedition.

"You knew the vessel was there but you had no idea what condition she was in, how big she was, or how much of it was intact. I knew then that with our systems and the things that we had, that this would be the crunch, and this was when we'd really crack the nut and really know exactly what the state of the wreck was."

Capain Baker said he, like most mariners, had believed the Titanic was inaccessible.

"When I started no one had ever thought of going down to a place like that. In fact no one ever thought they could locate it," Captain Baker said. "Most seafarers feel that way when they don't know about Alvin and about all of the cameras and robots."

According to Time magazine, Captain Baker's colleague, Robert Ballard, a WHOI marine geologist who led both Titanic expeditions, revealed some startling new information.

According to the magazine article, "His deep-diving craft failed to find the 300-foot gash that, according to legend, was torn in the Titanic's hull when the ship plowed into the iceberg. Instead, he suggested, the collision had buckled the ship's plates, allowing water to pour in. He also brought back evidence that the ship broke apart not when she hit bottom, as he had thought when viewing the first Titanic images last September, but as she sank: the stern, which settled on the bottom almost 1800 feet from the bow, had swiveled 180 degrees on its way down."

The Atlantis II's scientists found objects strewn between the bow and the stern of the Titanic, including a copper kettle, a coffee cup, a doll's head, and three of the ship's safes. They also found cases of wine, stacks of undamaged china, monogrammed luggage, and much more from the luxury liner.

Captain Baker said the first crew to go down on Alvin was so excited to be near the wreck that communications between the Atlantis II and the submarine were difficult. The crew, made up of a pilot and two scientists, could actually see the side of the Titanic with the naked eye.

"There was the hull of the Titanic, and they were on the sea floor, looking up at it for the first time. It's the first time you got a look at the side to see what condition it was in, and there it was—right in front of them," Captain Baker said.

"They were talking amongst themselves, and were so occupied in what they were doing, seeing the wreck for the first time that anybody had really had a good look at it...that it was very hard to get them to even talk, but we knew they were all right."

In all, the undersea craft Alvin would go to the bottom of the sea 10 times to investigate and photograph the Titanic, and calm seas held thoroughout the expedition. "We were blessed with good weather. There was no time when we ever even considered scrubbing any of the dives."

Captain Baker's grandfather, Lorenzo Dow Baker, Wellfleet's successful shipping magnate, struck it rich when his countrymen developed a craving for an exotic delicacy called the banana. When he first tried to ship the fruit north from the Caribbean, it rotted before it got to Boston. Then Lorenzo Dow Baker hit upon the idea of loading the bananas while they were still green.

The fruit reached port just as it ripened, the craving of Americans was satisfied, and Lorenzo Dow Baker went on to fortune, and to the presidency of the United Fruit Company.

Reuben Baker never met his grandfather, who died in 1908. His father, also named Reuben, never went to sea. Along with three brothers, he managed the sprawling Jamaica plantations operated by the United Fruit Company.

Young Reuben and his family stayed in Jamaica until he was 15 years old, when the United Fruit Company's properties in Jamaica were sold, and the youngster returned to Wellfleet.

Captain Baker has said he wasn't influenced by his grandfather's seafaring ways. "I just liked ships. I just liked the sea," he said. Captain Baker left Wellfleet High School in his junior year, and went "straight to the sea."

"Eventually, I went aboard a Fruit Company ship," he said, "but I never told anyone who I was." He stayed with the United Fruit Company until the early 1970s. He lives in his grandfather's 31-room house near the center of Wellfleet.

Captain Baker has been captain of the Atlantis II since 1983, the same year the ship was re-equipped as the mother ship and tender for the Alvin submarine. The 25-foot submarine is launched and recovered from the sea by a crane on the stern of the mother ship.

The submarine is housed in a hangar on the ship's deck. When not in use the submarine, which rests on tracks, is held fast so it doesn't slide into the sea when the ship pitches in rough weather. "She'll slide in like a freight train," Captain Baker said.

The captain said it is sometimes difficult to retrieve the submarine. "When the seas are running 12 and 15 feet high it's a little bit of a chore sometimes to get it on board."

The Atlantis II is 210 feet long. As a research vessel, she carries 25 officers and crew, 15 scientists, and a complement of 10 who service and operate the submersible Alvin. "It's definitely a research vessel in every respect. It's always in a state of flux," the captain said of his ship, which changes scientific crews as it conducts various scientific experiments in the ocean, and on the ocean floor.

In November 1985, the Atlantis II returned to Woods Hole after spending 22 months at sea. The ship traveled almost 30,000 miles down through the Panama Canal and then north on the western side of the Americas to the northern Pacific and Canada. The ship then traveled south again to the Equator and the Galapagos Islands, and then went through the Panama Canal again and north through the Caribbean before returning home to Woods Hole. On the way back to Woods Hole, the ship stopped in New York Harbor for three days, when tours of the ship were offered to the public, and members of the scientific expedition faced the TV cameras at the city's South Street Seaport Museum. Captain Baker himself was on national television, doing four weather spots with Willard Scott, meteorologist for NBC's Today Show.

During the 22-month journey of the Atlantis II, the submersible Alvin (which can dive to 13,000 feet) made 337 dives. The ship carried scientists from California, Germany, Japan, and Canada. The scientists, among other projects, studied volcanos, hydrothermal vents, and exotic marine life communities on the East Pacific Rise off the coasts of California and Mexico.

The submarine Alvin, with its two robotic arms, is used in many of the scientific tests performed off the Atlantis II. The undersea craft is used to investigate the ocean bottom, and to examine life forms which have previously been unknown to science—such as foot-long clams and mussels, and red-tipped tube worms eight feet in length.

The submarine has found the tube worms, which do not have mouths, eyes, or intestinal tracts, in depths of up to 10,000 feet near hydrothermal vents where scalding water spews forth from cracks and fissures. The worms hide inside rubbery white tubes three inches in diameter, extending only a spongy red plume out of one end.

For Captain Baker, working aboard the Atlantis II always involves discovery, and new experiences.

"Anything we do is never matter-of-fact. There's always something new. Because you go in there, and, 'Look, there's a shrimp with no eyes.' Right. And then you see there's a six-sided organism that nobody knows anything about—yet. That's what we found on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. That was done in June out of Bermuda."

After taking several weeks off, Captain Baker will rejoin the Atlantis II in Tampa, Florida, when the ship will resume its voyage of discovery. The ship will be in San Diego by Christmas time, and then will travel on to Hawaii, and to Guam and Saipan. Scientists will explore the 11,022 meter-deep Marianis Trench, the world's deepest ocean trench. The ship will arrive in Yokohama, Japan, next August, before traveling back to Seattle, where it is due to arrive in September. Then the ship will travel down to San Francisco, and on to San Diego to the shipyard there.

Captain Baker says he isn't certain yet whether the Atlantis II will return east after the shipyard work is completed. "There's no indication. It depends on where the work is," he said.

The sailor, whose life at sea has brought him many adventures and to the brink of historical discovery, views his experience as an unfolding of destiny.

"I kind of let things happen in my life. I don't try to persuade it. Whatever is going to happen is going to happen," he said. "I don't know what kind of philosophy you'd call it. If I happen to be in the right place at the right time, so be it."

And was he at the right place at the right time when his ship played a crucial role in unraveling the mystery of the Titanic?

"Absolutely," the captain replied with a smile.

And what of Captain Baker's life-long commitment to ships, and to the sea?

"It's getting there by your own wits with a vessel, taking a vessel from one part of the world to another part. It's just knowing you can do it.

"There's a lot of satisfaction just in seeing your destination coming up over the horizon," the captain said.

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The Flying Bowling Coach

This feature, which appeared in a bowling publication, tells the story of a bowling coach with an interesting background.

If you live in Oklahoma and hear a small plane buzzing your bowling center, it could belong to pilot-coach Christina Marie Borzelleca. She probably won’t decide to do a flyover, but the USA Bowling silver coach could if she wanted.

Borzelleca first came to Oklahoma in 1999 to study aircraft mechanics. That was after her plane had lost power at 10,000 feet, and she and her passenger crash-landed in the Nevada desert. Both walked away from the destroyed airplane. It was then that Borzelleca decided to get an up-close understanding of her plane’s nuts and bolts—after discovering that an aircraft mechanic had made an error that caused her plane to have mechanical difficulties and to fall from the sky.

Her interest in bowling began when she lived in Nevada, where she was working as sales and marketing director at the Red Lion Inn and Casinos in Winnemucca. In a varied career, Borzelleca also was executive sous chef at Caesars Place in Atlantic City, N.J.—after having attended the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. When she arrived in Oklahoma, Borzelleca continued her interest in bowling by joining leagues in Tulsa, where she was attending the Spartan School of Aeronautics.

Borzelleca knew she wanted to devote herself to coaching, after she was coached by Fort Worth-based coach Susie Minshew. Working with Minshew increased her desire to become a coach. “I saw all that she was doing with people,” Borzelleca said. She also credits Tulsa-based former pro bowler Paula Drake with helping her to improve her game.

Borzelleca has achieved success as a bowler. She began bowling in the Professional Women’s Bowling Association regional program in 2000. In her rookie season, she bowled a 299 at the Don Carter West in Dallas and made match play. In 2000, she also won the Oklahoma Queens Tournament, and she was the Tulsa Women’s Bowler of the Year in 1999.

Borzelleca is based at the 80-lane Riverlanes bowling center in Tulsa, and her coaching has spread to bowling centers throughout the state of Oklahoma. She said Riverlanes General Manager Steve Inasy was instrumental in helping her to get her coaching career started. “If it weren’t for Steve and his insight, I wouldn’t be here,” she said. “This is a great place to work. The people are so good here.”

Borzelleca is on the mend from some health challenges and wanted to take it slow for a while, but she is finding that students continue to want her services. In February she gave 50 private lessons. Previously, she was giving about 80 lessons a month. Besides working with private students, Borzelleca also coaches at Jenks High School in Tulsa and at Oral Roberts University.

“I can’t think of a better job—where I can get out on the lanes and help people,” Borzelleca said.

For Borzelleca, coaching is not just a one-way street. “I learn so much from each student,” she said. “Every time I go out there, I gain so much more experience and learn something new. Every single student is different and has different problems to address.”

She would like to attain her USA Bowling gold-level certification. Borzelleca received her silver-level certification in Las Vegas in 2002 and bronze-level certification at Wichita (Kan.) State University in 2001.

As she continues to hone her coaching skills, Borzelleca finds that working with students provides her with a special kind of satisfaction. “It just makes my day when the light goes on,” she said. “That’s my biggest reward.”

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Playing Van Gogh

In this feature, which appeared in a theater playbill, an actor speaks of Vincent Van Gogh.

Intense and animated as he speaks, actor Jonathan Smoots sees art as an arena too crowded with passions to make room for emotional sissies. The actor stabs the air with his words the way Vincent might have jabbed his canvas with the bold strokes of a yellow-drenched brush. Smoots uses the verbal talents of an actor and the fervor of a preacher to state his views on everything from media politics to the role of the artist in society.

His well modulated voice alternately mocks, convinces, and laughs, clipping a phrase here or adding a rhetorical flourish there to make a point. His features, like Vincent's, are finely drawn, with prominent cheekbones that are only slightly blunted by his beard. Maybe it's his Dutch descent, maybe it's his current artistic and domestic plight, but the actor is experiencing parallels between his life and that of the painter. "It's been feeding me," Smoots says by way of explaining how his own situation has helped him to explore the role, in which he plays Van Gogh's brother Theo reading the artist's letters.

There may be similarities between the life of Smoots and the life of Van Gogh, but one thing is for sure. Van Gogh never heard of Dan Quayle or Murphy Brown. Smoots has heard of both. The actor takes issue with those who ascribe an elevated status to the people who provide our society with its mass entertainment. "We've been told there is a cultural elite in this country. If the creators of Murphy Brown are representative of the cultural elite, who runs the Metropolitan Opera?" He pauses here for effect. "God?" This last word is said in a stentorian tone worthy of Moses as Charleton Heston.

Smoots does not necessarily put down television shows like Murphy Brown simply because they are mass entertainment. In fact, he describes the program as being entertaining television. But he does decry the selling of higher forms of art as just another marketplace product, "like cans of tomato juice. I really believe that America has become such a commercial, material-driven, consumer-driven society that the arts have become a consumer product. The role of the arts in the lives of all people is more important than the lip service we hear them given credit for."

The arts, he says, have a larger purpose, not something to be merely bought and sold, but "nourishment for the soul. I know that sounds like a highfalutin, pompous phrase, but I believe that's what it is and Vincent agreed with me, so I feel like I'm in good company." Indeed, the actor sees art as being inspiring, transforming, elevating. These are the capabilities of art, and he feels that they are sorely needed in a world often devoid of intensely felt examination of itself and of its own potential for goodness.

Smoots just moved from his apartment in the Riverwest neighborhood after "a slumlord let the property deteriorate so severely that the only people who would move in there are dope addicts, alcoholics, and generally the poorest of the poor who had no hope or vision."

This is one type of emptiness toward which Smoots would apply the balm of passionate endeavor. "The arts, and education, are catalysts that give people hope and curiosity, that give them a vision for their future and for their society's future as a whole. It expands their horizons to believe that this world is wonderful if you're surrounded by astounding wonderful shows, astounding wonderful pictures, astounding wonderful sounds that transport you. That's what the arts are for." Again and again in conversation, Smoots uses the words vision, hope, and passion. They are a kind of artistic triad to him, a chord he sees as being capable of harmonizing aimlessness and superficiality.

His views on Vincent's genius express his perception of the capabilities of art at its highest levels. Of Vincent the actor says, "He invented a new way of looking at the world. The world had never been looked at through those eyes before. The creative geniuses open up portals on the world that we never even knew existed. He did that, and they didn't see it. He was looking out his window at a new world, a brave new world. They had to call it madness. It's called passion; it's something we shouldn't be afraid of; it's part of being human and we should embrace it, but we're afraid of it."

Smoots, who teaches acting at Carroll College, does not reserve his willingness to explore and be passionate only for the Van Goghs of the world. "I think everyone has some creative talent, and I think everyone should be encouraged to exercise it, through language, through creative thinking, through creative use of the hands, through making of sounds and movement. Where it needs to happen is in education. If you were never exposed to painting, to acting, to dancing, you're not going to expose your children to it."

Children are on the actor's mind. He's getting married in December to Milwaukee actress Laura Gordon. This transition is causing him to seriously question his commitment to his profession for the first time in the twenty years he has been a member of Actor's Equity Association. The reassessment is motivated by the same things that caused Vincent's turmoil, Smoots says—lack of recognition and "minuscule" financial reward. "I'm now appraching an age where if I don't have a family soon, I never will." He describes Van Gogh as being desperate to have a family. Taking care of the baby of the woman he was living with gave Van Gogh "a connection with being human."

Growing up, Smoots did not feel compelled to be an actor. "It was pointed out to me along the way that I had certain talents for this or that, and once realizing that, I decided that those were the talents I would develop. I don't seek fame...I guess in that sense I'm a worker, and I'm happy to be a worker. I just wish renumeratively I could get by and have a family, and do the things that, quote, normal people do."

Except for the full-time salaries from what he describes as some of Milwaukee's "superb" flagship arts organizations, such as the Milwaukee Symphony and the Milwaukee Repertory Theater, making enough money to support a family as an artist in Milwaukee is difficult. For example, when he served as artistic director of Next Act Theatre, Smoots made $1500 for directing a play, with preparation and rehearsal taking around a month. Actors at the theater made $240 a week.

The actor's grandfather was a minister, as was Van Gogh's. Smoots' mother wanted him to go into the clergy, but he had other thoughts. "Like Vincent, at a certain age I just couldn't make sense out of the rigidity of organized religion. I saw it not touching people. I saw it not reaching their spirits. It wasn't working. So I sought some other outlet."

While acting the role of Theo Van Gogh reading Vincent's letters, Smoots says he tries to take Vincent to different depths. "There are lengthy passages where Vincent really takes over. There I hope to have a fully fleshed out character in terms of voice, body, and speech rhythms."

Smoots feels that Vincent's dissolution had both physical and psychological causes. "He didn't eat anything. He didn't take care of himself. But he was driven and driven and driven and he didn't understand it enough to put on the brakes, and then he just got driven into his own self-destruction without even understanding it. The more recognition he didn't get, the more of himself he used up in the quest, until every waking hour was involved in the passionate expression of what he felt."

"If endless striving is the key, then there's no better disciple of endless striving than Vincent," Smoots says of Vincent's unrelenting aspiration.

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