My goodness you guys are a great bunch. I never imagined I would get so many replies or so much information. A million thanks to all.
I was a plankowner of the current USCGC Harriet Lane (WMEC-903). Harriet Lane was the third ship of the “Famous Class” or “Bear Class”. When the ship was first commissioned, there was a lot of interest in the history of the ships. As a model builder, I paid more attention to it than many of my shipmates…
It has been a while since I’ve been to the Academy, but I think there is a painting there of Miss Harriet Lane, with the cutter in the background. I think the hull in that picture was a dark green???
(I"m not entirely sure, as a reproduction of the painting appeared on the cover of the Alumni magazine, and I seem to have lost mine in the ensuing 20 years…)
Harriet Lane was more than just James Buchanan’s niece and White House hostess. She was a major celebrity of her time-- imagine if Michele Kwan (the skater) was the first lady.
Model Expo is indeed re-releasing an upgraded version of the Harriet Lane kit in 1.96 scale. Their website lists the kit as having an expected release date of 7/30/2006, so it shoudl be available soon. The new kit is still a solid hull kit, but with revised plans by Ben Lankford, and upgraded fittings.
Hello All Stations
Professor Tilley has casually mentioned on this forum that he “did some line drawings” of Coast Guard ships…I would bring to all who read his entries that Mr. Tilley is being 'waaayy too modest.
First of all, his drawings were top notch in every respect…well researched and as accurate as one could put down in an illustration(considering how poor the Coast Guard preserves it’s historical documents for reference purposes). Second, his drawings are part of a visual historical record of a pretty much over-looked Service, a real treasure if you are a fan of anything Coast Guard. Third, his “drawings” (should read art work) are not only of some Revenue cutters but of WWII CG vessels of every type as well as modern cutters, just great stuff…if he did similar renderings of USN vessels( I don’t think he has, I could be wrong), they would be in demand by model builders and naval fans alike …I always had hoped that the Professor would get together with the folks that do the Squadron profiles on ships and do a history (with COLOR profiles) of the Coast Guard’s handsome and long serving SECRETARY CLASS cutters, in all their different arrangements and paint schemes. But we can only hope…By the way, the PYRO model of the TANEY is on display at the CG Academy museum, with a brass plate that states it is a “gift” to the USCG from the PYRO company. Again, Professor Tilley is to be admired for his wonderful art work as well his insightful remaks on this forum. Bravo Zulu!
Warm regards
Mike Maynard USCG(Ret)
Well, I hardly know what to say in response to Mr. Maynard’s post - except thank you very much, and you’re being too generous. Maybe a little info on that drawing series would be in order.
A great deal of the credit for it has to go to two successive holders of the position of Coast Guard Historian: Dr. Bob Scheina and Dr. Bob Browning. Bob Scheina initiated the concept back in the late eighties, when he asked me to prepare a research package for one of a series of paintings his office was commissioning in conjunction with the Coast Guard’s bicentennial (in 1990). As part of that package I worked up a line drawing of the early revenue cutter Eagle, which participated in the Quasi-War with France. Bob liked the drawing well enough that he hired me to do four more, in the form of outboard profiles of early sailing revenue cutters. The project eventually expanded to include vessels from all periods throughout the history of the Revenue Cutter Service and the Coast Guard. When Bob Scheina retired, his successor, Bob Browning, was equally enthusiastic. The drawings were printed in sets of four, each set packaged in a big brown envelope with a sheet of information about the ships’ histories and the sources I used in making the drawings.
The source materials varied enormously. When Bob Scheina asked me to do an outboard profile of a “Treasury”-class cutter from the 1930s, for instance, I was astonished to find out that the Coast Guard didn’t already have one. The National Archives had a nice set of deck plans and the hull lines, and the Coast Guard Yard had rather simplified inboard and outboard profiles of the ships as they looked near the end of their careers. But apparently somebody had, quite literally, lost the original outboard profile that showed the ships as built - with all their armament forward and gear for handling seaplanes on the afterdecks. Bob Scheina supplied me with close to a hundred photos, and I was able to reconstruct the Roger B. Taney’s original configuration with considerable confidence.
There’s at least one huge boner in the series. That drawing of the original Eagle was based on a set of hull lines for an “unidentified revenue cutter” that Howard I. Chapelle found in the Coast Guard archives back in the thirties. The date was about right, and we hadn’t been able to find any other information about the Eagle whatsoever. I figured the ship in the drawing might have been her - and that starting with an unidentified drawing would be preferable to pure speculation. So I started by tracing the Chapelle drawing, and added the spars, sails, and rigging on the basis of contemporary practice. A few years later, Don Canney, who was working on his book about American revenue cutters, found a document (in the records of the Port of Baltimore, if I remember right) that established that the Eagle was a good bit bigger than the ship in Chapelle’s drawing. Ouch. (We still don’t know what the ship in Chapelle’s drawing was - and, according to Chapelle, the original disappeared when that particular stack of old documents got transferred from CG Headquarters to the National Archives.)
On the other hand, in some cases the documentation the guys in CG Headquarters provided was superb. The icebreaker Eastwind was designed by Gibbs and Cox, of New York, who have always prided themselves on employing some of the best draftsmen in the business. Making that drawing was largely a matter of tracing.
I’ve lost count of the total number of drawings in the series, but I think there were at least a dozen sets (of four sheets each). I also don’t know how many copies of each the CG had printed. Initially, they were distributed to Coast Guard stations, and used in various Coast Guard publications. (They’re in the public domain; anybody who wants to reproduce them can legally do so. In fact the only person on the planet whose use of them is restricted in any way is me. Since the government paid me for drawing them, I can’t sell them to anybody else.) Bob Browning used to keep a big supply of them in his office, and mailed them, free of charge, to anybody who expressed an interest. I think he’s had several sets reprinted over the years, but I suspect he’s also run out of some. I’m sure, though, that he’d be happy to send any of them that he has to anybody who asks - at no charge. Bob is a first-rate gentleman, and appreciative of the peculiar needs of ship modelers. The first step in reaching him is to go to the Coast Guard website, www.uscg.mil, and click on “History.”
The last set of drawings I made for the CG was a series of lighthouses - four sheets, each with about a dozen lighthouses on it. Bob reports that these are, in terms of requests from the public, the most popular of all. (The public seems to have a certain fascination with lighthouses. Bob and I have speculated that the explanation may be phallic. Webmaster - are you there?)
About a year ago Bob hired me to redo four of the old drawings - the Alexander Hamilton (Morris class, from the 1830s), Harriet Lane (1857), Bear (the original) and Taney (1936) - in color. That was an interesting project, as I’d never worked in color before. Fortunately a local printing firm here in Greenville has a nice, extremely patient lady who can do marvelous things in Photoshop. She scanned the original line drawings and “dumped” the colors I selected into all the right places, with results that I think are pretty impressive. I know that set of color drawings is currently available from Bob Browning’s office. We’ve been talking about doing another set the same way, but at the moment the money seems to have dried up. (For some reason or other, the Coast Guard seems to think it has more important things to worry about in 2006 than hiring a senile college professor to make old-fashioned pictures of old-fashioned ships.)
The only Navy drawing I’ve done is one of the U.S.S. Porterfield, a square-bridge Fletcher-class destroyer on board which my wife’s late father served. I made the drawing shortly after we got married, and used copies of it as Christmas presents for members of the family. I don’t expect to get any commissions from the Navy; it has several draftsmen working for it who are better than I am.
At any rate, I deeply appreciate Mr. Maynard’s kind remarks. I would be happy indeed if any of those drawings were to be of any use to anybody who’d building a model of any of those important, but rarely appreciated, old ships.