By 1938 the Society’s membership had increased to twenty-two, and in 1940 newly-admitted members Captains Wilbur Brown and Ralph Leavitt borrowed a Chase Leavitt Company truck to move the Society to new quarters on the third floor of 179 Commercial Street, above Chase Leavitt. There the Society met for over thirty years. During the war membership continued to grow with the admission of about eight new members annually.
In 1941 two events occurred which would have long-lasting effects on the Society. After five months of frantic construction, the first twelve-inch pipeline connected the Portland Pipeline’s South Portland tank farm with refineries in Montreal. Over the years since, the Pipeline has been enlarged and new storage tanks added. With its two piers it now handles a hundred tankers each year, with other terminals taking just over a hundred more. A conservative estimate is that each arrival injects at least twenty-five thousand dollars into the local economy, though tanker traffic is down from its peak in the late seventies, when it peaked at more than a thousand arrivals annually. In the fifties the Society admitted its only foreign members: Canadian tanker Captains Pink and Robinson and Greek Captain Kaloumenos.
The Maine Maritime Academy in Castine opened its doors in 1941 and many of its graduates have joined the Society in the just over half a century since. Four members, Captains Martin B. Billings, Davis E. Jameson, Paul A. Stearns and Stephen C. Williams, were in the Academy’s first graduating class of 1943. Perhaps the most unusual wartime experience of a Marine Society member happened to the late Captain Charles B. Prior, who on 5 May 1945 was in command of the collier SS Black Point, bound from Newport News to Weymouth, Massachusetts. At 1740 hours, Eastern War Time, off Point Judith, Rhode Island, Captain Prior had just lit a cigarette when a torpedo from the U-853 struck his ship on the starboard quarter.
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