Twelve men were lost on the Black Point, which sank at 2155 the same day. Captain Prior and fourteen others took to rubber life rafts. They were picked up by crash boats from Quonset Point and taken to Newport, shaken but unharmed. Ironically, just a little over seventeen hours before the sinking, German Fleet Admiral Doenitz had sent out a radio message ordering his U-boats to cease hostilities. Apparently the submarine’s commander, Helmut Froemsdorf, either did not receive the order or chose to ignore it. The U-853 was promptly sunk by the USS Atherton and USS Moberly and went down with all fifty-five crew members. The Black Point was the last American flag merchant ship sunk by a German submarine.
Captain Prior died in 1991 after having been a member of the Society for over thirty years. At his request, some of his ashes were buried ashore and some scattered from the Portland Pilot Boat at the entrance to Portland Harbor, with family and Society members in attendance. As he had asked, at the ceremony his standing orders were quoted: "Stand an alert watch; keep a good lookout; call me if the visibility gets poor, or at any time you are in doubt, and call me in sufficient time to reach the bridge."
In addition to being a major Navy port during the war, Portland Harbor was also home to the sprawling complex of shipyards in South Portland, which built thirty Ocean class freighters for the British and two hundred thirty-six Liberty ships for the American war effort. Just after the war a pamphlet extolling Portland’s virtues as "America’s Sunrise Gateway," predicted that the New England Shipbuilding Company yard "will not long remain idle," but the hoped-for revival never materialized. In the postwar period Society members Ralph Leavitt of Chase Leavitt and Captain Francis X. Landry of the Jarka Corporation worked closely with other local firms and the Longshoremen’s Association to have Portland accepted as a port of entry for rubber and sisal destined for strategic stockpiles. Landry, a 1920 graduate of the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, had received his master’s papers at age twenty-five, and over the years had invented several improvements in cargo handling machinery. Both he and Leavitt—as have many Marine Society members since—were very much involved in the affairs of the fledgling Maine Maritime Academy.
In the early fifties attendance at meetings apparently was sometimes rather sparse, with only nine or ten present. The menus varied: fish chowder, corned hake, lobster stew, and in November 1952, President Wilbur Brown served up venison stew, followed by plum duff, evidently after a successful hunting trip. Payments to the Society’s beneficiaries, as recorded in the Log, were $525 to five (apparently widows) in May 1952 and $500 to five in 1954. By the early sixties attendance at meetings had increased dramatically, often with thirty or so climbing the stairs to the third floor. In 1965 the Society began its tradition of an annual "Ladies Night." Summer outings were held at Indian Island in East Boothbay, a lobster and clambake operated by member Captain Charles Wade.
Page 5