Casco resident Letty Tucci was four
years old when her father, a crew member on the SS Pendleton, was rescued at
sea amid a nor’easter that made this rescue one of the most dangerous Coast
Guard rescues in history.
Tucci’s father, Fred Brown, was a 36-year-old
merchant marine, on his way back from an oil delivery to Louisiana when the blizzard
hit on February 18, 1952. According to his granddaughter Caroline West, Brown
told a story of being asleep, and waking to a terrible sound. He ran to the
deck, and saw crew members bailing water.
Another story Brown frequently repeated
was of being unable to save his best friend, ship cook Tiny Myers. “He wanted
my dad to take his wallet and the possessions in his pocket because he said ‘I
won’t make it, I can’t make it down there to the rescue boat’ and my dad said
‘No, you’ll make it’ and he put his stuff back into his pocket,” said Tucci.
But as Myers tried to descend the rope ladder he slipped, and was crushed
between the rescue boat and the ship. Although he was already dead, Tucci said
her father reached out to grab him, trying to pull him onto the boat, and the
Coast Guard team had to force his hands away from Myers.
Myers was one of nine to lose his life
that day. The eight officers on the ship were killed when the ship split in
two, and the crew had to watch them float away on the bow of the ship.
It was an experience that impacted the
rest of Brown’s life, and a difficult thing for him to talk about, said Tucci. She
said the rescue was a miracle that the crew did not anticipate. They had been
shooting off flares and blowing a whistle with no response. “When they gave up
all hope, all of a sudden they saw a little light in the dark in the distance,
and it was a miracle to them,” she said.
One thing Tucci hopes people get from
the movie is how brave the Coast Guard crew was. “It was an extremely dangerous
mission, but had it not been for them, my dad never would have come home.”
When Brown did make it home, he went
immediately to the hospital where his son, Stephen, had been born the morning
after the storm. Tucci said her father arrived in the same brown tweed clothing
stained with blood that he’d had on when rescued. Her mother, she said, hadn’t
known her father was shipwrecked until after the baby was born, and Brown had
been saved.
Her father would never have dreamed that
a book would be written about the experience, or a movie made. She herself
found out about it when she overheard the story on Fox morning news.
Having a book and movie written about
the incident allows the family to understand some of what Brown went through,
said granddaughter Jennifer White, who lives in Raymond. “It helps me to
understand some of the struggles that he had as my grandfather,” she said. In
2014, White took a trip to Chatham in Cape Cod, where the wreck took place. “It
was quite emotional to stand there and look out and to see where this all
occurred,” White said.
White and 33 family members gathered at
Smitty’s in Windham to see the show on Saturday. It was a sold out show, so
only 23 of the family members present were able to get tickets, but they all
gathered afterwards in the function room at Pat’s pizza to talk and process the
movie.
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White also said she and her family were
confused by a character called “Brown” who was portrayed very differently than
the man they knew her grandfather to be. At the end, the credits showed that
that character was actually a David Brown, who was no relation to Fred.
Watching the rescue on the screen was
amazing, White said. “You got a little bit of a feeling of what they went
through,” she said. “It was an important story to tell.”
Tucci said the movie is important
because there’s a lot on the screen these days that isn’t real. “It’s amazing
to have a story like this on the big screen that is absolutely real and true to
what actually happened,” she said. “It should have an impact on people because
it’s true.”
