Long before popular television shows such as Dirty Jobs and The Deadliest Catch, everyday men and women---the unsung heroes of the job world---toiled in important but mostly anonymous jobs. One of those jobs was deckhand on the ore boats. With numerous photographs and engaging stories, Deckhand offers an insider's view of both the mundane and the intriguing duties performed by deckhands on these gritty cargo vessels. Boisterous port saloons, monster ice jams, near drownings, and the daily drudgery of soogeying---cleaning dirt and grime off the ships---are just a few of the experiences Mickey Haydamacker had as a young deckhand working on freighters of the Great Lakes in the early 1960s. Haydamacker sailed five Interlake Steamship Company boats, from the modern Elton Hoyt 2nd to the ancient coal-powered Colonel James Pickands with its backbreaking tarp-covered hatches. Deckhand will appeal to shipping buffs and to anyone interested in Great Lakes shipping and maritime history as it chronicles the adventures of living on the lakes from the seldom-seen view of a deckhand. Mickey Haydamacker spent his youth as a deckhand sailing on the freighters of the Great Lakes. During the 1962 and '63 seasons Nelson sailed five different Interlake Steamship Company ore boats. He later went on to become an arson expert with the Michigan State Police, retiring with the rank of Detective Sergeant. Alan D. Millar, to whom Haydamacker related his tale of deckhanding, spent his career as a gift store owner and often wrote copy for local newspaper, TV, and radio.

A deckhand's coming-of-age story of sailing the Great Lakes steamboats during the social and political turbulence of the early 1970s, Lake Effect is a vivid and memorable account, told in a light-hearted and entertaining narrative style, of life aboard the giant ore boats. In the early 1970s, the author sailed on four different US Steel freighters as a deckhand and deckwatch. Ten years later, he enrolled in the Great Lakes Maritime Academy with the intention of becoming a deck officer, and sailed on the 1000-foot Columbia Star. This humorous yet poignant memoir follows his voyage of self-discovery.

"To read this book is to spend a day on a 40-foot shrimp boat in a southern Texas bay, then return home to an isolated port town whose economy revolves around shrimping and whose future is in jeopardy. Often reading like a good novel, Maril's political economy of the Texas shrimp industry is written by someone who knows the inner workings of the industry and the communities that depend upon it. A rich and highly engaging study of the industry". -- Contemporary Sociology.