Magazine of the Seaway Port Authority of Duluth Spring, 1997 

Behind the 'Working Waterfront'    By Karen Sunderman 

Fog is the enemy," said Ed Ruisi, a ship agent for Guthrie-Huhner, Inc., as he waited for an oceangoing vessel to arrive in the Twin Ports. That was lesson number one. The Helena Oldendorff, expected to pass through the Duluth Ship Canal at midnight, went to anchor instead and eventually slipped into Port later while our camera crew scrambled to capture the image.  
 The experience with Ed and the entry of the Helena Oldendorff was an introduction to the working realities of the waterfront that few people outside the industry understand. No schedule is cast in stone. Flexibility is the name of the game. Those who are successful in the maritime industry adjust to change on an hourly basis. That lesson was reinforced daily as our team of producers and videographers plotted strategy to document the working waterfront of Duluth and Superior. We called several ship agents, mapped out arrival and departure schedules, assigned duties—and then changed them, again and again. Ships can be about as predictable as the weather. 
Our documentary project, filmed in 1996, was designed to follow the maneuvers of the Helena OldendorFf— docking at the Duluth Port Terminal, offloading steel coils, shifting to Harvest States elevator in Superior, loading wheat and finally leaving the Twin Ports. 
 

As the Kansas hooks up a towline on the bow of a big oceangoing freighter and pulls it taut, Nick casually comments on the chances that the line could snap, and what damage it could do. "You might want to step around to the other side of the pilot house," he says, cloaking his warning as a mere suggestion. The captain onboard the Kansas, George LaTour, has been in the pilot house for more than a dozen years, working his way up the tugboat ranks as his father did before him. "At first you get a little excited ... " he starts to explain, then pauses to listen to the pilot aboard the freighter. With a cheerful, "All-righty!" into his radio he increases the power of the Kansas's huge diesel engine and, in perfect unison with the tug Vermont at the stern, his crew deftly maneuvers a 28,000 deadweight ton ship around a series of 90-degree turns and gently nudges her up against the dock.
 Bob Stager loads boats. As the evening  shift operator at the Burlington Northern Dock in Superior, he controls a battery of shuttles and conveyor belts capable of pouring 22,000 tons of taconite onboard a vessel in a single hour. 
 Bob started working for Burlington Northern in 1977, when the dock opened, and he's still impressed with its size and statistics—" ... and I don't get paid extra for saying that either," he said. 
 Some ships are regulars at the dock, visiting "every five days forever." Their schedule has given Bob a chance to develop a rapport with crews from more than a dozen boats. He's watched as third mates have moved up to first mate, and then to captain. 
 Bob muses over his role in the Port. "It's interesting," he says. "I like loading the boats and I get a nice view." 
 A crane operator ties his lunch box to 11 a rope dangling from a platform high above his head. As the man climbs the ladder up to the platform and reels in his lunch, Russ Wedin, the dock supervisor at the Duluth Port Terminal says. "The waterfront is a unique place ... you could be loading a grain ship one day, you could be loading general cargo or you could be working in the warehouse unloading boxcars. There is a big variety of things to do down here and I think that helps us out a lot. There's not a lot of repetition."