Hardships, Battleships and Bottle Ships

By Luke Pinneo, Coast Guard Petty Officer 2nd Class

Long retired, Coast Guard veteran Maurice Poulin relaxes at a small workbench in his home in Nahant, Massachusetts, building ships in bottles. His hands are steady for an 85-year-old man.

Just outside the window, waves from Boston Bay slap the shore and a sea breeze fills the room.
“The older you get, the more relaxed you want to be,” he said.

But he remembers a time when life was not so peaceful. Born in 1922, he recalls growing up in hard times when nearly everything was in short supply.

“The Depression formed our generation,” he said. “We had to have stamps to buy everything—gas, sugar, even butter.”

The stamps were dated and included the quantity people were allowed to buy, and were required in addition to the monetary price.

He said the government donated bags of food and clothes, including pants that could be identified as government-issued by the stitching.

“It was easy to tell all the kids who had no dough by the line on their pants,” he said. “It was embarrassing.”
Jobs were also scarce.

“For a young kid, there was nothing to do but hang around,” he said.

In 1939, he found a ticket out of his depressed community. He joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, a group devoted to dams, roads and reforestation projects and that founded many of the national and state parks in America today.

He went to Colorado, to help build dams.

“It was like a kid playing with mud,” he said.

And a kid he was. He said to get into the CCC, boys had to be 17 years old. He was only 16 so he forged his birth certificate to make him a year older.

“There was nothing else to do,” he said.

The CCC paid him $30 a month. He kept five dollars and the remaining $25 was sent home to his parents in Lowell, Massachusetts.

“It was more to help the family,” he said.

He said back then there was no welfare and people would grab any job available. “They’d do anything to make a buck—sweep streets, pick up garbage.” He said when he was 10 years old, he and his friends walked the gutters and collected tobacco from cigarette butts to sell to teenagers for pennies.

“After the Depression, anything would have been better,” he said.

He joined the Coast Guard in 1941. Between 1942 and 1945 he served aboard the Leonard Wood, a 535-foot transport ship.

He said for him and his fellow servicemen, the military supplied a steady flow of camaraderie, food and paychecks that were once scant.

Despite the barrage of new conveniences, he found himself in the middle of a world war.

The Leonard Wood carried landing craft that were loaded with tanks, trucks and troops and sent to shore during invasions. During battle, Coast Guardsmen aboard the Leonard Wood were deployed as crew inside the landing craft or as gunners on the ship. In the three years aboard, Poulin did it all, narrowly escaping death several times.

“We would be blinded by bombs going off right off our quarter,” he said.

He recalled one battle when a group of enemy airplanes swooped in to attack. One plane approached Leonard Wood low and fast.

With two leathery fingers pointed square at his face he said, “I swore it was going to hit me in the eyes.” Instead, he said it buzzed over his head, attacked the ship next to the Leonard Wood, and killed every
man aboard.

“War is very strange like that,” he said. “I think it’s all about luck.”

Even now, more than half a century later, he still seems to have luck on his side. Of the nearly 400 ships in bottles he’s made, he has given most away as gifts to friends and family, to admirals and local museums. Recently, one he made of the Coast Guard Cutter Eagle was selected by a Smithsonian Institution museum in Washington D.C., to be exhibited until August 2010.

“He’s done so many of those models of famous ships and he incorporates some personal touch into them,” said Calantha Sears, Poulin’s neighbor and curator of the Nahant Historical Society, where three of Poulin’s ships are on display.

“I think we’re very lucky that he chose Nahant, and I say that as a third generation, lifelong resident,” she said. “He’s an amazing man and we’re lucky to have him.”