Page 61 - 2018 Lake St. Clair Guide Magazine

If you want the Cont. from page 24 USS Lake St.
rainbow, you Clair Service Ends His Grandfather,
need to enjoy a native Detroiter who grew up on the
shores of the Detroit River, trained at the
the rain Great Lakes Naval Station and served in
the Navy between 1918-1919.

Jim said his grandpa’s Lake St. Clair
crew narrowly escaped one of the
worst pandemics in world history – the
“Spanish Flu”. The crew left for Eu-
rope just days before the virus hit Phil-
adelphia and devastated the sailors Grandfather Louis

stationed in the Navy Yard and the greater Philadelphia population.
The exact figures unknown, but reportedly 650,000 Americans died
of the estimated 50-100 million worldwide deaths in only about a
year’s time from this pandemic. It was believed to have been spread
by the millions of WWI soldiers from around the world, intermingling
together in the trenches of France, then bringing the virus to each of
their own homelands… no one is quite sure of its origination.

The SS Lake St. Clair’s role in 1918 was to carry coal from Wales

and Ireland to French ports. She returned home in September 1919

and was sold to Ford Motor in 1926 for its steel. The Lake St. Clair

was built by the Great Lakes Engineering Works in Ecorse, MI who

also built the Edmund Fitzgerald in 1958.

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