050- SS San Pedro

Fed up with the everyday grand. Tied out from the summer heat. Wanna get away from it all? We offer you... Escape! Escape! Designed to free you from the four walls of today for a half hour of high adventure.

You are trapped aboard an ill-fated ocean liner. Captain by a dying man. Follow mysterious stranger. danger, haunting you, menacing you, seems intent on sending you to destruction. Tonight we escape to Mid-Ocean and to the strange passengers aboard a stranger ship, as James Gould Cousins tells it in his gripping story, SS San Pedro.

It was hot, the heat rolled up from the Hoboken waterfront and drifted in waves across the the open bridge deck where I stood. The last few loads of passengers' luggage were being hoisted aboard. Thirty minutes to whistle on the forward stack would sound off, and the cargo liners and people carrying 172 passengers and 200 in the crew

who'd nose away from the pier and start the long-run south of Buenos Aires. Then, then she'd become the great living animal she was meant to be. no longer something built of paint and steel and tied to appear.

You get to feel that way after you've been a while at sea, you feel that your ship is a live thing and that you're part of it. The captain is the biggest part, of course, the brain of the ship, the mentality that keeps her from turning idiot and dashing herself to pieces in her madness.

The officers are the nerve centers, the crew, the hands and fingers. The twin turbines far down in the hole are the great driving muscles of the legs. Silly, maybe, but you can feel it. And the passengers, well, to most of us officers, the passengers are the parasites of this ship.