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By GREGORY D. KESICH, Staff Writer Wednesday, April 4, 2007

A piece of Portland Harbor's history will be steaming in for a visit this summer.

The World War II Liberty Ship SS John W. Brown will make Portland one of three places it stops, arriving Aug. 16 for a six-day stay.

The Baltimore-built Brown is identical to 236 Liberty Ships built in two hastily created shipyards in South Portland beginning in 1940.

The ships were used to carry cargo around the globe, breaking Hitler's blockade by transporting much-needed war materiel to Great Britain and Arctic Russia.

Only two of the 2,710 Liberty Ships are still operating. The other, the SS Jeremiah O'Brien was built in South Portland, and is harbored in San Francisco.

The Liberty Ship era transformed South Portland. With most of the established shipyards busy at the start of the war, a new yard was built from scratch in 1940 to manufacture 30 coal-burning cargo ships bound for England.

In early 1941, a second yard was built to fill a contract for oil-fired ships, which later became known as Liberty Ships.

The two yards combined to form the New England Shipbuilding Co., eventually employing 30,000 workers who came from every walk of life.

Jack Gibson was hired in the summer of 1942 to drive a tractor-trailer at the yard. With the wartime labor shortage as it was, no one seemed to mind that he was only 13.

"Nobody asked me if I had a driver's license," Gibson recalled. "There were not too many questions asked at all."

Gibson earned 75 cents an hour, wages he remembers as "darn good."

The yard operated around the clock. At the beginning of his morning shift, Gibson would meet his father coming off a night shift at the plant gate and trade shoes so the family wouldn't have to buy two pairs of steel-toed boots.

At night the sky would be alight from the torches of welders building the sturdy vessels. It took 279 days to build the first 441-foot Liberty Ship in South Portland. Two years later, it took only 52 days for workers to turn out a new ship.

This August, the Brown will visit The Massachusetts Maritime Academy in Buzzards Bay, Portland and the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston.

The ship is scheduled to steam into Portland Harbor Aug. 16 and will be available for tours.

On Aug. 18, a fundraising cruise for 700 people will leave from Portland. World War II aircraft are scheduled to fly over as part of that event.

The Brown was built in 1942, making it the oldest surviving Liberty Ship. It served as a school ship in New York Harbor from 1946 to 1982. She was rescued from a scrap heap by a group of Merchant Mariners who formed Project Liberty Ship Inc., the current owner and operator.

For more about the Brown and its visit, check the Project Liberty Ship Web site, www.liberty-ship.com.