When I first caught brief sight of the bound collection of "The Finger" on the shelf at the Great Northwest Bookstore in Portland, Oregon, its name and style led me to believe it must be some sort of radical underground paper from the 1960s. It wasn't until I spied the date on the first issue -- October 9, 1942 -- that I realized it obviously was something quite different.

Although the set had been bound together in hardback form, with "THE FINGER" and "OCT. 9, 1942 - JAN 3, 1944" embossed along the spine, there was no indication of the book's source, although that it had been carefully bound at all suggested it had come from a collection, of some sort, from somewhere. That binding, however, was free of any label or imprint.

The collection then sat untouched for months before I began to seek out information on "The Finger," its origins, and its creators.

A visit to the Oregon Historical Society Research Library in late November, 2003, yielded mainly some sense of the historical context of life at the Portland-area shipyards of Kaiser Company, Inc.

According to a 1944 publication of Kaiser itself called Tanker Champions of the World, intended to commemorate the work done at the company's Swan Island shipyard:

The first contract to build 56 T2-SE-A1 tankers was signed March 24, 1942, and the first ship steel was received in the yard May 23, 1942. Sixteen days later, June 8, the first steel was fabricated in the Plate Shop and on July 1, the first keel was laid. The hull was launched October 24, 1942, and delivered December 31, 1942.

That ship was the S. S. Schenectady, "largest ship built on the Pacific Coast, first of a fleet of fine tankers" according to Tanker Champions of the World. Almost a year to the day later, on October 23, 1943, "Swan Island received the Tanker Champion flag for having achieved the highest productivity per way of any American shipyard engaged in tanker construction."

You'll notice that the first volume of "The Finger" runs from October 9 until October 24, 1942 -- the final two weeks of construction for the S. S. Schenectady. And indeed, it is in this context that "The Finger" receives the only mention of it I could find at the Oregon Historical Society.

During those years, there was a company magazine for shipyard employees called Bo's'n's Whistle. And in the November 5, 1942, issue which celebrated the launch of the S. S. Schenectady and all that Kaiser workers had done to make it happen ("...launched just seven months to the day after surveyors started laying out the yard, and 115 days after keel laying ... a new national record for this class of ship"), we find this:

In the face of such major obstacles as shortages of vital manpower and materials, notably steel and oxygen, Swan Island management and men have gone ahead in the spirit of "It can be done," and established a national record for their very first ship.

One of the staggering undertakings on the jobs was the installation of 70,000 feet of pipe ... more than 13 miles, including the mammoth heating coils. Many essential items had not arrived at the last minute, and over a hundred emergency purchase orders ... including rudder, trucks, and bearings were issued in an effort to keep construction on scheduled time. These problems, coupled with an acute shortage of oxygen, were just a few of the difficulties licked in building the "Schenectady."

Excitement ran high at Swan Island during the last two weeks before launching, and a mysterious small daily publication known as "The Finger" came into being. Reputedly published by a dwarf living in a dug-out under the outfitting dock, this paper put the finger on employees not pitching in to help meet the launching deadline. Cartoons and posters by workmen helped build high morale among Swan Island workers.

Beyond this, nothing more is known other than what the editor (or editors) of "The Finger" did or did not reveal in the course of publishing. According to Kaiser Permanente Northwest, their archives from Kaiser's World War II shipyard operations do not include any material regarding the publication.

Further, a retired Kaiser employee who briefly worked at the shipyards during World War II, himself unfamiliar with the publication, asked at a retiree luncheon in December, 2003, if anyone present had any recollection of it. No one did.

For that matter, there is no current evidence, beyond the word of the publication's editors, that "The Finger" was in fact produced by and for shipyard workers themselves at all.

While clearly not a well-monied effort (one would not expect a paper put out by laborers to be so), hindsight -- or perhaps 21st century cynicism -- makes it just as easy to imagine that it could have been a Kaiser publication posing as a worker-produced effort.

Workers chastizing fellow workers, after all, likely would find a better reception in the shipyards than management doing the same. Then again, this was a period of intense wartime patriotism, and it isn't difficult to imagine workers wanting to keep the pressure up on those amongst them who weren't performing.

Neither do we know how many of each edition were produced, who created it, who wrote it, who paid for it, how it was distributed, nor how widely read it might have been.

What is clear from "The Finger" itself is that its October 24, 1942, issue was meant to be its final. Having played its own role in pushing shipyard workers to meet the intended launch date for the S. S. Schenectady, that issue is marked as a "Five Star Final Edition."

But then, on January 16, 1943, after successful sea trials, the S. S. Schenectady returned to harbor and sat at the dock at Swan Island. A report of the United States Coast Guard describes what happened next:

Without warning and with a report which was heard for at least a mile, the deck and sides of the vessel fractured just aft of the bridge superstructure. The fracture extended almost instantaneously to the turn of the bilge port and starboard. The deck side shell, longitudinal bulkhead and bottom girders fractured. Only the bottom plating held. The vessel jack-knifed and the center portion rose so that no water entered. The bow and stern settled into the silt of the river bottom.

On January 25, a Time magazine article described how the tanker "suddenly broke in half with a thunderous snap, settled in the water with its two-inch steel plates split clean asunder, the midship sections sticking out of the water like crags."

Nobody knew what caused the break. The FBI, the Maritime Commission, the Bureau of Marine Inspection and Navigation and the American Bureau of Shipping started investigations simultaneously, refused to say a word.

Four days after the accident, "The Finger" reappeared to rally shipyard workers to the cause of repairing their first tanker. "Maybe we don't know why the SCHENECTADY broke," the paper wrote, "but we sure as Hell know how to fix her."

A couple notes about this sudden reappearance of "The Finger" in 1943. If the set reproduced here is full and complete, it was not the start of a new run, but intended to be a one-off call-to-arms in the aftermath of the break-up of the S. S. Schenectady. Strangely, the issue is labelled as being "Vol. 3, No. 1" -- although there is no indication that the paper published at all since the conclusion of its initial run on October 24, 1942.

Stranger still, later that year, "The Finger" reappeared yet again. An issue dated November 10, 1943 -- and labelled "VOL. II, NO. 1" -- begins with the exclamation, "Boys and girls, the FINGER is back!" It offers no particular explanation for this, the second time (to my current knowledge) it suddenly reappeared. The editor does, however, offer this insight into the paper's operation:

The FINGER is published by yard employees for yard employees, and is free of all editing by the management. Kaiser Company, Inc., has reserved only two rights -- that of canning the editor and stopping publication of our little rag if we get too rough. We haven't been and won't be a mighty publication, but we can "put the finger" on the guy who isn't producing.

This 1943 run of "The Finger" included a new masthead logo, more complex layout, and superior printing, and no particular indication whether or not it was produced by the same team as the original.

In this new run's December 22nd issue, the editors briefly returned to the subject of Swan Island's first love, the S. S. Schenectady. An item which stands as an ode of sorts describes the ship's life, from launch through near-destruction, repair, and return to operation. It ends thusly:

The "Old Lady" is turning out to be a champ. Speeding through war waters to new accomplishments, she probably chuckles to herself and says:

"If the boys back home could only see me now!"

"The Finger" ended -- as far as I know for the final time -- with the very next issue. Dated January 3, 1944, it was one year and nearly three months since "The Finger" first appeared during the construction of the Schenectady.

Its final headline read, "FINGER FOLDS" and its front page included a quote from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:

The moving finger writes and having writ,
Moves on; nor all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it

- The One True b!X, 02 Dec 2003 (Revised on 11 Jan 2004 and 10 Aug 2006)