Flashback 1999: Now's the time for him to chart his own course

    Today is the 38th anniversary of my joining the Sun-Times, a day I traditionally reach back into the files and highlight something from the archive. This column appealed to me because, to be honest, I write about myself so goddamn much, it's a relief to see me focusing on someone else for a change. 

     This column ran the summer I crossed the ocean with my dad for the book, "Don't Give Up the Ship." Our New Zealand press lord, Nigel Wade, would not give me time off — he was offended that I asked — so I had to file a column, three days a week, from the sea, using the molasses-dripping-off-a-stick-in-winter satellite modem in the radio room. Focusing on the ship's only Chicago cadet was a no-brainer. 

    The obvious question this column leaves us with is: what happened to Terry McCabe? My gut told me, as mentioned at the end, that the son, grandson and great-grandson of police officers has a strong chance of becoming a Chicago cop. But CPD, natch, did not respond to my inquiry, and a desultory online search came up empty. He'd be in his late 40s now. He seemed like a nice kid; I hope he's having a good life.

     ABOARD THE EMPIRE STATE — So how does a 21-year-old South Side Irish kid end up aboard a ship, 300 miles due north of Puerto Rico, steaming toward Barbados at a brisk clip of 17 knots?
     "I like water," offers Terry McCabe, the only Chicagoan attending the State of New York Maritime College, the oldest of the nation's six colleges teaching young people the honorable and endangered art of navigating the high seas. Every summer, 400 underclassmen and -women set sail for eight weeks aboard the Empire State — a 37-year-old cargo ship converted to carry trainees — cruising from the Bronx and heading, on this summer's voyage, to Charleston, Barbados, Naples and Wales.
     I suggest to the 1996 graduate of Mount Carmel High School that while many people like water, few sail the seas. He digs for a better explanation.
     "I was a lifeguard at Rainbow Beach, at 79th and Lake Street — also at Kennedy Park," he says. "This is what came to me, I guess."
     It is gratifying to see your city well-represented, and McCabe, as Maritime's lone Chicagoan, does just that. He was vice president of the student council, president of the 50-member Emerald Society, and wrestled at 171 pounds. The cadets have their nicknames embroidered on the pockets of their blue boiler suits, and McCabe's "Scrappy" is a remnant from his days on Maritime's now-defunct rugby team. Five-foot-eight "on a good day," he made up the difference between himself and the typical rugby behemoth with pure grit. Maritime prides itself on a certain quasi-military discipline, and so disbanded its rugby team after realizing that rugby placed its cadets in the general vicinity of other collegiate rugby teams, and thus such venerable rugby traditions as the Naked Beer Slide.*
     Probably just as well. While McCabe's older sister is a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, his blood is not navy but Chicago Police Department blue. His great-grandfather, Peter McCabe, was a Chicago cop, as was his grandfather, John McCabe, as was his father, also John McCabe, who just retired as a detective at Area 2 violent crimes after 30 years on the force. His brother, named — and you saw this coming — John McCabe Jr., is a fourth-generation Chicago cop, currently on leave.
     Despite that long tradition, McCabe — who took and passed the police exam last March — is in no rush to settle down at 11th and State, certainly not before seeing the world. And he has already seen much more than the typical 21-year-old from Mount Greenwood. This is his third cruise_the past two summers took him, among other places, to Spain, Portugal, Germany, Bermuda, England and his ancestral Ireland.
      He wasn't overly impressed. Asked his assessment of the countries he's seen, McCabe replies: "They're all the same." Pressed for something more profound, McCabe, who plays bagpipes in the Chicago Stockyards Kilty Band, admits "Ireland was actually pretty cool."
     McCabe has reasons to be nonplused. Not only is he from Chicago, but the Maritime College is not your run-of-the-mill state institution either. Tucked on the very northeast tip of New York City, where the East River flows into Long Island Sound, the college is built around Fort Schuyler, an 1830s pentagon of stone with formal parade grounds and slit gun ports and enough nautical memorabilia scattered about to quicken even a Midwesterner's dusty heart, such as a massive bronze five-bladed propeller salvaged off that greyhound of the seas, the SS United States, and displayed as if it were sculpture.
     "(The campus) is one of the things I like most about it," says McCabe. "It's hard to believe it's in the Bronx."
     It is, but we're not. Not anymore. The Bronx is 10 days and 1,300 miles behind us. Shipboard life for cadets falls into routine. "You're either on watch, or working or in class," says McCabe, a 1st class boatswain — sort of like a handyman on the ship. They need a handyman, given that the vessel is basically 12,000 tons of pumps, blowers, winches, watertight doors, condensers, conduits and wildcats that haul up 12,900-pound anchors on massive chains with links 14 inches long.
     "You don't usually use heavy machinery in college," McCabe notes.
     The news about the maritime industry typically sounds so grim — all those 400,000-ton Japanese supertankers with crews of a dozen or two — but McCabe, entering his senior year, doesn't think he has spent the last three years training for a dwindling profession.
     "I have more options than (I would at) any other college," he says. "I'll graduate with a degree in marine transportation and I'll also have my U.S. Coast Guard license for unlimited tonnage. So they gave me the best of both worlds here. You can ship out, you can work on land. And my degree is so inclusive, you can do anything and everything, from maritime law to maritime insurance."
     He doesn't add "to being a cop" but that's where I'd bet my money. The lure of the sea is mighty, but it drains away compared to 100 years of family tradition. And besides: How many police officers can figure out where they are with a sextant and a starry night sky? We could use one, someday. But Terry McCabe is in no rush. He has those supreme luxuries of youth: time and a world awaiting.

      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 6, 1999

* Something I knew about because I had witnessed it first hand at a Big 10 rugby party held at Northwestern Apartments in 1979.