The Book With the Red NumberYour great-grandfather · 1951–1955
This little blue book is more than seventy years old. It fits in a jacket pocket. It belonged to a teenager from Sarnia — a kid his classmates called “The Brat” — who spent five summers working on ships and grew up to be your great-grandfather. And on the very first page, it gets one thing wrong. Nobody has figured out why. Maybe you will.
Book number 27710 — stamped in red, like it means business
Start here
He was your age
Robert James Davies. Everyone called him Bob. He was born in 1936, grew up in Halifax, and by high school his family was in Sarnia, Ontario — a town on a river so wide that the country on the other side is the United States.
His high school was St. Patrick's — home of the Fighting Irish. Keep the school in mind: half of this story happens there.
Some of you knew him a little. Most of you never got the chance — he died in 2004, before most of you were born. So here is the important thing to know first: before he was anyone's great-grandfather, he was a fifteen-year-old with a summer job he did not ask for and did not want.
His father was a ship's captain — a real one, the kind who ran tankers up and down the Great Lakes. And in June 1951, his father got him a job as a deckhand. Scrubbing, painting, hauling lines, taking orders. All summer. Every summer.
What did Bob actually want to be doing? We know the answer, because years later his oldest daughter — your grandmother or great-aunt Brenda — wrote it down in one sentence:
"This is a log of ships my dad sailed on in high school summers. He didn't like it at all because he wanted to play baseball. His dad got him the summer job."— Brenda, his eldest daughter
Keep that sentence in your head the whole way through. He didn't want to be there. He went anyway. And every single captain who signed him off wrote the same two words about him. You'll see them in a minute.
The evidence
Year
Ship · when · what he did
Age
1951
SS Imperial Simcoe
Deckhand · 16 Jun, Sarnia → 26 Jul, Montreal
15years
1952
Imperial London
Deckhand · 13 Jun, Sarnia → 22 Aug, Montreal ← this entry was written in pencil. Look how faded.
16years
1953
Imperial Collingwood
Wiper (engine room!) · 6 Jun → 14 Aug, Sarnia
17years
1954
Imperial London
Deckhand · 17 Jun → 1 Sep, Sarnia
18years
1955
SS Imperial Hamilton
Deckhand · 22 Jun → 18 Aug, Sarnia
19years
About that pencil line. Whoever filled in the 1952 row used a pencil instead of a pen, and after seventy years it has faded almost to nothing. For a while we thought it might just be ink showing through from the other side of the page — until we noticed it reads the right way round (bleed-through would be mirror-writing) and sits exactly where 1952 should. One faded pencil line nearly cost him a whole summer of his story. That's how fragile this stuff is.
The two wordsVERY GOOD. Every captain rated every sailor twice — once for how well they worked, once for how they behaved. Bob's book says VERY GOOD and VERY GOOD. Five summers. Five different captains. Never anything less.
The actual page. Five rows for five summers, signed by the officers themselves — men with names like Geo. R. Thornton, 1st Mate. Two of them couldn't be bothered writing "very good" twice, so they used a rubber stamp.
The mystery
The book gets his birthday wrong
Open the front of the book and there's a form describing its owner. This is the only physical description that exists of your great-grandfather as a teenager. Here is exactly what it says:
The front of the book. Department of Transport, Canada.
Full name
Robert James Davies
Year of birth
1935 ← wait. what?
Born in
Montreal, Que.
Height
5 feet 5 inches
Eyes
Blue
Hair
Blond
Tattoos
None (they actually checked)
So picture him: five-foot-five, blue eyes, blond hair. Probably shorter than some of you.
Now look at the year of birth. The book says 1935. But Bob Davies was born on April 2, 1936. Every family record says so. His own daughter's birthday posts say so. The math of his parents' ages says so.
The book is off by exactly one year. And here's what makes it interesting: one year is exactly what a fifteen-year-old would need to become a sixteen-year-old.
The family's theory — not proven yet
We think he lied about his age to get on the ship.
Think about it. A slip of the pen could produce any wrong year — 1929, 1940, whatever. This mistake just happens to be the single most useful wrong number possible: the one that makes him a year older.
Useful for what, though? That's the honest hole in our own theory. For a lie to make sense there has to be a rule he was too young for — and we haven't actually found that rule yet. Somebody looked it up online and got an answer, but the internet is not a document, and this book only runs on documents and people who were there. So the real rule is still out there, in a law book or a company file, waiting.
But — and this matters — we can't prove it. It could be a clerk's honest mistake. Nobody alive was in the room. And here's a live update: your grandmothers and great-aunts have now been asked. None of them had ever heard the story. Judy's exact words: “my jaw is on the ground.” So the case stays open. Maybe one of you finds the document that settles it.
One more thing, though. His father was the captain who got him the job. You cannot sneak your age past your own dad. So if that 1935 was on purpose, it wasn't slipped past Edward — either a clerk's pen slipped, or father and son walked up that gangway in on it together. The family's bet is on the second one.
His signature. Fifteen years old (or sixteen — see above), signing a government document. This is his actual handwriting.
Summer 1951 · age 15
First ship
Ten weeks after his fifteenth birthday, Bob walked onto the deck of the SS Imperial Simcoe — an oil tanker older than his own parents' marriage, built in 1930. His town, Sarnia, was an oil town: refineries along the river, tanks and towers and flares. This is what it looked like from the air right around the year he started:
Imperial Oil refinery, Sarnia, around 1950. Find the ship docked at the top right. That's the kind of tanker he worked on. Now find the little houses at the bottom edge — refinery workers lived right there.University of Windsor archives · public domain
Six weeks later the ship dropped him in Montreal — the city he'd been born in. He'd get dropped there again the next summer. Probably coincidence. Still a strange kind of homecoming for a kid who'd never chosen any of it.
September to June
The other life
Here's what the discharge book doesn't tell you: the ships were only ever the summers. The other nine months of every one of those years, Bob was a student at St. Patrick's High School — and not a quiet one.
His actual yearbook — The Shamrock, 1955. Look closely at the crest. The school motto is Esse quam videri: Latin for “to be, rather than to seem.” Keep that motto in your pocket. It is secretly the rule this whole book was written by.BOB DAVIES — Fighting Irish football. Leather-helmet era. Look at that chin strap.
Football in the fall. Basketball in the winter — the yearbook calls him “high scorer for the Fighting Irish.” Now flip back to the front of the discharge book: he was five foot five. A five-foot-five high scorer. Nobody hands you that. You earn it.
Year Book Staff — Business. Bob is in there, tenth name in the standing row, between Pat Beatty and Terry Cameron. These sixteen people are also the prime suspects for what happens on the next page.
So the true shape of his teens: five school years, five ship summers. September to June he was a Fighting Irish. When June came, his father's world took over.
Exhibit A
“The Brat”
And now the gem. This is Bob's page in the graduates' section of the 1955 Shamrock — and somebody has been at it with a pen.
The evidence speaks for itself. Beard, moustache, a “W” on the forehead, earrings — and beside it, in real ink: Bob Davies, “THE BRAT.”
The printed part is the yearbook staff being funny about him, 1955-style: “Business Staff of the Shamrock — high scorer for the Fighting Irish — basketball player — progressive tackler through the 11.55 hall traffic.” Translation of that last bit: at five to noon, when the lunch bell emptied every classroom at once, Bob went through the crowded hallway like a fullback.
The handwritten part looks like his own signature — nickname included. Which raises excellent questions. Did he sign his own photo? Did a friend draw the beard first and Bob autograph the result? Was “The Brat” what they called him, or what he called himself? Nobody knows.
Here is what we do know. Five ship captains looked at this exact same kid, five summers running, and stamped VERY GOOD, VERY GOOD. His classmates looked at him and wrote THE BRAT. Both were telling the truth. That's what a real person looks like — it depends who's holding the pen.
One last piece of evidence. When this page surfaced, Brian — who spent more time with him than any of the twelve grandkids — couldn't believe it:
“Never in a million years would I guess he was the Brat... sports star, yes... believable... the Brat... not a chance. I do remember the aftermath of his many summer parties though — my buddies and I turned up a couple of times, unannounced, on bikes, and the pool and yard were a mess of empties and obvious signs of a rager.”— Brian, eldest grandson
Read that twice. The grandson who knew him best never once saw the Brat — and then remembered the parties. The pool. The yard. The evidence, everywhere, on a Sunday morning.
The Brat never retired. He just learned to tidy up before the grandkids came over.
Update, from Aunt Judy, within the hour of reading that: “And the aftermath of our family parties too!” Case corroborated.
Summer 1953 · age 17
The wildest eleven weeks
His third summer, Bob switched jobs — down into the engine room as a "wiper," the lowest, hottest, greasiest job on the ship. But it's what happened around that summer that's hard to believe. All of this is real:
21 May 1953A tornado rips through Sarnia. Seven people are killed, more than a hundred injured, whole streets of downtown wrecked. It is still one of the worst tornadoes in Canadian history.
2 JuneQueen Elizabeth II is crowned. The whole country gets a holiday — parades, fireworks.
6 JuneSixteen days after the tornado, with the town still clearing rubble, Bob signs onto the Imperial Collingwood and sails.
27 JulyThe Korean War ends. He hears about it on board, somewhere on the Great Lakes.
14 AugustDischarged at Sarnia. Rating: very good, very good. Obviously.
What did he think about any of it — the tornado, the Queen, the war ending while he was scrubbing an engine room? Honestly: nobody knows. Nobody wrote it down, and we're not going to make it up. That's the rule this whole book follows. If we don't know, we say so.
The ships themselves
Four tankers, one weird fact each
All four of Bob's ships were Imperial Oil tankers, all about 250 feet long — the biggest size that could squeeze through the old canal locks. Here they are, with the one thing worth knowing about each:
Imperial Simcoe
Built 1930. His first ship, and already 21 years old when he stepped aboard — older than any player on the Tigers' roster that summer.
Imperial London
He sailed her twice — 1952 and 1954. This photo is her launch at Collingwood in 1948: they literally slid her sideways into the water in front of a crowd. Bob was twelve when this happened.
Imperial Collingwood
The engine-room summer. Built 1947. She kept getting sold and renamed and was still afloat in 1995 — she outlived him... almost outlived the century.
Imperial Hamilton
His last ship, and by far the oldest — built in 1916, during the First World War. She was 39. Keep reading. Her story isn't over.
Ship photos gathered by collectors who spent decades photographing Great Lakes freighters, especially Richard Duncan and the Lake Huron Lore collection.
Sarnia · 4 September 1961
What happened to his last ship
Bob walked off the Imperial Hamilton in August 1955, nineteen years old, and never worked a ship again. He got on with his life — married Donna in 1957, started a family.
Six years later, the Hamilton came back to Sarnia to load gasoline. She docked on a Sunday. At eight o'clock Monday morning, she exploded.
The Imperial Hamilton burning at the Imperial Oil dock, Sarnia, 1961.
The blast shattered hundreds of windows along the waterfront and blew out a 150-foot chunk of the dock. The back half of the ship burned all day, fed by four thousand barrels of gasoline. Thousands of people watched from both sides of the river.
Here's the part that sounds made up but isn't: nobody died. Five crew hurt, two of them barely. And investigators never figured out what caused it — the ship was too destroyed to tell.
Bob was twenty-five, living right there in Sarnia. Did he stand in that crowd and watch his old ship burn? Nobody ever asked him. If anyone in the family ever heard him mention it — that's exactly the kind of story we're trying to collect.
The Hamilton two years before the fire, crunching through spring ice under the Blue Water Bridge — yes, the same bridge your family walks under today.Photo: Richard Duncan, Lake Huron Lore collection
The whole time, though
Baseball
Remember Brenda's sentence? He wanted to play baseball. Here's the proof it wasn't a passing thing:
Bob as a boy, in uniform, glove up. Someone colourized this photo later — the original was black and white. Nobody's sure exactly what year it was taken. Look at that car.
And baseball stayed for life. Brian — the oldest of Bob's twelve grandkids, the one who put this book together — watched it himself, decades later: summer afternoons, Bob lounging with a radio at his side, always tuned to the Detroit Tigers. Detroit sits directly across the water from Sarnia; he crossed the river to see games in the stadium more than once, and took the family along.
A Tigers score book from 1950 — Briggs Stadium, ten cents. This is what they sold at the gate the season before his first voyage.Detroit Historical SocietyBob with his first two grandsons, Brian and Greg — matching Tigers caps, obviously his doing. See the scorched edges? This photo survived an actual house fire. It's a survivor, like the book.
And now the best fact in this entire book.
SARNIA TOWN & COUNTRY FASTBALL CHAMPIONS — 1969. Goodfellow Construction, Corunna. Read the front row of names. Fifth one along: R. Davies.
Fourteen years after he walked off that last ship, Bob Davies was on a championship ball team. The kid who spent five summers scrubbing a deck when he wanted to be on a diamond — he got the diamond. And he won on it.
Nobody's dad arranged that one. He just went and did it.
(We know it's him from the name printed on the mount. Which player he is in the photo, we haven't worked out yet — another small case for somebody.)
His other team was the Montreal Canadiens — because Montreal was where he was born, and because from 1956 to 1960 they won five Stanley Cups in a row, which no team has done since. He picked two teams from two cities he didn't even live in, and stuck with both for life. Make of that what you will.
One honest note: we know grown-up Bob was a Tigers fanatic — Brian saw it. Whether teenage Bob was already listening to Tigers games during his ship summers is what the family believes, but no document proves it. Spot the difference? That's how history works. Knowing and believing are neighbours, not twins.
Zoom out
His town, before and after him
Sarnia when it was young — these postcards are from around 1910. Sailing ships at the docks, a streetcar on Front Street. Bob wouldn't be born for another 25 years, but this is the town that was waiting for him:
The docks, c. 1910 — actual sailing ships
Front Street, c. 1910
And Sarnia in his last ship summer — this postcard was mailed in 1955. Those lights are the refineries, photographed at night from the American side:
Sarnia at night from Port Huron, 1955. Your family still takes photos from almost this exact spot. Next time you're at the Blue Water Bridge, you're standing in this picture.University of Windsor archives · public domain
One more constant
St. Benedict's, 1011 Oak Ave — drawn by Marian C. Bast
2545 Beech St, Halifax — where Bob grew up
St. Benedict's has been the family's parish through all of it — Bob and Donna's, your grandmothers' and great-aunts', still now. And the Halifax house is real and still standing: your relatives keep making trips to stand in front of it. The current owners must wonder about all the Ontarians taking pictures of their porch.
1955 · and after
What actually happened
Robert Davies, graduate. The Shamrock, 1955 — the clean copy of the photo, before his friends got to it.
In 1955 Bob finished at St. Patrick's. On June 22 of that same summer he boarded the Imperial Hamilton — the fifth line in the book, the last ship, the oldest one. On August 18 he stepped off, and the book stops forever.
What came next? His daughter Judy answered part of it, seventy years later, in one typed sentence:
“My dad always wanted to go to university and be a teacher.”— Judy, his daughter
He never got to university. He and Donna married in 1957 — he was twenty-one — and the daughters started arriving. A young dad with a young family needs a paycheque, not a lecture hall. So Bob went to work at Imperial Oil, the same company whose ships he'd crewed, and he stayed there his whole working life: a refinery man, and a staunch union man — the guy who stands up for the people working beside him.
The teaching dream didn't die, though. It moved one door over. Bob had two brothers, and both of them became teachers: Ted, the older one from the porch photo, and Reg, two years younger.
And while we were chasing that down, the family turned up something nobody expected. Bob wasn't one of three. He was one of four. There was a sister too — Diane, the youngest.
Here's the part to sit up for. Two of them are still alive. Ted is about ninety-five. Diane is about eighty-six.
Think about what that means. Ted was Bob's big brother. He was in that house every single year in this book. He watched his little brother pack up for those ships. Every mystery in these pages — the birthday, who raised their dad, why the family kept moving — Ted might just know. Not guess. Know.
Which means this book stops being only about reading old paper. Somebody in this family should go and sit with him.
So read those five VERY GOOD, VERY GOOD stamps one more time, knowing the whole story. They weren't rating a future teacher after all. They were rating something plainer, and maybe rarer: a guy who spent his life doing work he hadn't dreamed of — a tanker deck at fifteen, a refinery floor at forty — and did it very good, very good anyway, because people were counting on him.
And the classroom he wanted? Count the faces on the sweatshirt a few pages from here. He built a house where twelve kids always wanted to be. The attendance was perfect.
(It keeps going, by the way. Brian and Greg went to St. Patrick's too, a generation later — same school, same fields. Their photos will join the family album at the end of this book as soon as they surface.)
After the book stopped
The part your parents remember
He married Donna Strevel on October 5, 1957, and they raised four daughters — Brenda, Judy, Sandra, Cheryl. Your grandmothers and great-aunts.
Three generations in one frame, 20 May 1978 — Brenda and George's wedding. Left of the bride: Bob and Donna. To the right: Bob's parents, Captain Edward and Eileen, and Donna's parents, the Strevels. The captain who started this whole story is the older gentleman, sixth from the left.Count the faces: twelve. Andrew, Patrick, Matthew, Lee, Justine, Bobbi-Sue, Melissa, Brian, Greg, Michael, Laura, Eric. Your parents, aunts and uncles — each one stitched onto a sweatshirt. That's how much the grandkids mattered in that house.
The house was the gathering place — every holiday, everyone, always. The man in the rocking chair with a drink raised and a grin on his face, surrounded by that whole crowd: that was him. Joyful, loud in a good way, happiest with family around. A refinery man and a union man on weekdays, a Tigers radio in summer, and every single holiday, a full house.
And a garden. Strawberries and rhubarb grew at Nanny and Grandfather's place, and they didn't stay in the garden — Aunt Judy baked them into pies with Brian back when he was barely tall enough to reach the counter. He can still rank them: apple first, strawberry-rhubarb from that garden a close second. When he asked his aunts, decades later, how he could possibly remember something from being that small, he answered his own question: the love. And that's not just a nice thing to say — the warm, patient, repeated moments really are the ones that stick. Which is worth knowing, because the people reading this book are exactly the age where those moments are being made.
Kingston, May 2003 — everybody, all at once. Bob is on the far right: white hair, tan jacket. He wasn't well by then, but he came anyway. Find your parents in here. Find yourself, if you were born yet.
One last echo. In 2003, Brian graduated and went to sea as a naval officer — sailing out of Halifax, the city where Bob grew up, up the same St. Lawrence River Bob rode at fifteen. Brian didn't especially want to be at sea either. He did the job well anyway. It runs in the family: showing up, doing it right, wishing you were at a ball game.
This story isn't finished — that's the point. Two of these cases cracked open LIVE while this book was being written, just because somebody asked the right grandmother the right question. These are the ones still standing.
Case 0 · Go and ask Ted — this one comes first
Bob's big brother Ted is alive, at about ninety-five. His sister Diane is alive, at about eighty-six. Ted was there for every year in this book. He is the last person who can answer these questions from memory instead of guesswork — the birthday, their father, the moves, all of it. Every other case on this page can wait. This one can't. If you get the chance to sit with him, bring a notebook, or just record it on a phone. Ask him what his little brother was like.
Case 1 · 1935 or 1936
Did he fake his age to get aboard? Update: the aunts have been asked. None of them had ever heard the story — Judy's jaw is “on the ground.” So there's no family legend to lean on; only the book and the birthday, one year apart. Find a birth certificate, a baptism record, anything. Whoever cracks this gets permanent bragging rights.
Case 2 · Who raised Captain Edward?
Bob's father was orphaned in Halifax — his dad died in 1915, his mom in 1916. Who raised him? This one cracked open mid-book. Brenda heard the family story: “I think we went from sister to sister” — and Edward did have grown sisters in Halifax, so that fits. But she also heard he was “about 2ish” when his parents died, and the death records say he was nine and ten. Family memory squishes time; documents don't. Meanwhile, Uncle Brian has his own theory: that from his mid-teens onward, the sea raised him — a crew for a family, which would explain why he made ships his whole life and put his own son on one at fifteen. Both theories can be partly true. One document could settle it: the 1921 Census of Canada, which would show fifteen-year-old Edward and exactly whose household he was living in — or whose ship. Somebody go find it.
The only photograph we have of Captain Edward Davies. Sarnia, 1960 — being handed a top hat for bringing the first ship of the season into port. The orphan from Halifax ended up the man in the top hat.Sarnia Observer Negative Collection, 39221-01
Case 3 · The captain's own book
If Edward spent his whole life on ships, HIS discharge book existed too — same blue cover, same red number, his entire career one line at a time. If it survives in a drawer or an attic anywhere, it would blow this story wide open.
Case 4 · The burning ship
Bob's last ship, the Imperial Hamilton, blew up at the Sarnia dock in 1961 — six years after he walked off her. Thousands watched. He was twenty-five and lived right there. Did he ever mention it, even once? If anyone remembers a single sentence, write it down immediately.
Case 5 · Montreal → Halifax → Sarnia
Born in Montreal. Raised in Halifax. In Sarnia by high school. Nobody knows why the family kept moving. There's a story in there and it's currently lost.
Case 6 · The dog photo
Young Bob with his dog Trixie and two little girls. One is Brenda. We're only guessing the other is Cheryl. Someone's mother knows for sure.
Case 7 · Who drew the beard?
Somebody put a beard, a “W” and earrings on Bob's graduation photo, and he (probably) signed the result “The Brat.” Which classmate did it? The suspects are all named on the yearbook-staff page. Lowest stakes in this whole book. Highest entertainment value.
Case 8 · CLOSED — the third Davies boy
Solved, in one text message. The brother was Reg, two years younger than Bob, who died around 2015 — and the answer came with a bonus nobody expected: a sister, Diane. Four kids, not three. This is what happens when you ask. One question, one afternoon, one whole extra person restored to the family tree.
Case 9 · The missing faces
We have no photograph of Reg. None of Diane. None of the four Davies children together. Four kids grew up in that house and we can only see one of them. Go looking.
Case 10 · What was the rule?
For Bob to have lied about his age, there had to be an age you needed to be. Nobody has found the actual rule yet — the real law from 1951, or Imperial Oil's own hiring policy. Find that piece of paper and Case 1 basically solves itself.
How we know all this
Every fact in here comes from somewhere real: the discharge book itself (photographed page by page), his 1955 high-school yearbook The Shamrock, family photos, newspaper archives, ship registries, census records, and the memories of people who were there — especially Brian, who knew Bob longest of all the grandkids and built this for you. Nothing was invented. No quotes were made up. Where we don't know something, we told you we don't know. One more rule, learned while writing this: an answer from a search engine is not a document. If you can't point at the paper or the person it came from, it doesn't go in.
Why it exists
Because none of you got enough time with him, or any time at all. And because a person isn't really gone while people are still telling true stories about them — and still arguing about their birthday.
His school's motto was Esse quam videri — to be, rather than to seem. This book tries to live up to it.
