When Mercury Astronaut Gordon Cooper retired from the U.S. Air Force Space Program in1970, he left behind a legacy of flight success and intrigue. The flight aspect of his career is chronicled in the long list of awards he received during his military service in the U.S. Marines, U.S. Air Force and finally as an astronaut.

During the “Gusher Age,” 1900 to 1940, there appeared to be as many oil rigs in Texas as desert cactus. But what became a trillion dollar industry, with rigs around the world, the search for “black gold” created a frightening scenario when a construction worker yelled, “Fire in the well!” When an oil company’s own “roughnecks” couldn’t extinguish the blaze, word went out fast: “Call Red!” they cried.

The press called the USS Bear a “storied” ship when its discovery was announced by the United States Coast Guard (USCG) at a waterfront news conference in Boston, October, 2021. The historic U.S. Revenue Cutter foundered in 1963, 260 miles east of Boston, while being towed from Nova Scotia, Canada, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The present day discovery of a 207-year-old whaling vessel appears to have renewed interest in an industry that thrived in the 18th and 19th centuries. Kerosene was yet to be invented and oil extracted from “monsters of the deep” was in demand worldwide. About 15 years before author Herman Melville introduced the world to his captivating book, Moby Dick, the Industry was a Massachusetts whaling ship that sank near the mouth of the Mississippi River.

There are lots of idioms floating around, some trite and others true, such as: “haste makes waste; fit as a fiddle, no pain no gain,” etc. The expression, “Bad things come in threes,” appeared years ago in the case of the SS Morro Castle, a ship whose story is one of the strangest in maritime history.