Lake Superior Journal: Paul Flynn, Hard Hat Diver

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Still fully dressed in his canvas diving suit, lacking only his battered brass helmet, he felt the little barge capsizing beneath his feet. The late November storm had come out of nowhere, Paul realized, and now he was headed for the bottom of Lake Superior loaded with weights and iron shoes, and no way to breathe. Icy water, entering the suit through the open metal collar piece, quickly soaked his long underwear.

Twenty feet below the overturned barge, he landed on the bottom, face down and in a kneeling position, astride the large concrete pipe he had been assembling a few minutes before.

His hands found the flange of the pipe joint, indicating the direction to shore. With a crablike crawl, he started for the beach almost 100 feet away. His lungs burned for just one gulp of air. His vision blurred with bright speckles of light as his consciousness deteriorated. The endless sleep beckoned.

Crawling on, he felt the surge of building waves above him, a trough granting him a moment above the surface. Gasping for breath, the next wave pummeled him under, but now the weight of his diving suit added stability.

Pressing on, he made it to the beach. Wind-driven snowflakes swirled around him as he raised his head to stare at the overturned barge.

He forced a smile. Andy, his faithful diving-tender, buoyed by the life vest he constantly wore, was also emerging from the surf. Staring in mutual disbelief, they grabbed for each other.

“We beat her one more time, Andy,” Paul whispered, “but this one sure was close.”

It was the 12th year of his work as a diver, and Paul J. Flynn glanced upward as he offered his prayer of thanks. They drove home in his old truck, the suit freezing solid along the way. Later, they would finish the job of installing the French River Fish Hatchery water intake, 12 miles north of Duluth.

Despite that scare, Paul pursued water work as a career that spanned more than 40 years.

Paul’s father, Captain Cornelius O. “Con” Flynn, had encouraged Paul to join the Navy, where he trained as a diver. After learning how to put on a deep-sea diving suit, he was sent down, still filled with enthusiasm. He had secured his diving harness, carefully checking the knot around his chest. What he had not done, he later realized, was check the air hose connection, and he soon found himself on the bottom without the ability to breathe – a lesson learned.

After being jerked to the surface, he was greeted with derisive laughter from his instructor and fellow students. Paul learned the first lesson well: Never go down until you are sure everything is RIGHT!

When the steamer America sank at Isle Royale on June 7, 1928, Paul was summoned, and his first task was the recovery of a luckless Irish setter from the after deck; the animal had been chained there for the voyage. A complete inspection of the entire hull followed, revealing the damage that had caused the sinking to be a semicircular tear in the hull under the engine. He advised his father that it was a simple repair, which led to Con’s bid and subsequent ownership of the sunken vessel. Title passed to Paul in the 1930s.

I first met Paul in 1965 at his home on Skyline Parkway in Duluth, just west of Lake Avenue. Trim and just under 6 feet tall, he met me with a firm handshake and offered a chair. His lovely wife, Irene, made me feel quite welcome, plying me with coffee and a still-warm cookie as I sat down.

The conversation quickly moved to his work and his ownership of the steamer America. Over several visits, many an interesting tale of Lake Superior emerged, in addition to the one described above.

While building the south breakwater at Silver Bay, Minnesota, in 1952, Paul found the wreckage of the wooden steamer Hesper. This 250-foot wooden steamer had foundered at what is now Silver Bay on May 3, 1905, and had been long forgotten. The rock of the breakwater now covers most of it, but at the time he found it, the wreckage was intact and undisturbed. A large, round brass nameplate, bearing the name Hesper, was removed from the wreck and is somewhere around the west end of Lake Superior, but hasn’t been seen for years.

In 1931, Paul had been retained by two local men to find the steamer Kamloops, which disappeared at Isle Royale in a 1927 storm. Rumor alleged it was loaded with whisky, a valuable cargo during prohibition. With the retainer, he went to Chicago to check the manifest with the insurance underwriters. The cargo was shown to be a paper-making machine, candy and toothpaste, but no whisky was listed.

Relaying the information to his employers, he was unable to daunt them; they said it was obviously a smuggled cargo.

“Oh yeah?” replied Paul. “You fellows better get another diver. The Kamloops was a Canadian ship, and they didn’t have any prohibition on alcohol.”

Paul passed away in 1966, but his stories live on in my tape library. Like so many who depended on our Lake Superior for their livelihood, he was a great and good man.

This Lake Superior Journal originally appeared in Lake Superior Magazine, May/June 1987. It was later republished in Lake Superior Journal: Jim Marshall’s Views from the Bridge. Jim Marshall had acquired rights to salvage the America at Isle Royale from Paul Flynn, a project scuttled one winter when something exploded – deliberately? – in a part of the submerged vessel, ending efforts to refloat it.