WWII marine takes Kingsborough on walk down memory lane

June 5, 2015 By Paula Katinas Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Paul Lieb, shown in a World War II era photo, trained at the Sheepshead Bay Merchant Marine Training Station, now the site of Kingsborough Community College. Photo courtesy Kingsborough Community College

Share this:

Paul Lieb visited Kingsborough Community College even before it was Kingsborough Community College.

Lieb, whose daughter Elise Laurenti is an English professor at Kingsborough, recently spoke to Dawn Walker, the community’s college’s director of communications, about his days as a merchant marine more than 70 years ago.

Lieb was one of first merchant marines to set foot on the grounds of the Sheepshead Bay Merchant Marine Training Station, located at the site where Kingsborough sits today.

The U.S. Coast Guard purchased 125 acres of waterfront property in Brooklyn shortly after Pearl Harbor in 1941 and used 75 of those acres to build the Sheepshead Bay Merchant Marine Training Station.

Kingsborough, which was established in the 1960s, has carried on the training station’s tradition with its Maritime Technology Program for students.

Lieb joined the U.S. Merchant Marines at the age of 17 and was one of more than 100,000 men who received their training at the station during World War II. He served in the Merchant Marines for three years.

“It was about keeping the country safe, keeping the war away from it and preserving the future of America,” he told Walker. “Everyone had a specific job, and we relied on each other to be safe and successful.”

Training consisted of early morning exercises in cold weather including the practice of lowering rowboats into the water. There were classroom exercises, as well as physical training, calisthenics, boxing and swimming, which the marines were required to be able to do underwater. The recruits also had to jump from a 15-foot tower into water that had been set afire, and learn how to splash their way through into clear water.

Lieb, who was raised in a kosher home, also had to adjust to eating food he had never had before, like sausages.

After completing training, the merchant marines selected the careers they wanted to pursue. Lieb became a radio operator and later studied to become a purser/pharmacist so that he would be able to find work on ships when he was unable to ship out as a radio operator.

Anthony DiLernia, director of Kingsborough’s Maritime Technology Program, said he appreciates the marines’ contributions to the war effort.

“Many of the wartime cadets went on, after the war, to lifetime careers at sea, as do a number of our current graduates,” DiLernia said. “Among the first things they are taught, much like the merchant marines were taught years ago, is that safety and survival at sea are critical elements of training. For training then, cadets jumped off a tower into the water that had been set afire. Today, students must jump off the high board into the pool wearing survival suits, and then swim to and climb into a life raft. The only difference from the old days is that we don’t set the pool on fire!”

The Maritime Technology Program trains men and women for marine-related careers both at sea and ashore.

Lieb, who lives in Albany, visited the campus with his daughter in 1980, when she joined Kingsborough’s faculty.

“When I came here to teach at KCC, I had no idea how remarkable a coincidence it was until my parents’ visit to the campus so they could see how lovely it was,” Laurenti said. “My father pointed out where the training vessels had docked, and where he had learned to become a seaman. He also gently touched his finger to the names on the bronze plaque of those men who perished and with whom he had trained.”

Michael Goldstein, director of Alumni Relations and Public Information for Kingsborough, told the Brooklyn Eagle in an email that the Sheepshead Bay Merchant Marine Training Station trained several men who would go on to become world famous famous actors, poets and comedians, including Carroll O’Conner Peter Falk, Jack Lord, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Ralph Ellison, James Garner, Sid Caesar and Lenny Bruce.