Remembering the Andrea Doria on the 50th anniversary

Mario deGirolamo was 8 years old, an Italian immigrant asleep in his bunk on the Andrea Doria, when he was awakened in the night by his agitated father. "Let's go. Let's go!" his father screamed. "Something's happened." Then the sleepy little boy watched as the seawater rose in the corridor outside.

Moments earlier, Judy Smith, a 19-year-old college student heading to Europe aboard another passenger liner, the Stockholm, played bridge and sipped martinis. The ship staggered to a screeching halt, launching her into a somersault that left her sprawled amid broken glasses and liquor-soaked playing cards.

DeGirolamo, of North Bellmore, and Smith, of Stony Brook, were survivors of one of history's most famous maritime disasters - the collision between the Andrea Doria and the Stockholm on a foggy night 50 years ago Tuesday. The spectacular accident left 51 people dead, sent the beautiful Italian liner to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean 100 miles east of Montauk, and generated ongoing controversy about the cause of the encounter. DeGirolamo and Smith are among a dozen Long Islanders of the 200 survivors worldwide who are still living.

DeGirolamo and Smith plan to be at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point today for a reunion to mark the 50th anniversary of the event that millions followed on the young TV networks of the mid-1950s, as well as in countless newspapers and magazines. More than 240 people, including 60 survivors and their relatives and guests, are expected to attend the reunion.

"It's the 50th anniversary, and for a lot of people it's the last one they'll be able to attend," said Robert Meurn, a professor emeritus at the academy and expert on the accident who helped organize the event.

The 58-year-old deGirolamo, a security guard and Vietnam veteran, said his family had left their home near Naples because "our dream was to come to America."

The cabin he was sharing with his father and three brothers was near where the Stockholm hit. "We ran outside and the ship was already at a tilt, and we saw water coming into the hallway. I was a little scared and confused because it was late at night."

The boy watched as crew members fired signal flares into the sky. Eventually, he, his father and his brothers were taken to the Stockholm that night by one of the lifeboats.

As for the rest of his family, deGirolamo said, "My mother and sister were sharing a cabin with ladies in another part of the ship and we never saw them until a day and a half later in New York. They were taken on the Ile de France [another liner that responded and rescued hundreds from the Andrea Doria]. We didn't know that they were alive. All of our family's possessions were gone." Smith, now 69 and a travel agent, was a Bryn Mawr college student from Mamaroneck in 1956. She was on the Stockholm to visit a Swedish family that she stayed with while studying. A tray of martinis had just been delivered to her bridge game when everyone heard a "huge crash" and the ship slammed to a halt.

The ship must have struck a rock, she thought, as she and other passengers rushed to their cabins to get life preservers. "When I got back up on deck I ran into a Danish fellow who was part of our card game who said his cabin on the lower deck was flooded," she recalled. "So then we got a bit nervous."

Smith spent the night on deck, watching the Stockholm's crew row lifeboats back and forth with shaken survivors from the sinking Andrea Doria. Listening to them as they arrived, she learned of the havoc onboard the Doria as the foundering ship continued to list.

"The people were holding onto the railings until their strength gave out, and they let go and slid across the deck and crashed against the opposite railing and broke bones," she said. "There were also people who were very distraught because they were separated from their families."

Smith also watched as 14-year-old Linda Morgan, who had been in her cabin on the Andrea Doria and ended up inside the wreckage of the bow of the Stockholm, was airlifted by helicopter. She recalled "a pretty tense maneuver" because the helicopter had to hover between the tall booms of the Stockholm's freight-handling cranes.

That night, most people did not think the Andrea Doria would actually sink. The next morning, however, the ship's funnel had dipped almost to the surface of the water, and the liner's fate was clear. "Everyone watched when all of a sudden like a whale it just kind of rolled over on its side belly-up and went down. It was certainly an amazing thing to see. We then just slowly steamed back to New York Harbor."

The collision occurred July 25, 1956, as both ships were making routine crossings of the Atlantic. The 697-foot Andrea Doria had 1,706 passengers and crew aboard as it neared the end of a nine-day voyage from Genoa to New York.

The 525-foot Stockholm, its bow reinforced for icebreaking, had just left Manhattan for Sweden. At 10:45 p.m., the Doria's crew picked up the Stockholm on the radar.

The liners raced toward each other at a combined speed of 46 mph, but with no one concerned because their officers made conflicting assumptions about how the other ship would pass. With the Doria in a fog bank, the officers on each ship could not see the other vessel, yet neither ship slowed down significantly.

While the usual practice at sea is to pass port-to-port - or left side to left side - the Doria's captain decided to pass starboard to starboard because the other ship was already to his starboard side. But the Stockholm's officer in charge assumed a port-to-port passing. When just two miles apart, the two ships finally became visible to each other. The Stockholm began a sharp turn to starboard to give the other ship more room. But the Doria still believed the Stockholm would pass starboard to starboard. So the Stockholm was turning toward the Doria's path, and the Stockholm failed to signal the turn with its whistle as required.

At the last minute, both ships tried to turn to avoid an impact but at about 11:10 p.m. the Stockholm's bow ripped into the Doria's starboard side, killing five crewmen on the Stockholm and 46 passengers on the Doria. The collision exposed the lower seven of the Doria's 11 decks to the sea. It capsized and sank at 10:09 a.m. on July 26.

The Stockholm and five other ships carried 1,660 of the Doria's passengers and crew to safety. In the aftermath, Italian captain Piero Calamai received most of the blame. But Meurn says that while Calamai was traveling too fast for the limited visibility in the fog, as was the Stockholm, the accident was caused primarily by the failure of the Stockholm's third officer, Johan-Ernst Carstens-Johannsen, to properly read the radar.

The accident changed the way ships operate at sea, even today. Designated traffic lanes now separate ships traveling in and out of New York. There was no ship-to-ship radio communication in 1956. Now, that is required, as is certification for ship officers in use of radar. DeGirolamo and Smith have never met, but they have something else in common besides the close-up views they had for the great disaster. Neither spends much time thinking about July 25, 1956, even if they also acknowledge the loss many others experienced that foggy night. "It didn't seem at that point in my life to be such a big deal because I was just so young," Smith said. Said deGirolamo: "I was only 8. My mother was very shocked by it; she didn't want to go on the water for the rest of her life. I was never afraid of the water."