A Life Saver Made in Beacon
The extensive news coverage of the recent death of our 41st President often included a clipping from an 8mm home movie camera showing the rescue of Lt. (JG) George Herbert Walker Bush by the Navy submarine USS Finback on September 2, 1944. The grainy movie footage at first catches Bush floating in a one-man rubber raft near the bow of the submarine, then shows Lt. Bush being hauled aboard the submarine to safety. Bush had been afloat about four hours on the raft in the ocean after having parachuted from his burning Avenger aircraft hit by Japanese antiaircraft fire. His parachute and his raft had saved him. And there is a strong possibility that that rubber raft was made here in Beacon ...
The New York Rubber Corporation was one of Beacon's oldest factories, having been founded in Matteawan (Beacon) in 1851. The factory made rubber products of all sorts--from rubber balls to rubber belting. During World War II, New York Rubber manufactured life vests, rubber pontoons, and assorted sizes of life rafts for the armed services, especially one-man rafts, the kind George Bush climbed into that September day in 1944. To be sure, other rubber companies in America at the time were making rubber rafts, too: Goodyear had a large plant in Akron, Firestone in Memphis, and likewise the Dayton Rubber Company . But there is some evidence that the Beacon plant had preference over those others. In the early 1930s, New York Rubber was the first company to be awarded a government contract for rafts for the navy, the company having secured a patent for a rubber raft with individually sewn compartments inflated by a canister of carbon dioxide.
With its proven record for innovation and performance, New York Rubber was awarded the coveted Army-Navy "E" (for excellence) for outstanding production of war materials in 1943. And the one-man raft was one of the company's specialties. Company vice president Herschel G. Harris often demonstrated this product at area community functions and fraternal organizations during the war. Harris would take out a flat-packed raft with a CO2 canister attached, pull the ripcord, and throw the raft to the floor as it quickly inflated--the same basic steps a pilot would take before bailing out. Harris claimed that a raft thrown out of the cockpit in that way would be fully inflated by the time it hit the water. And hundreds of Army and Navy pilots were saved by this New York Rubber Corporation product.
So, was George Bush rescued in a New York Rubber raft? We may never know for sure, but the thought of a Beacon connection to the saving of a future president somehow stirs a sense of pride in our local history.
