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‘Borrowed’ tool returns to Taney ship after 61 years
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James Kitchen made a plaque for the tool he “borrowed” from the Taney. He returned the tool — 61 years after borrowing it.
BALTIMORE (Map, News) - It’s not unusual for someone to “borrow” a tool from work. It is unusual, however, to return the tool 61 years later.
But that’s just what James Kitchen did last week when he traveled 4,000 miles to return a 22-inch smoothing plane to its rightful place aboard the former Coast Guard Cutter Taney, moored in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. The ship is now operated as a tourist attraction by the Baltimore Maritime Museum at Pier 5.
The Taney is the last surviving warship from the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese-led attack on Pearl Harbor, and one of two remaining Secretary Class ships.
Kitchen’s effort to return the smoothing plane took museum curator Paul Cora by surprise, to say the least.
“It was one of the most unusual, out-of-the-blue calls I’ve ever received,” Cora said. “It’s a piece of original ship’s equipment. ... We have so few pieces of moveable equipment that are original to the ship.”
Kitchen, 84, left the Coast Guard in 1946, taking the smoothing plane with him. Cora said Kitchen offered to return the plane on the condition that he wouldn’t be turned in to the government for stealing Coast Guard property.
Kitchen used the piece of equipment in his role as a carpenter’s mate third class, a rank that no longer exists in the Coast Guard. Damage controllers have picked up where the carpenters left off.
He was aboard the ship when it became the first to sail into Japanese water after Japan’s surrender ended World War II. It was there that Kitchen remembered using the smoothing plane to make a working mast.
“The skipper wanted a mast made for one of the lifeboats,” he said. “We started with an adz to shape it, and after we got it shaped, we used [the smoothing plane] to smooth it out.”
Kitchen drove from Fresno, Calif., with his wife of one year, Edith, on his cross-country venture that began May 21.
“I wanted to see what [the Taney] looked like,” Edith Kitchen said.
It’s very different from the Taney that James Kitchen served on — “other than seeing the Taney and the 37 [on the side of the ship] — that hasn’t changed,” he said.
The Taney was decommissioned in 1986 in Norfolk, Va., in a ceremony that Kitchen attended.
“When they played taps and took the flag down, tears began to roll,” he said.
al.robinson@baltimoreexaminer.com
