A family’s ‘lifeline’ to the wreck of the SS Badger State
On a Friday afternoon in early August, Maureen Reiche Foster called the Journal from her home in Chicago. She was hoping to talk with someone about the article “Nightmare at Sea,” by Geoff S. Fein, that ran in the Jan. 2, 2003, issue of the paper. It was about William “Willie” Burnett, a local survivor of the SS Badger State, a Merchant Marine ship hauling munitions that sank amid rough seas in 1969 en route to Vietnam, killing 26 of the crew of 40. The men had spent 11 days attempting to repair damage and stay afloat amid 20-foot waves, nine of those days with bombs rolling loose in their holds, eventually punching through the hull until one finally exploded, sinking the ship.
Why she wanted to get in touch, Reiche Foster said, was a long story. Journal Publisher Melissa Sanderson, who’d picked up the phone, settled in.
According to Fein’s story, Burnett, who died in Cutten in 2002, didn’t talk about his experience. But Steve D’Agati, a history buff who lived in Eureka, had discovered his connection to the harrowing wartime disaster while browsing the sale of his estate, coming across a stopwatch in an envelope that indicated it had been aboard the vessel, saved along with Burnett after the bomb exploded and the ship caught fire.
Reiche Foster’s first husband, Raymond Reiche, was aboard the SS Badger State with Burnett. However, the second assistant engineer was not among the 14 survivors, nor was his body ever recovered, despite an 8,000-square-mile search. Reiche Foster had been pregnant when he set sail. She was three months along on Dec. 26, 1969, when she saw the news ticker at the bottom of the television screen announcing that his ship was breaking up 500 miles from the Midway Islands. She recalled dropping a glass she’d been cleaning, the deep, sudden terror, the feverish hope and the Christmas tree incongruously lit up in the living room. She doesn’t recall who put all the decorations away by the next day.
Survivors headed for Japan aboard a Greek ship named the Khian Star, while Coast Guard and Air Force planes searched in vain for anyone left in the water, as did several ships. Foster Reiche remembers her father sending a telegram to President Lyndon B. Johnson begging him not to call off the search, but by Jan. 3, the danger of more and greater explosions forced other vessels to distance from the SS Badger State.
In those days, she said, she was wracked with unanswered questions along with her grief over the man who’d been her high school sweetheart since she was 15 and he was 16. “In 11 days, how many times did he think of us, and of this baby he hoped was a girl?” she asked. It was a question that never left her. In June of 1970, she gave birth to her daughter Katie.
Reiche Foster had read Fein’s story years earlier, and she came across it again recently while working with the Merchant Marine Academy to assemble materials for a tribute to Reiche in its yearbook. “But that stopwatch, it crossed my mind,” she said. She shared it with her brother Michael Downs, along with her wish that she could reach out and perhaps buy the stopwatch that had been on the ship and give it to her daughter — something tangible that was linked to his last days that she could hold in her hands. Though Reiche Foster wasn’t even sure the Journal still existed, Downs urged her to give it a shot.
“He’s a big Irish guy but he’s a mush,” she said of her brother. Reiche’s death had devastated him, too, she said. As a boy, Downs had idolized Reiche — a high school football star, a hero from their Chicago neighborhood who’d gone to the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy — even before they’d become brothers-in-law.
Sanderson was moved and started searching online and making calls until she tracked down D’Agati. A week later, she’d made contact. He still lived in the area and, after 23 years, he still had the stopwatch.
When Sanderson told D’Agati someone wanted to buy the stopwatch, he was reticent, thinking it was a collector without connection to the tragedy, he says. But once he learned about Katie and Maureen, he asked Sanderson to pass on a message: “It’s not for sale but I would love to give it to you.”
Over the phone, Reiche Foster’s voice shook. “You did not,” she gasped. “Oh my God. It’s like it’s meant to be.”
A month later, Downs was walking across the dew-wet lawn on the side of Steve and Linda D’Agati’s house. Downs wore a wool Irish cable-knit sweater, his hair a tufted white cloud. Beside him, Steve D’Agati wore crisp short sleeves and tipped his head with interest as Downs recounted his flight from Illinois. After all these years and miles and lucky coincidences, Downs said, the stopwatch was too precious to send by mail and required a road trip.
Inside, Linda D’Agati set out plates of cookies and brownies as her husband opened the pair of scrapbooks tracing the hearings that followed the sinking of the SS Badger State. Sanderson set up a video call with Reiche Foster from Chicago that led to a round of introductions and thanks.
Downs pressed his fingers to his eyes, dabbing tears even as he cheerily reminisced about what trouble they were as kids — all seven siblings — and about Reiche’s football triumphs, how he’d been part of their family even before marriage. But when talk of the Badger State began, he excused himself.
Steve D’Agati, now retired, had been working as a youth correctional counselor at Humboldt County Juvenile Hall when he wound his way through Burnett’s home and worldly possessions in 2002. The house, he recalled, “seemed stuck in time from 1955,” down to the tube television. The lot, including the scrapbooks, stopwatch and a stack of books related to Burnett’s work as a merchant marine, was $40. D’Agati passed the envelope with the stopwatch around the table. It was silver with looping, stylized numbers, its hands stopped at 23 minutes and 57 seconds, the glass face slipping loose. Blocky letters on the envelope read:
W. L. Burnett, 3rd Mate, S/S Badger State. Stop watch that was saved when S/S Badger State was abandon [sic] in mid Pacific Ocean Dec. 26-1969 Approx. 1000 +11 zone time following a bomb explosion & fire in #5 hatch. Ship abandon (sic) in storm. 26 men lost — 14 men saved by Greek MV Khian Star.
It was this note that piqued Steve D’Agati’s interest, leading him to buy the lot, pore over the clippings and search online to learn more about the ship that sank 1,600 miles from Hawaii on what was meant to be a nine-day journey.
According to William R. Benedetto’s book Sailing into the Abyss, chronicling the disaster, Burnett was a World War II veteran and career merchant marine who’d also sailed with wartime munitions during the Korean War. He aided with setting the ship’s course, using “a set of parallel rulers marking off the ship’s course on the navigation chart.”
The SS Badger State set sail from Washington’s Bangor Naval Ammunition Depot with a cargo hold full of munitions bound for the U.S. Air Force stationed in Da Nang, Vietnam on Dec. 14, 1969. The load included mines, ammunition and aerial bombs ranging from 500 pounds to 2,000-pound blockbusters sandwiched between wooden pallets. Over the following days in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the sea turned rough, with 15-foot-high waves tipping the ship up to 45 degrees, causing damage to the steering mechanisms, as well as the hull, which had to be patched. Changing course was too difficult in these conditions, and on Dec. 16, some of the bombs were shaken loose from their restraints.
Even as the crew attempted to secure the bombs, more broke away and waves, now as high as 40 feet, buffeted the ship. Capt. Charles Wilson requested to head for a safe port with an escort for the battered ship and set a course for Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.
But on Dec. 25, Christmas Day, another storm hit, rocking the Badger State even harder until bombs in all the holds were rolling free and the order to change course to the Midway Islands became impossible, even with an escort on the way. Then yet another storm knocked at the ship, sending it nearly sideways, some of the largest bombs breaking through the hull, which began taking on water. According to Benedetto, Wilson reported the ship rolling more than 50 degrees after being hit by a wall of water, knocking sailors out of their bunks, sending refrigerators to the floor and tearing away the portside lifeboat. All hands went to throw linens, mattresses and packing materials onto and around the bombs to slow their crashing and lessen the chance of sparks, which grew with every pitch and roll of the ship. When an explosion finally came, blowing a hole in the ship, the flash was visible to the Greek vessel the Khian Star still miles away en route to aid the Badger State. As devastating as the explosion was, given the explosives aboard, it could have been much bigger. Wilson gave the order to abandon the ship, which later sank without further explosion.
“Ten days in rollicking weather with the bombs loose and rolling around,” said Steve D’Agati, marveling at what the crew endured. Burnett, he explained, was the last man pulled from the water onto the Khian Star, yanked aboard by his hair and vest. One of Burnett’s albums has photos of the rescue ship and a Greek crewman, perhaps, Steve D’Agati wondered, the one who dragged Burnett to safety.
“I felt they should be cared for and preserved,” said he. He said he’d tried to donate them to the Humboldt Maritime Museum but didn’t get a response, and the Merchant Marine Academy in San Francisco’s donation protocol involved a complicated process and little enthusiasm. Passing it to Reiche Foster and her daughter made him glad it didn’t work out.
Reiche Foster had been a relative newlywed, having married in March, gone on a late honeymoon in October. She kept all Reiche’s letters, including the one he wrote her before shipping out, promising it was only temporary. “He called it ‘a big rust bucket,’” she said, adding he’d written that the stevedores were “throwing cargo onto the ship.” The packing and securing of the bombs were issues raised in the hearings that followed.
Her doctor advised her not to attend the hearings while pregnant, but, she said, “I’m a pretty headstrong Irishwoman.” She sat in back, she said, unable to look at the survivors. “I just saw Ray among them, and he wasn’t there.” She found little comfort in learning of brutal details, like the way the poorly designed life vests pushed men’s faces forward into the water, the birds that pecked at their heads as they waited in the water, or how some were crushed between the lifeboat and the rescue ship. “Everyone dies. But for these men, it took nine days for them. …. Knowing he was in the 100-degree engine room trying to keep the ship upright, imagining him there,” she trailed off.
She and Steve D’Agati talked a bit more about the Coast Guard investigation’s findings, which included flaws in the packing method, and the storms’ intensity and unpredictability. She gave a hard smile and thanked everyone again, saying how much it meant to pass the stopwatch to her daughter. “I look at Katie and I see him.”
Back in Chicago, Downs went over to see his niece and goddaughter for lunch, and Reiche Foster joined them. It wasn’t unusual, said Katie Filbin, but her uncle’s tone was serious. “He sat down on the couch and he said, ‘I have something for you,’ and he started crying,” she said. She’d read the Journal article about Burnett and the stopwatch from the Badger State, but it took a moment to piece it together. “There’s moments in life when you just feel, like, love, and the veil between heaven and earth is just lifted. And that’s what it was like.”
Filbin said she has her father’s letterman’s jacket and class ring, and a couple of his sweaters. But “anything tactile, the stopwatch, the clippings … knowing it had been handled by someone who was a survivor … anything that connects to a story or someone who knew him is a lifeline,” she said, especially since his remains were never recovered.
After her mother remarried, she said, they didn’t talk much about Reiche, perhaps out of deference to Fran, the stepfather who raised her, though Filbin doesn’t think it would bother him. At 55 with kids of her own, she said she has empathy for families doing the best they can in painful circumstances. “Now we have this item that will be out in my home and give us reason to talk about him and know that it’s OK.”
Filbin was still wonderstruck that Sanderson found Steve D’Agati, that he’d hung onto the watch and that he and his wife were so welcoming to her family, “Especially in this day and age, that he invited them into his home.” She wondered aloud at the fragile connections back to the father she never met.
“You can’t tell me that it’s not some kind of, I don’t know, little angel wink or something,” she said. “He’s still in our lives.”
Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the managing editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400 ext. 106 or jennifer@northcoastjournal.com. Follow her on Bluesky @JFumikoCahill.
This article appears in The Stopwatch.