The 17-year-old was walking along the Brooklyn waterfront near his Greenpoint home with no interest in a maritime career. But then “a tug came in and they were ‘grubbing up,’ which meant they were coming in to get food for a trip,” related his daughter, Margaret Therese McKay Egan, who goes by Therese. “He was kind of walking past the tug and looking to see what it looked like, and the captain called out to him, ‘Want a job?’
“And of course my father grabbed at the opportunity and said yes, he would. And the captain said, ‘Hop aboard.’ He said they would be leaving for Port Arthur, Texas, in a half-hour. And they did, and that was the beginning of his career. He didn’t even have time to tell his family. He was just so happy to get a job (that) he went along. I guess he called his family when he got to Port Arthur.”
That trip marked more than the beginning of a long career in the towing industry for McKay. It began a family legacy of working on tugboats that has extended for two more generations as well as expanding to other relatives.
Recently, Therese and her husband, second-generation tug captain John Egan, were joined at the Whisper Woods assisted-living facility in Smithtown, N.Y., by their son John Jr. and his wife Linda to tell the family’s tugboat story. Therese and John Sr. are residents at the facility.
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