Daddy at the organ—Lori Arsenault’s father Tilmon (or “Tilly” to his shipmates) would pass on to his daughter a lifelong love of music. (Photo courtesy of Lori Arsenault).

PORTSMOUTH – Michael DiNola Jr. remembers being summoned to the living room, and even at 9 years old, knowing something was wrong. The living room, after all, was a place reserved for special occasions, and DiNola had been following the news and knew the admiral had already been to the house to meet with his mom.

It was April 1963, and just days before, DiNola Jr. had been with his dad – Michael Sr., “Dinty” to his shipmates – in the garage of their Rye home, carving, sanding, and painting by hand the Indian Head neckerchief slide he’d wear for his Cub Scouts Blue & Gold banquet. A short time later, Michael DiNola Sr. boarded the U.S.S. Thresher in Portsmouth, the pride of the nuclear Navy, as its Lieutenant Commander for sea trials off of Cape Cod.

It was a voyage from which he and his shipmates would never re-emerge.

“I can remember we were driving home from the banquet and mom had shut off the radio,” DiNola Jr. says. “As soon as we pulled into the drive, two neighbors pulled in to let us know the ship had gone missing… All of us had, of course, been paying attention to the story as it was developing, so when my mom pulled us into the living room, we sort of knew what was next. I just remember telling my mother at that point, ‘I’ll take care of you.’ I got a job that summer washing dishes for $1 an hour, and have worked ever since.”

This marker and plaque outside the Albacore Museum in Ports- mouth is one of several memorials nationwide to the men of the U.S.S. Thresher. (Photo: David Lazar).

For the DiNola family, and an entire region whose livelihood centered on the fishing and shipbuilding industries, the loss of the Thresher to the depths of the Atlantic was a tragedy beyond description. In all, 129 men – officers, enlistees, civilians, dads, husbands, brothers, friends – would perish when a suspected leak in a salt water joint shorted out the submarine’s electrical systems and prevented the submarine from resurfacing.

It was the kind of tragedy that wasn’t supposed to happen. Built at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, the nation’s longest-operating (and arguably its finest) shipyard, the Thresher was the lead ship in a new class of Cold War-era fast attack nuclear submarines, introducing a level of technology, speed, stealth, and comfort never before seen – “the Cadillac of its time,” as one former crewmember described it, “a stainless steel palace, so unbelievably modern compared to the ships other countries had at that point in history.”

“I think if you were to draw a comparison today, you might look at the Challenger,” DiNola Jr. says. “The Thresher was one-of-a-kind, ahead of its time. The dedication of the people in the shipyard was amazing. The engineering that went into it was glorious, pushing the limits of known science and technology. Onboard you had the best and brightest the U.S. had to offer. Every man aboard was the best of the best, all of them dedicated to ensuring the ship was sound.”

The Thresher, seen here during her fitting at Ports- mouth Naval Shipyard, would be the world’s most advanced underwater vessel. (Image courtesy of Kevin Galeaz).

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Thresher’s official launch and this past April 10, the 47th anniversary of its sinking. It is an event marked each year by a solemn ceremony near Portsmouth Harbor, one of prayer and reminiscences by family, former crewmen, the former shipyard workers who built, outfitted, and maintained the ship; one punctuated by a family’s tossing of a wreath into the Piscataqua and the scattering of 129 rose petals to signify the lost.

For Hooksett’s Kevin Galeaz, a former sub vet himself who has helped organize the memorials since 1999 as a member of the Thresher Base, United States Submarine Veterans Inc. (http://www.thresherbase.org), they are as much a service for the living as they are a tribute to the fallen. “What these families and that community went through was unbelievably traumatic,” Galeaz says. “And so our mission is to maintain the memory of the Thresher and its crew through the families of those who died and to ensure that future generations always remember.”

Prior to her sinking, The Thresher would set new standards in the Cold War era for technology, comfort and stealth. (Photo courtesy of Kevin Galeaz).

To understand that memory is to understand a culture that for more than two centuries produced some of the U.S. Navy’s finest vessels, shipbuilders, and sailors. Since colonial settlement, NH and Maine forests provided lumber for wooden boat construction – first for British ships, and eventually during the Revolution for the Raleigh, built in 1776 as the first vessel to fly an American flag into battle. Established in 1800, the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard would prove an essential cog to powering the U.S. Navy, producing hundreds of ships critical to the nation’s war efforts through the 19th and 20th centuries. The first American submarine – the L-8 – was built in Portsmouth during World War I, with the yard employing more than 25,000 at its peak during World War II and turning out an additional 70 submarines, including a record 4 launched in one day. They were vessels with names like the Finback, which rescued a young pilot named George H.W. Bush in the Pacific; like the Archerfish, which sank the Japanese aircraft carrier Shinano, the largest warship ever sunk by a submarine; and like the Swordfish, the first nuclear-powered sub built at the base in 1957.

The Thresher was to be one of those ships. Launched in July 1960, it heralded a new era in shipbuilding, replacing dated technology and cramped quarters with a level of sophistication, efficiency and spaciousness previously unseen. DiNola Jr. can remember his dad taking him and his younger brother for lunch aboard the ship while docked in Portsmouth and marveling at the gadgetry, while others remembered taking spouses on evening cruises in the waters near the harbor. “There was never trepidation on my dad’s part,” DiNola Jr. says. “I can remember him saying to all of us that the safest place you can be on this earth is in a submarine.”

Thresher patch. (Image courtesy of Kevin Galeaz).

Indeed for nearly three years, the Thresher lived up to that billing, recording few problems during routine sea trials or shock trials, the latter of which required the equivalent of 20,000 lbs. TNT to be detonated underwater within 180 yards of her 278.5-foot hull. And so it was on April 9, 1963 that DiNola Sr., a career seaman, along with 11 more officers, 91 enlisted men, and six military and civilian technicians set sail for the waters off the Cape Cod coast for a post-overhaul trial, the submarine rescue ship Skylark in tow.

Micheal DiNola, Jr., seen here with a scale model of the Thresher, is work- ing with Washington officials to erect a national memorial in Arlington Cemetery to his father and others lost by the nuclear Navy. (Photo: David Lazar; inset: Official photograph of the U.S. Navy).

The Thresher was about 220 miles east of the Cape at 7:47 am, when she began her descent to test depth, the depth to which a sub can dive and maintain the integrity of its hull (the Navy keeps that actual depth classified, though it is generally believed to be around 1,000 feet). At 7:52, Thresher leveled off at 400 feet and reported back to the Skylark after the crew inspected for leaks and found none. Around an hour or so later, Thresher had reached 1,000 feet and was inching along slowly, descending in slow circles, her transmission quality notably declining.

What exactly happened next remains a matter of educated conjecture. At 9:09, it’s believed that the Thresher probably suffered the failure of a joint in her salt water piping system, springing a leak and shorting out one of her electrical panels. This would have in turn caused a shutdown of the nuclear reactor, with a subsequent loss of propulsion. Under the command of Lt. Commander John Wesley Harvey, it is believed that the ship attempted to blow its ballast tanks in an effort to resurface. Harvey’s transmissions with the Skylark, while garbled, remained remarkably calm. Those ballast tanks, however, were prevented from blowing because the ship’s high-pressure air flasks were plugged with frozen moisture. As the ship’s engine room flooded with water, it likely began a further descent, tail-first. By 9:17, Harvey – barely audible – reported that the Thresher had exceeded test depth. A minute later, at a believed depth of 1,300 to 2,000 feet, the Thresher is believed to have imploded, her remains settling gently some 8,400 feet beneath the surface of the Atlantic.

The effect on the surface was devastating. “The impact on the area was huge,” DiNola Jr. recalls. “So many people worked at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. It was the largest employer in the area, and pretty much everyone knew someone on that boat or who’d worked on it.” DiNola Jr., now 56, can remember the line of neighbors along Cable Road in Rye who passed boxes from one to another to help his family move into a new home across the street from where they once were.

This plaque, now owned by Micheal DiNola, Jr., came from a nearby Kittery, ME, steakhouse which routinely marked the launch of new ships from Portsmouth. (Photo: David Lazar).

Lori Arsenault, whose father Tilmon – or Tilly to his shipmates – was the Thresher’s chief engineman and had taught her how to play the organ and to love music, was 8 at the time of the tragedy. “I don’t know if my (older) brother realized what was happening, but I didn’t. The phone kept ringing… and someone from the Navy was trying to reach my mother, but she was at a PTA meeting with my sister,” Arsenault says. “As soon as she got home, my brother went out to meet her. When I went into the kitchen, my older brother and sister were huddled together with my mother and they were all crying. That is when I knew, and I started crying, too.”

For John C. Riemenschneider, the tragedy hit in a different way. Riemenschneider had been a first class storekeeper aboard the Thresher for its first 34 months at sea before transferring out to another sub, the U.S.S. Jack, just 18 days before the final voyage. Riemenschneider remembers taking a light-hearted $2 bet from his best friend and fellow crewmember Jack Hudson that he wouldn’t be called up for the sea trial. Hudson, of course, never made it back to pay him. “At first, you didn’t believe it happened,” he remembers. “You believed they were on some sort of secret mission… But then the reality sets in. It’s a hard thing to comprehend. To lose that many friends at once, it’s unbelievable. A lot of us lived in Navy housing, and all of a sudden, so many of them are gone. My daughter was six years old at the time, and most of her friends were the children of those seamen. All of a sudden, all of their dads are gone. Personally, I would have to say it was the most traumatic thing that ever happened to me, outside the loss of my wife.”

Riemenschneider, now 74 and living in Lebanon, ME, would serve on two more submarines before retiring from the Navy and then work on an additional 18 Trident subs as an engineer with Westinghouse. Like DiNola Jr. and Arsenault, Riemenschneider faithfully attends the memorials each year with his daughter to pay his respect and honor his friends. “That was the only trip that the Thresher made to sea without me,” he says. “I was on that boat for 34 months. You just don’t know… I’m not a particularly religious person, but I pretty much believe that I’m on a train ride, and when God punches my ticket, that’s my time to go… I just try to do the right thing everyday so that when it is my time, I can make sure I’m going to the right place.”

Just as there is no shortage of heartbreak to be found in the story of the Thresher, so, too, there is salvation. For, in the wake of the tragedy came an aggressive set of safety regulations – known as SUBSAFE – that is single-handedly credited with preventing a similar loss in the decades since. Whereas from 1915 to1963, it’s believed that the U.S. Navy lost one sub every 3-5 years due to non-combat causes (some have suggested the Thresher’s fatal flaw had to do with the design specs of the time, which called for brazing joints instead of welding them), the SUBSAFE program, administered by the Navy, has provided maximum reasonable assurance that subs’ hulls will stay watertight, and that they can recover from unanticipated flooding

Thousands lined the streets of Portsmouth in April, 1963 to pay respect to those lost aboard the Thresher. (Photo courtesy of Kevin Galeaz.

“If you want to know why I’m involved, it’s because of the fact that every time we go down, we come back up,” says Galeaz, who served on a ballistic sub from 1975-1982. “It is a miracle and an achievement we directly owe to SUBSAFE and to the men who gave their lives aboard the Thresher. We lost a lot of good guys when that submarine went down. I think all of us are driven by the conviction that we don’t ever want to see it happen again.”

The losses incurred by the Thresher are scattered across the country, as are memorials – from a marble stone at a post office in Eureka, Missouri, to a monument outside the Naval Weapons Station in Seal Beach, CA, to a song by the Kingston Trio, “The Ballad of the Thresher,” and, here in Portsmouth, where a stone memorial and plaque outside the Albacore Museum honors all who were lost. DiNola Jr., meanwhile, is working with officials in Washington to try and erect a memorial to the Thresher and the entire nuclear Navy in Arlington National Cemetery.

“We have to understand the people in the military and their dedication to protecting our rights and our nation, and the sacrifices that go with that,” DiNola says. “We have to understand the dedication of the men working in that shipyard and on that boat to be the best at what they do. The loss of the Thresher was horrific. But what we came away with were ways to make us safer as a nation in the nuclear age.”

The Thresher would carry aboard her 129 officers, enlistees and military and civilian technicians at the time of her sinking near Cape Cod in April 1963. (Image courtesy of Kevin Galeaz).

And, says Arsenault, who maintains her own online memorial to the crew of the Thresher (www.ussthresher.com), a greater understanding of the costs of war. “I would like people to walk away knowing and feeling tremendous loss, not just for me and my family, and other Thresher families, but for… the influence these kind of men could have had on the world around them,” she says. “These are men who knew how to live in an itty bitty space and get along. Even under tremendous pressure, they knew how to manage themselves with calm…. These men were not daredevils, but skilled and caring of each other, their families and their communities.

“There is something in this for every person who has even a tiny seed of love in them,” she continues. “For Thresher families, ours is not a trauma of abuse, hatred, or neglect, but a trauma of love. The good news for everyone to know is that love is forever. On that alone we can rely.”

And thanks to the passion of their families and their supporters, it is a story and a sacrifice none of us will soon forget.

Special thanks to Kevin Galeaz, Michael DiNola Jr., Lori Arsenault, John C. Riemenschneider, and Mary Morin for their assistance and generosity with this story.