Dearborn residents Paul and Donna Atkins recently decided to add the Dossin Great Lakes Museum to their estate plan. They have a link to the maritime history of the Great Lakes through Donna’s father, Matthew J. Apt, and thought the Dossin would be the best way to pass on that heritage to others.
Matthew Apt sailed on Great Lakes freighters for the Pittsburgh Steamship Company, from 1930 to 1940, starting as a coal passer and working his way up to an engineering position. He left the company to accept a position in a factory but, when the United States went to war in 1941, he volunteered for the Merchant Marine. He sailed in Atlantic convoys through hostile German U-boat wolfpacks to bring supplies to American allies in the British Isles and Europe. He married his fiancé, Gertrude, while on leave at home in 1943. When the war in Europe ended, instead of more war in the Pacific, he chose to return home to his wife. The way Donna tells it, “Dad asked Mom about transferring to the Pacific Theater because he only needed 100 more hours to qualify for Chief Engineer, but Mom said, ‘No, you’ve done enough.’”
He took his discharge from service as a Lieutenant Commander and First Assistant Engineer. Once home, he returned to his tool and die job and worked there until he retired after 28 years in 1973.
Donna was born a few years after her father returned from the war and, from an early age, learned about life on the water. She remembers going with her father to watch the freighters and other boats go by on the Detroit River as well as the occasional trip to Port Huron to watch the freighters make the turn out of the St. Clair River into Lake Huron. Those images have never left her; she is connected to the Great Lakes and the waterways that feed them through her childhood memories.
When Matthew Apt passed away in 1993, Donna and her mother were talking through a suitable recipient for any memorial gifts and remembered how her father had liked a print of the S.S. William Clay Ford Donna had purchased during a DHS fundraiser as a Christmas gift for her father. They decided that any donations made by friends and family in his memory would be directed to Dossin.
The family did not know that the Detroit Historical Society combined their gift with other funds to support the recovery from the Detroit River of the anchor from the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald by the Great Lakes Maritime Institute. The anchor rests in the yard at Dossin. They were notified by the DHS that Matthew Apt’s name (with others who had made the recovery possible) was on the anchor’s identifying plaque in the Dossin yard should they ever wish to see it. Donna says that they were honored by the unexpected gesture and emotionally moved when they saw his name on the plaque. This established a fondness for the Dossin that has continued for almost 30 years.
Donna and Paul met in 1970, while both were students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and they were married in 1972. Donna received her BA in Anthropology, and MA in Library Science, and Paul received his BS in Aerospace Engineering.
In 1977, they began a 35-year odyssey, as Paul’s career path took them from Ford Motor Company in Dearborn to Denver for a seven-year stint at a small R&D firm, then to Vandenberg AFB near Lompoc, California for a year, where he worked at the launch site for the Air Force version of the Space Shuttle. From Vandenberg, he transferred to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. He spent 27 years working for Space Shuttle program contractors and eventually NASA, as an engineer in charge of several launch critical systems, including the Orbiter Access Arm, Tail Service Mast, and Gaseous Oxygen Vent System. Paul frequently provided launch support for his systems in the Launch Control Center and often supported post landing operations at the Shuttle Landing Facility when the Orbiters returned from a mission. Paul received many awards for his work to solve time critical problems with shuttle launch systems.
Donna began her career at Oakland University, and then became a research librarian at BASF Wyandotte. She worked for a multinational mining company in Colorado, the Western Space and Missile Center at Vandenberg AFB, and was Head of Reference at Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, where they lived. Paul alerted her to a job opening in the Technical Documents Department of the Kennedy Space Center’s Library, and she worked there for 24 years. She was responsible for a collection of over 100,000 documents including Apollo era infrastructure that was still used for the Space Shuttle program, and operational documentation for Space Shuttle and International Space Station missions. She provided research services and distributed launch-critical documentation to authorized users, including Paul. He was a great resource when she had particularly vexing questions concerning Shuttle launch systems.
In 2011, when the Space Shuttle program ended, they decided they had had enough of Florida’s heat, humidity, hurricanes, and bugs, and that Michigan was calling them home. Donna retired in 2011 and Paul retired in January 2012. In March 2012 they moved to the Henry Ford Village Retirement Community (now Allegria Village) in Dearborn, where they reside today.
When they decided to update their estate plan, they remembered what the DHS did almost 30 years ago and decided that a further gift to Dossin could help promote awareness of the maritime history of the Great Lakes and while further honoring Donna’s father. This generous planned gift creates a maritime legacy for Matthew Apt and a friendship that extends beyond the financial for the Detroit Historical Society and Paul and Donna Atkins.