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HOME > HISTORY INTRODUCTION > CHAPTER 1 > CHAPTER 2 > CHAPTER 3 > CHAPTER 4 > A NEW WAY > MARY BUTLER DAVIES
Chapter Three
Fathers and Sons: 1948-1973
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 In his recollections, Charles Hughes Sr. wrote of the 1930s: "We operated the business for many years, going through the Depression. The banks were closed by President Roosevelt, and there was no money to operate. We finally got ten percent of the amount we had in the bank." He and Claude persevered, however, and "soon after World War II was declared in 1939 we became very busy."
Vane Brothers began supplying Coast Guard vessels as they came into Baltimore harbor. "There was a lot of red tape and confusion as we had to have ration tickets for most every commodity." With the war came intrigue. Vane Brothers was ordered to supply "picketboats"—private yachts commandeered to spy upon suspicious vessels and otherwise act as coastal security. The picketboats would tie up at Pier 4 and hand over their store lists. Without asking too many questions, Vane Brothers provisioned them and then billed the Coast Guard. The accounts were always paid.
New workboats of the sea
The chandlery carried on in the peace following WWII, but the Hughes brothers found themselves in a changed and very different world. By the late 1940s, the shipping registers, the official listings of vessels in operation, listed most schooners as abandoned. Diesel fuel was supreme and sailing vessels for commercial transportation had become obsolete. While Vane Brothers had ceased to depend on the sailing trade long before, the ship chandler's business had changed dramatically. Customer vessels were now the tugs, the barges, the tankers, and the big bulk freighters.
In the best interests of the family
Charles F. Hughes Sr. and his wife, the former Pauline Taylor of Salisbury, Maryland, had two children, Nell Taylor Hughes and Charles F. Hughes Jr. As did many men of his generation, the senior Hughes had it firmly in his mind that his son would follow him in his business. And like many young men of his own generation, Charles Jr. had other ideas. One was to become a teacher. Another was a naval career. None included ship chandlering.
 A small thing, but a telling one
Perhaps it was while bunkering ships from the tanker Hughes Bros. that Charles Jr. had the notion of renaming the vessel. In a sense, it was a small thing, but a telling one. Though it was traditional for ships’ owners on the Chesapeake to name their vessels after themselves or their business associates—as Claude and Charles Sr. had done with the Hughes Bros.—Charles Jr. had an inkling of a different tradition. Whereas Captain Vane’s business had started out at the turn of the century as one of more than twenty-five ship chandlers in Baltimore, few of those competitors had lasted. By the time Charles Jr. came aboard fifty years later, the Vane Brothers name had come to represent a franchise. Renaming the tanker Vane Bros. was an early indication that Charles Jr. recognized the company’s history and reputation, and that he hoped to preserve it.
A dock of their own
It took Charles Jr. six years to convince his father to move from an increasingly congested Inner Harbor. For their new quarters they chose a building in Fell’s Point, at 916 South Broadway. It was the former Immigration Building, owned by the renowned old salt, Captain Norman Rukert. If the space was a little eccentric—a maze of showers and bathrooms and warrens for immigrations officers—it offered plenty of room. Best of all, it had a pier next to it. Because the building was vacant and an oddity as well, Captain Rukert was happy to let it cheaply, and to include the disused wharfage besides. For the first time Vane Brothers had its own dock, from which they could service vessels directly.
By the time that Vane Brothers considered moving again—thirty years later—the firm owned or occupied five different buildings strung out along the waterfront in Fell's Point, including the east side of the Recreation Pier and the International Longshoremen’s Association Meeting Hall on Thames Street. They had become a major business presence in the community. The move from Pratt Street to Fell's Point had been a wise one, after all. Charles Hughes Sr. confessed later, "I found that if we had moved ten years earlier we would have been better off." Ironically, Charles Sr. might have made up his mind sooner had he known something not realized until many years after his death. The Vane Brothers' location at 916 South Broadway sat next door to the building at 912 South Broadway where Captain William Burke Vane and his brother, Captain Allen P. Vane, established their first shop at the turn of the century.
 Diversification begins
With the outbreak of the Vietnam War, ship chandlers found their businesses revivified. Nevertheless, Charles Jr. had begun to diversify. He recognized that Vane Brothers would not survive solely as a chandlery. As he searched for new business avenues, he focused on the company’s tanker trade. The Vane Bros. enjoyed a steady business, fueling all manner of ships in the harbor. Descended from Charles Wright, the boat with a small tank aboard that Captain Vane had commissioned in 1919, the Vane Bros. eased the cyclical nature of the chandlery business while still staying firmly within the company’s traditional expertise.
In 1971 Vane Brothers commissioned a 42,000-gallon tanker at the Blount shipyard in Warren, Rhode Island. With this vessel, Vane Brothers would gamble on expanding the gas oil business—the fueling of ships of all sizes, from ocean liners to tugboats and dredges. The new Vane Brothers tanker was christened the motor tanker Duff for Charles Duff Hughes, the son of Charles Jr. and Betsy Hughes. Aged thirteen at the time, Duff shipped out as a galley boy on his namesake’s maiden voyage. A rough storm and heavy seas did nothing to diminish his enthusiasm. He arrived in Baltimore two and half days out of Warren undaunted.
Captain Russi
In 1974, for the first time in its history, Vane Brothers found itself without a captain on the roster. A disastrous longshoremen's strike six years earlier, however, had planted the seed of solution. In November 1967 the Pakistani ship Ohrmazd, a passenger-cargo liner, called at Sparrows Point on her maiden voyage.
The voyage had gone well, until Baltimore. Here, the Ormazd was becalmed by the strike. Fortunately, Captain Makujina was accompanied by his wife and their four-year-old twin sons. Not so happily, another younger child had remained in Pakistan with a grandmother. While the Ormazd waited out the longshoremen’s strike, the port community organized to make the stranded sailors more comfortable. It was in this pursuit that Charles Jr. and Betsy Hughes met the Makujinas. In all, the Makujina family and the Ohrmazd had to wait more than three months before they were able to load cargo.
After leaving Baltimore in March 1968, Captain Makujina continued sailing under Pakistani registry. Pakistan's nationalization of shipping, however, was imminent, and his employers suggested emigration as the only hope for his career. Captain Makujina turned for help to his new American friends, the Hugheses. In 1972 the Makujina family emigrated to the United States under the sponsorship of the Hughes family. Shortly thereafter, Vane Brothers hired Russi Makujina as port captain.
In a sense, Captain Russi, the Pakistani-born, England-educated, multilingual steamship captain, was the perfect fit for a company founded by an old schooner captain from the Eastern Shore. The entrepreneurial Captain Vane had made his mark by staying always a step ahead of his trade. Captain Russi, a master mariner with invaluable international experience, brought with him the vision of what commercial shipping could mean to Vane Brothers.
With Captain Russi aboard, Vane Brothers was now ready to take the next significant step in its conversion from ship chandlery to a multifaceted maritime service industry. In 1979 Captain Russi and Charles Hughes Jr. designed and built the motor tanker Anne, named for Charles Jr. and Betsy’s daughter, at a capacity of 10,000 gallons. With the addition of the M/T Anne, the Vane Brothers fleet now numbered three.
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