Dear Janet,

SS DANIEL G REID was a Liberty ship built by the Kaiser Permanente Shipyard No. in Richmond, California. (About 2,700 Liberty ships were built before, during and after World War II, the largest single class of ships ever built.) Her keel was laid January 13, 1944, she was launched February 1, and was she was completed and delivered for service on February 9, just 27 days after keel-laying. She survived World War II and was laid up ("mothballed") in Mobile, Alabama. She was scrapped in Panama City, Florida, in 1971. See http://shipbuildinghistory.com/history/shipyards/4emergencylarge/wwtwo/kperm2.htm and scroll to hull number 2743. Also see http://www.mariners-l.co.uk/LibShipsD.html and scroll to the name of the ship. The namesake of the ship was Daniel Gray Reid (1858-1925), an industrialist, financier and philanthropist who made his fortune in the manufacture of tin plate, later an officer of the US Steel Corporation.

If you are interested in obtaining a photograph of the ship, see this page for sources of photographs of World War II merchant ships: http://www.usmm.org/photosource.html. The list includes a Mr. Hultgren who is a particularly good source, since he specializes in photographs of Liberty ships. Mr. Hultgren is quite elderly but at last report was actively managing his collection.

I have been able to find one record of your father serving in DANIEL G REID, following a search of Ancestry.com. Ancestry.com is a subscription website, more commonly used for genealogical research. However the website also contains databases of the crews and passengers of ships that arrived in certain U.S. ports of entry following a foreign voyage. In this case, your father arrived in San Francisco on September 21, 1945, having sailed from the port of Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands. The ship originally left San Francisco in late May 1945. Ancestry.com incorrectly lists your father as "Robert" M. Fay, although he is correctly shown in the original document as Rodger M. Fay. He served as one of six able seamen aboard DANIEL G REID, and had three years of seagoing experience as of that time. His age was listed as 27 and he was described as 5'10" tall and 175 lbs. The master (captain) of the ship was Carl E. Carlsen. The entire crew numbered 42 men.

Best wishes.

Ron Carlson, Webmaster
Armed Guard / Merchant Marine website
www.armed-guard.com