Tag Archives: CG36500
CG36500 – Renovated rescue boat ready for the spotlight
Following an $18,000 renovation this fall at Chatham’s Pease Boatworks, the 36-foot wooden Coast Guard motor lifeboat is ready for the red carpet. The CG36500 is on the National Register of Historic Places, so stunt doubles were used in the new movie, “The Finest Hours,” which has its premiere tomorrow at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles. While Andy Fitzgerald, the sole surviving crewman of what is hailed as the greatest small boat rescue in Coast Guard history, and his wife, Gloria, are headed to that premiere, the real rescue boat that safely transported four Coast Guardsmen and 32 crewmen from a stricken tanker back from a hellish nor’easter will be on display at the Chatham Bars Inn Thursday night for a pre-release party. Read the article here 12:06
Heroic Coast Guard rescue off Cape Cod now major motion picture
Andy Fitzgerald had a purpose in hanging around the Coast Guard station in plain sight. “I was the lowest class engine man there, and I didn’t get to go out too much,” he recalled. “I’d never really been out in a rescue of any size where you’re really rescuing people’s lives when they were really in danger.” “I was really trying to figure out how to go on that rescue,” he added. Fitzgerald got what he wished for, and more, when he volunteered to be the boat engineer to rescue men off a stricken tanker on Feb. 18, 1952. He and the three other Coast Guardsmen on the CG36500 were awarded the Gold Lifesaving Medal, the Coast Guard’s highest honor for plucking 32 men off the SS Pendleton. Read the article here 10:49
