Homecoming

There used to be a place on every base where you could sit down. Not the mess hall. Not the chow line. A place with tablecloths and conversation and a drink you didn't have to rush through before the next watch. Officers' clubs. Chiefs' clubs. They had different names and different rules, but they served the same purpose: they were where military people could be people. Where rank still mattered but relaxation was permitted. Where friendships formed over something other than a mission briefing.

Those places are mostly gone now. Consolidated, defunded, closed. The buildings sometimes remain — repurposed as conference centers or administrative offices — but the life inside them has vanished. An entire social architecture, altered, consolidated, and in many places lost.

We noticed.

The Thames Club has stood in New London since 1869. We predate the submarine force by three decades. We have watched the boats come and go from this river for more than a century. Our walls hold the photographs of members who served in every branch, every era. We have been, for a hundred and fifty-five years, the kind of place that bases used to have and no longer do.

But here is what makes it better than a base club ever was: you sit down next to people you would never meet inside the fence. Physicians. Attorneys. Architects. Educators. Clergy. Business owners. Theater people. The room holds thirty professions and no rank structure. The doctor has a first name here. So does the retired admiral and the plumber.

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There is another table worth knowing about.

It is roughly four feet long and bolted to the deck of a submarine. The tablecloth is white linen, dampened with seawater — a tradition carried forward from the age of sail, when the moisture kept plates from sliding as the ship rolled. Navy blue-and-white china. Silver flatware. Officers seated by seniority. A few feet away, the crew's mess: four tables, twenty seats, a rotation that runs through every watch because there isn't room for everyone at once.

The galley that serves both is the size of a family bathroom. A team of six cooks produces four meals a day, every day, for months, from scratch. Bread baked daily. Saturday night pizza and wings. Sunday prime rib. Everything made by hand in a space that would get a restaurant shut down. Ask any submariner what they remember about being underway and they'll get to the food within two minutes. It was the best part of the day, and the cooks knew it.

This is the submarine way. Excellence produced under conditions that don't permit excuses. The cooks understand what every submariner understands: when you are on patrol for ninety days, the things that seem small become the things that hold you together. The meal. The conversation around it. The moment when the work pauses and you sit across from someone who knows exactly where you are, because they're there too.

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This publication is called Above and Below because that is where this community lives — on the surface and beneath it, in New London and at sea, in the shipyard and in the deep. It is also where this club lives: above, in a city whose membership spans every profession in the region; and below, in the quieter knowledge that some of the most disciplined people in the country walk through here without ceremony and find themselves talking baseball with a playwright.

The clubs are gone from the bases. But here is one that stays.

The table is set.

If this is you, you already belong. We just haven't met yet.

His hands are the first thing you notice. Not damaged, exactly, but used. The kind of hands that make you conscious of your own.

He started at Electric Boat in 1993, the week after his twentieth birthday. His father had worked there. His uncle before that. Nobody sat him down and said this is what you're going to do. It was more like gravity. He grew up in Ledyard, twelve minutes from the yard, and the yard was where the work was.

"First day, I didn't understand anything." He's not being humble. He means it. "They put me on a crew doing fit-up work and I couldn't — the tolerances, the prints. Guys next to me had fifteen years in. They'd look at a weld and just know. Took me a year before I started to get it. Two years before I trusted my own work."

What he does is join metal. The simple version. The complicated version involves tolerances measured in thousandths of an inch, welds that must be perfect because they will be submerged under pressure for decades, and quality standards enforced by people whose job is to find the one thing you did wrong. He has worked on six classes of submarine. He cannot name most of them, or describe what he did in specificity, because the work is classified. Thirty-one years of his life, and he can't put it on a résumé.

"You get used to that. People ask what you do and you say 'I work at the boat yard.' That's it. What am I going to say? Can't tell them the interesting stuff."

He works in Building 260 — one of the massive structures along the Groton waterfront visible from the Gold Star Bridge, where submarine sections are assembled before being joined at the graving dock. Inside it is loud, organized, and surprisingly clean. The work moves slowly. The standards do not move at all.

Three of his four kids grew up within earshot of the yard's shift whistle. His oldest daughter is a nurse at L+M. His son thought about the yard but went into HVAC. "He's doing fine," he says, in a tone that closes the subject.

The crew that sails the boat will not know his name. He is fine with this. He shifts in his chair when he says it.

"Sometimes I watch one go down the river. And I know which sections I worked on. I know where my welds are. And I think — those guys are gonna go under in that thing, and they're gonna trust it completely. Part of why they can is 'cause I didn't cut a single corner. Not once. Thirty-one years." He pauses. "You don't get a letter for that. Nobody calls. But you know."

He has never been to the Thames Club. He has driven past it hundreds of times. He is not sure if it's the kind of place for someone like him.

It is. And inside, he'd find himself sitting next to a doctor and an attorney and a retired Navy captain — all on a first-name basis. That part usually surprises people.

The Thames is not a wide river. Standing on the New London side, you can see Groton clearly — the cranes at Electric Boat, the piers at the submarine base, the long shape of a boat tied up alongside. On a quiet morning, the sound carries: the industrial hum of the shipyard, the diesel of a harbor tug.

The submarine base was established in 1916. Electric Boat's lineage stretches to the commissioning of USS Holland in 1900. Since then, generations have crossed this river daily — to build, to train, to deploy. But the river community was never only submarines. New London was commerce, institutions, law, medicine, education. Groton was the yard. The people who built the boats on one side lived, worshipped, doctored, litigated, and taught on the other.

The Thames Club, sitting on the New London bank since 1869, has been a gathering point for this cross-river community longer than any other institution still standing. Merchants and whalers first. Then naval officers and shipbuilders. Then the physicians who treated the families, the attorneys who handled the estates, the clergy who served the congregations, the educators who taught the children. The membership rolls, across a hundred and fifty-five years, read like a census of every profession the river corridor has sustained.

What changes is the faces. New officers arriving for their first assignment. Young welders driving across the Gold Star Bridge before dawn. Families settling into Waterford, Ledyard, Montville, Groton. Doctors taking positions at Lawrence + Memorial. Teachers starting at the schools. They come from everywhere, and this river is the first thing they see that tells them they've arrived.

The club was founded in 1869. New London was then a whaling port in its final years, a city built on the waterfront trades — shipping, chandlery, rope-making, provisioning. The men who founded the club were merchants and professionals, people who made their living from the river and gathered because gathering is what people in working communities do.

They could not have known that within thirty years, a new kind of vessel would transform their city. They were doing what felt natural: creating a place of substance where serious people could sit together.

By 1900, the USS Holland had been commissioned. By 1916, the submarine base was established on the Groton side. By the 1920s, the membership had begun to change — not dramatically, but in the way most things happen here: gradually and quietly. The club's existing culture — its discretion, its steadiness, its habit of receiving people based on character — turned out to be what the growing military and industrial community needed.

The work ahead is archival. Future issues will document the early membership rolls, photographs from the pre-World War I era, and the first recorded submariners among the membership. We also expect to find physicians, attorneys, and tradesmen from the club's first decades — the full cross-section of a working river city.

The submarine community became part of the Thames Club's story. It did not replace the story that was already here.