New York City (1916 - 1917)

My grandfather Robert J Noble left the Panama Canal Zone sometime after January 1916 and returned to the New York City area to look for work. German submarine warfare had significantly reduced transatlantic commercial shipping, and demand for passenger liner service dried up after the sinking of the Lusitania on May 7, 1915.

Robert supposedly worked briefly at The New York World, a New York newspaper that closed in the 1940s. Among the recollections he related to his children, Robert told of covering a large munitions explosion in New Jersey in about 1916. That explosion was surely the Black Tom Explosion, which took place on the morning of Sunday 30 July 1916, at the National Storage Company on Black Tom Peninsula. The peninsula juts out into New York Bay across from the Statue of Liberty and is currently memorialized at Liberty State Park near Jersey City, New Jersey.

Robert is said to have become friends with Bernarr McFadden, of isometric exercise fame, while working at The New York World.


While local reporting was exciting, Robert wanted to be a foreign correspondent. When he approached his boss, Robert was told he needed overseas experience before he could become a foreign correspondent. His desire to be a foreign correspondent was transposed into something real by the person providing details of his life for Robert's obituary in 1951.


Robert left the newspaper business in frustration after less than a year. Part of his frustration might have had something to do with World War I and the struggle for the sea lanes. The United States had declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917, but Robert wasn't allowed to serve, either because of his age -- he would have been close to thirty years old -- or, more likely, because of his eye injury.


As he walked away from the office, Robert saw a billing for a shipping company offering foreign travel. He decided to ship out right away.