General Manager Appointment Expected at SSA Meeting Today

By JAMES KINSELLA
Gazette Senior Writer

Wayne Lamson, tapped five times to head the Steamship Authority on a
temporary basis, will be put forward today as the best choice for
general manager for the boat line.

At the monthly SSA meeting in Woods Hole this morning a search
committee plans to recommend that Mr. Lamson be appointed to the top
post, according to a source.

An advisory issued Wednesday by SSA general counsel Steven Sayers
hinted at the news. "We have been advised that the search
committee arrived at a recommendation at their meeting last week and are
expected to submit their report to the board members on Friday for their
consideration during the public session of the meeting," the
advisory said.

The board may act quickly on the recommendation. "We hope to
have a new general manager on Friday," Barnstable governor and
board chairman Robert O'Brien said yesterday.

Mr. Lamson has been running the SSA since early August, when former
chief executive officer Fred C. Raskin resigned. Over the past several
months, boat line governors have applauded Mr. Lamson's efforts to
improve daily operations. His initiatives have included shifting
reservation clerk hours to better meet call demand, and widening the
decks of the SSA freight ferries to accommodate more trucks per trip.

He also has reached out to the Islands, including Nantucket, whose
residents were feeling so neglected by boat line management that they
authorized an exploration of secession from the boat line. The secession
effort apparently has now gone into limbo, owing largely to Mr.
Lamson's low-key, hands-on management approach.

Despite his extensive Steamship Authority experience - and
despite running the boat line in several temporary stints - Mr.
Lamson had never put himself forward for the top job. In fact, he made
it clear for years that he didn't want to be the general manager.

But that changed this summer, when Mr. Lamson allowed that he had
seen and experienced enough at the SSA to run the boat line on a
permanent basis. His decision surprised and encouraged SSA members,
battered by months and years of tumult at the boat line.

Mr. Lamson has seen the boat line from the bottom up. While still in
college, he started working at the SSA during summers and holidays as a
ticket seller at the Woods Hole terminal.

He intended to pursue a career in public accounting. But after he
was graduated from Bentley College, John J. McCue, then general manager
of the boat line, offered to hire him as an auditor. Mr. Lamson took the
job.

A year later, he became chief auditor. The job title subsequently
was changed to treasurer.

One year later he was made chief auditor, a job he held for 10
years, when the title was changed to treasurer. He smiled at the memory
of what Phil Read, the boat line governor from Nantucket, said at the
time: "He said, ‘Give me liberty or give me Lamson.'
"

In 1985, Mr. Lamson suddenly found himself named interim general
manager after the boat line board fired the then-executive director,
Joseph J. McCormack.

"Mr. Lamson says he did not ask for the general
manager's job and he did not want it," the Vineyard Gazette
reported in December 1985.

After a stint by Ron Eastman, Mr. Lamson was again named interim
general manager, and again he made it clear that he did not want the top
spot. The next general manager, Barry Fuller, left in 1994. Again Mr.
Lamson was tapped to fill in.

Then came Armand Tiberio. When Mr. Tiberio departed in 2001, Mr.
Lamson took the interim job, stepping aside when the boat line's
first chief executive officer, Mr. Raskin, came on board in 2002.

But relations were strained from the outset between the boat line
board and Mr. Raskin, who decided to resign this past summer. The call
went out again for Mr. Lamson - but this time proved different.

"It's a chance to step forward, whereas in other times I
have been a gatekeeper," he told the Gazette in an interview this
summer. "This time I feel like there are a number of things we
could be working on.

"The Steamship Authority has been good to me, starting with
John McCue - he gave me a chance and a start," Mr. Lamson
told the Gazette. "Mine is a slow approach, a more gradual
approach. We go to meetings, I sit there and I hear the same problems,
people complaining about the same things. I think about Joe McCormack
and his team approach, and John McCue and his conservative approach.
I'd like to combine the two things, I think, to work on these
problems.

"I hate to be a Monday morning quarterback, but I do think
looking back on the last year that there were some things done that were
just insensitive to the Islands, and I think they could have been
avoided," he said. "So now we are going to see if we can all
work together again."