They talk in lingo foreign to landlubbers, short stories peppered with the language of aged sailors and punctuated with pointed fingers, sweeping arms and piercing eyes.

Gathered around a table at the Ashtabula Marine Museum, the former Great Lakes sailors swap stories in a setting conducive to reminiscing – a freighter’s pilothouse and panorama of coal shipping just beyond the windows, hundreds of photographs and models in the gallery behind the table.

This monthly gathering of former “steamboaters” is a new program of the Ashtabula Marine Museum. The June gathering had nine participants who spent more than three hours sharing anecdotes and asking questions, some of which will never be answered.

Their experiences were on freighters that have since been reduced to scrap. Jack Perskari worked the engine room of Interlake for four seasons – 1956-58 and 1962. Ted Quirke, also an engine room worker, sailed with Wilson Marine from 1964 to 1969.

Donald D. Maginnis worked the engine room from 1954 to 1964 for Wilson, Columbia Steamship and Pittsburgh Steel. Bill Wiser was a watchman for Wilson from 1951 to 1960; his brother, Ray, was on the Reiss Line as a coal passer, fireman and oiler during the 1950s. George Legeza worked for Wilson just one season, 1953, as a coal passer, fireman and oiler.

Robert Brady worked for Interlake from 1956 to 1959 as an oiler, and Robert Rendrick from 1945 to 1950 on both the Great Lakes and Atlantic.

“All my relatives were sailors,” Rendrick says. “My Dad was a captain and his brother. My dad told me ‘Once you get married, you don’t want to be a sailor. You’ll never see your family.”

Rendrick started sailing when he was 16.

“It was a dishwasher’s job on a brand new boat,” he says. “We got out on the lake and I got seasick.”

The trip from Conneaut to Duluth, Minn., was miserable for the youth, and Rendrick tried to convince the captain to let him off there so he could make his way back to Ashtabula County via land. The captain insisted he stay aboard, however, and they headed to Gary, Ind., where Rendrick once again tried to exit. “The captain said he couldn’t do it,” Rendrick says. “Three weeks later, I’m over my seasickness and home sickness.”

Rendrick spent 18 months sailing the Atlantic, as well. When his employer switched to Panamanian registry, he returned to the Great Lakes. A draft notice ended his sailing career in 1950.

He got a job with Linde Air after he came home from the service, but on long weekends Rendrick continued to sign on as a crew member for Lake Erie runs. Decades later, his adventures, and those of the other sailors, provide a framework for stories about oddball characters who sailed with them, stupid things they did as fresh tars, girls who flashed their breasts at freighters on the Detroit River and the abundance of rats at the grain elevators.

“My sister picked me up one time at a grain elevator and she said there sure were a lot of cats down here,” recalled Donald Maginnis. “I told her ‘Those aren’t cats, they’re rats!’”

The men talk about blowing up radios by plugging them into the DC output on the steamships, inaccuracies in museum models of the ships they sailed upon, photographs they snapped during their travels, theories about how the Fitzgerald sank, volunteering at the museum and the loneliness of the lifestyle that, in retrospect and from a warm, dry perch on the shore, doesn’t seem so bad.

“At the time I went out, it was a job,” Rendrick says. “The worst part about steamboating is you’d go into Buffalo and as you went back by Ashtabula you’d see the lights of home on the shore.”