Phylipp Dilloway: Seaman, Engineer, Professor, Author, Historian
By Trevor Polasek, Archival Intern
Phylipp Dilloway is a graduate of the New York State Maritime Academy (now SUNY Maritime College), a former sailor in the Naval Reserves, an industrial engineer, a professor, and the unofficial class historian for his graduating class, October of 1946. Dilloway’s resume is quite impressive, and is an example of what one can do starting out as a merchant mariner. In 2017 he donated a collection of his personal items to the archives encompassing his time at the New York State Maritime Academy, his career as a consultant for Dunlap & Associates, and materials associated with his research on the class of 1946.
As an intern at the Stephen B. Luce Libary, I have organized Dilloway’s papers, created a finding aid for the collection, digitized a journal from his training cruise in the summer of 1946, and curated an oral history interview he gave to the library in 2011. In the time I spent with Dilloway’s collection, I learned a great deal from his experiences about maritime history and the life of a Merchant Mariner. One thing I love about Dilloway is how much pride he has taken in serving as his class’s unofficial historian. Dilloway was dedicated to create a living history of his classmates years after they all graduated from the New York State Maritime Academy. As I became more familiar with Dilloway, I found that I shared the same love for history as he did. It has been a pleasure being able to work with the history Dilloway has collected and offered to the Stephen B. Luce library.
Phylipp Dilloway was born on October 29th, 1926 in Bronx, New York. His time as a mariner started when a recruiter stopped by his school looking for young men to become merchant mariners. According to his oral history, Dilloway thought the Merchant Marines would be a good way to avoid being drafted into the Army, and so he enrolled in the New York State Maritime Academy. When Dilloway went on his required training cruise, he kept a journal to record his daily life. A unique part of the journal are the souvenirs that Dilloway had pasted into the inside covers. Imagine my surprise as I flipped to the last page and found an actual carnation, over 70 years old at this point! If you are interested in viewing this interesting piece of history yourself, the journal is accessible in the archive’s new digital home maritimedigitalcollections.com.
After his time at sea, Dilloway became an industrial consultant at Dunlap and Associates where he helped create reports on issues in the maritime industry. Below is the report I found the most interesting out of the four that are housed in the archives. The report is a study on the potential of converting certain industries to shipbuilding, which was written for the US government in 1964.
When Dilloway eventually retired from his career at Dunlap, he became a professor at the University of Bridgeport. He ended his time at Bridgeport as the Director of the Department of Industrial Engineering. Retiring from his various careers, Dilloway began work on creating a history of his graduating class at the New York State Maritime Academy. Dilloway spent a few years corresponding with his classmates to create a biography on their lives since graduation, and self-published the collection as a book in 2004. The amount of materials that Dilloway collected on each of his classmates is rather breathtaking. The collection shows the time and passion Dilloway put into the project and how much he cared about the personal history of his classmates. Dilloway himself is particularly proud of the fact that the book is also housed in the Library of Congress. The archive contains a digital and physical copy of the book, and it is definitely one of the highlights of the collection donated by Phyl Dilloway.
Phylipp Dilloway has been very generous in donating his materials to the archive. Along with the aforementioned items, Dilloway has also donated two bridge coats typically worn by officers onboard naval ships, a collection of other materials related to the alumni of the Class of October 1946, and an oral history interview which can be listened to at http://maritimedigitalcollections.com/index.php/Detail/objects/2650. The oral history interview in particular is one of the best items related to Phyl Dilloway. In the interview, Dilloway talks about his time at the New York State Maritime Academy and shares many stories about the people he knew at the college and the experiences he had. I loved Dilloway’s interview so much that an entire section of my internship was dedicated to making his interview, as well as several other ones, accessible online.
