“Shipping is a people business”, so the saying goes. Jim Lawrence, who passed away at the beginning of June, truly embodied that. Certainly, he was a great participant at maritime events. When
“Shipping is a people business”, so the saying goes. Jim Lawrence, who passed away at the beginning of June, truly embodied that. Certainly, he was a great participant at maritime events. When not up on the podium serving as the moderator, he would be walking around, shaking hands, talking about a particular transaction or development (and, sometimes, the intrigue behind it), along with everything that goes along with networking. He will certainly be remembered as a “people person” and deservedly celebrated for that aspect. But there is much more to his story; quite simply, he was a “Shipping Legend.”
I recall that I first met Jim in 1985 at a luncheon at the Downtown Athletic Club, at that time already past its prime but still a New York maritime hangout of sorts. In the mid-1980s, new technologies were trickling in, enabling the earliest versions of remote interactions. Shipping folks had been moving out of downtown New York to suburban Connecticut, notably Greenwich and Stamford. So, around the same time, the Connecticut Maritime Association (CMA) sprung up, with a group of shipbrokers, chartering folks, and a few shipowners meeting for monthly lunches. The technology “revolution” (now very quaint with personal computers
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