This is starting to get downright embarrassing. I have to confess that, when I called up the first of those drawings (via the Coast Guard website) on my computer, and it started appearing, line by line, at a considerably bigger size than the original, my reaction was one of horror. I drew those things twice as big as the intended published size. (That's an old trick that draftsmen have been using for generations; shrinking a drawing almost invariably makes it look better.) Now the whole world can call them up in a format that magnifies every one of the hundreds of glitches that now, to me at least, stick out like sore thumbs!
I agree that a Squadron-style book on the Treasury-class cutters would be a great idea. In fact I'll go further: I think they'd be an appropriate subject for a book in the Conway "Anatomy of the Ship" series. For the present, at least, such a project is far beyond my capacity. But retirement is just a few years down the road; maybe I can contribute something along those lines eventually.
I did three drawings of the Treasury class. They were surprisingly big challenges. The Coast Guard and its predecessor organizations are remakably inconsistent in their record-keeping habits. Sometimes a query about a particular ship yields a big, fat folder of photos and a super-detailed set of plans; other times there's practically nothing. When we started digging for stuff about the Treasury class, Bob Schiena found an excellent set of photos of the Taney, taken just after she was launched; that's why we picked her, in her "as-built" configuration, as the subject for the drawing. (There was also a fascinating stack of photos of the Bibb under construction.) But when Bob went to the National Archives looking for plans he was surprised to discover that, though there was a good, detailed plan of the maindeck, the outboard profile was missing. I had to work from several other sources: the photos, some extremely crude but accurately-measured drawings of the class in later (1950s and 60s) configurations, and the deck plan. (I also turned up one other minor but useful document. My old friend the late William Wilkinson, former director of the Mariners' Museum, was a Coast Guard enthusiast of many years' standing. When I asked him if he had anything in his collection about the Treasury class cutter, he turned up some notes he'd taken out of some official document many years earlier. It included, of all things, the exact heights above the waterline of all the lights in the ship. That was a big help in compensating for the effect of perspective in the photos.)
I remember the day I took my finished drawing of the Taney up to CG Headquarters in Washington, showed it to the captain in charge of the Public Affairs section (which oversees the Historian's Office) and told him, "I can't say for sure this is exactly right, because there apparently is no official outboard profile of the Taney as built." The captain pointed at the drawing I'd just handed him and said, "There is now." That made me feel pretty good.
Only temporarily, though. Just a year or so ago I started following a thread on another web forum (modelshipworld.com) about a guy who was working on a large-scale RC model of a Treasury-class cutter. He and a friend of his had started researching the subject from a different direction (I'm not exactly sure where), and had found a print of the original outboard profile. Oh, well....
A year or so after the Taney drawing was done, Bob Browning asked me to do a set that would represent the Coast Guard's role in amphibious warfare - including the Duane as an amphibious force flagship. The Historian's Office could find no measured drawings whatsoever of any of the Treasury-class ships in that configuration. Bob was able to track down about six photos, and I found a couple more in books. (One of the most useful showed the ship tied up to a pier somewhere in North Africa just prior to the invasion of Southern France, with the officers and crew standing on the pier. They were in nice, straight, equally-spaced lines, right in front of the ship, with the camera centered perfectly on the formation. Another big help in sorting out the perspective.
Then there was the case of the FS 550, a Coast Guard-manned Army "freight supply ship." Bob Browning found a terrifically detailed set of drawings of her on microfilm in (if I'm remembering correctly) the archives of the U.S. Maritime Commission. The detail sheets included the gear for stowing a road grader on the maindeck - which is why the drawing has a road grader on it. (Those "FS boats" were rather interesting. Two of them became famous - or infamous - for very different reasons. One was heavily modified after the war and became the U.S.S. Pueblo. The other - I'm not sure what her number was - played the part of the U.S.S. Reluctant in the great movie "Mister Roberts." In that capacity she became, rather ironically, something of a symbol for the unsung, behind-the-lines sailors of the U.S.N. in the Pacific. In fact the Navy didn't operate any FS boats during World War II. All of them were administered by the Army, most being manned by the Coast Guard.)
Last night, in an effort to conquer a mild attack of insomnia, I dug out some stuff from a cabinet and compared it with the drawings on the CG website. I discovered that at least seven of the drawings I made way back when aren't there (or weren't as of last night). The most significant probably was a third version of the Treasury class: The Spencer in (as I reconstructed it as best I could - based entirely on photos) her 1943 configuration, as an Atlantic convoy escort. The other missing ones: the Icarus (165-foot B-type cutter, in 1942 configuration), Escanaba (165-foot A-type cutter), Evergreen (180-foot buoy tender, in 1943 configuration), Storis (230-foot tender, in 1943 configuration), Northland (in WWII configuration - with a JF-2 Duck aircaraft, crane, and radar replacing the original sail rig), and Albuquerque (Coast Guard-manned Navy patrol frigate). I think at least one other one may be missing; the above list has seven ships in it, and I think they were all originally published in sets of four. I don't know the reason for the omissions; maybe the folks in D.C. thought they'd used up enough space on the website already, or maybe they couldn't lay hands on the originals. I've sent an e-mail to the Historian's Office.
As is probably obvious by now, this is one of my favorite subjects. I haven't actually worked on any project involving CG vessels for several years. (Some of the drafting tools and materials I used on those drawings are now - like me - just about obsolete. When I go into a drafting supply store and ask for Rotring Rapidograph points, the clerks look at me like I'm some sort of relic from a bygone age.) I don't know if I'll ever get the chance to draw any more of them or not. But I'm certainly more than willing to give it a shot.