In their 15 years as junkmen in New York, brothers Morris and Julius Lipsett had handled such big jobs as scrapping Manhattan's Second Avenue El, the old approaches to the Brooklyn Bridge, and the liner Normandie (TIME, Oct. 14, 1946). So they expected no trouble when they bought the decommissioned battleship New Mexico for $381,000 (original cost in 1917: $17,348,200). But last week as the New Mex, shorn of her power plant and with holes bored in her big guns, was towed from Boston toward Newark, trouble hit her like a spread of torpedoes amidships.
The Lipsett brothers had a...
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