Ah, the mystery of Kramer's past!
In tonight's (April 10) new episode, Seinfeld, while questioning the wisdom of Kramer's swimming in the East River, says that he's swimming in the busiest seaport on the East coast. Kramer immediately retorts that Norfolk is the busiest, in terms of tonnage. (I don't know whether or not that's correct, although it's plausible; anyway, Kramer said it convincingly.)
In a previous episode, Kramer mentioned something about a book he wrote on maritime disasters or some such thing, and he rattled off some facts about the Andrea Doria-Stockholm collision.
Was Kramer once a seaman? Was he a longshoreman? Here are a few of my own unusual theories for this unusual character:
- He developed a passion for ships and shipping after attending
a maritime film festival at the (now-defunct) Bleecker Street Cinema,
featuring Moby Dick, Captain Blood, A Night to Remember,
Anna Christie, and On the Waterfront. - He grew up on a houseboat at Manhattan's 79th Street Boat Basin.
(BTW, there really are, or at least until recently were,
people living on houseboats there.)- As a child, he was a rabid fan of the 1950's TV show Tugboat Annie.
BTW, Kramer must be an unusually good swimmer. He spoke of doing laps between the Queensborough Bridge (a.k.a. the 59th Street Bridge, as in the Simon and Garfunkel song) and the Brooklyn Bridge; those bridges are roughly 4 miles apart.
---Alvin H. Nichter