The shipping community is mourning the death of tanker market veteran and social organiser Ivar Gram at age 81.
Gram, a resident of Weston, Connecticut, died recently, his widow Rosemary has confirmed to TradeWinds.
The Oslo native had a long shipping career in the US — first with Stolt-Nielsen for 17 years and then as a partner with tycoon John Fredriksen in Northern Parcel Tankers in the 1980s.
Social skills
He also led Canadian Pacific Tanker Services before spending the end of his career as a shipbroker, concentrating mainly on chemicals and vegetable oils.
But he was equally well known on the industry’s social scene in Connecticut as co-founder of the Connecticut Carnivores Club, a luncheon organisation that celebrated its 25th anniversary last April.
At those sessions — and on the dais at the Connecticut Maritime Association’s annual Commodore Dinner — Gram was known to get the party started with a traditional Norwegian drinking song and a toast of “skaal”, shot of aquavit in hand.
“Over time everyone learned the words and sang along with him, and there were many good times,” Rosemary Gram told TradeWinds.
Gram came from an era where the business and the social were inescapably intertwined, his long-time friend and business partner, Charlie Fritts, in an interview this week.
“Entertaining was part of the job. It was one of the ways you kept customers as customers. It was a very social business,” said Fritts, who met Gram at Stolt-Nielsen in 1974 as a trainee. Gram at the time was a service manager.
“He was very open and friendly and he helped me a lot,” Fritts said of their early encounters.
“He gave me a lot of rope as a trainee with which to hang myself. He just told me to go as fast as I could. It was very good and helpful experience. I owed him a lot.”
The two men wound up as partners and close associates, moving together from Stolt-Nielsen to join Fredriksen next, and then collaborating closely throughout their careers.
Eventually, that would lead to the Connecticut Carnivores Club, a venture they founded together.
The backstory
Gram and Fritts used to entertain clients from Union Carbide at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, Fritts recalled, but were stymied when the restaurant banned their usual meal — steak tartare — because of an E. coli scare.
The partners soon found themselves in discussion with the owner of the old Sevilla restaurant in Greenwich, Connecticut.
The rest of the story was related by Gram at last April’s Connecticut Carnivores Club lunch with TradeWinds in attendance.
“He said, ‘Oh, you want steak tartare? We’ll give you steak tartare’. And that’s how CCC [Connecticut Carnivores Club] was started,” Gram said.
The club was constrained by Sevilla’s available capacity of 13 seats, so it sought other, larger homes throughout Fairfield County over the years, always, of course, involving meat. And the other essential: smoking.
The Connecticut Carnivores Club will carry on, although it will be different without Gram, Fritts admitted.
“I’m going to miss him,” he said. “He’s been my friend for a long, long time. And my business partner. It’s quite a loss. But you have to go on.”
Outside the shipping world, Gram pursued a quieter passion — gardening. He first learned the skill from his father and later refined it through an internship with a tulip grower in Holland, Rosemary Gram said.
Besides his wife, Gram is survived by his son, Michael, daughter-in-law Janice Eng, sister Gitte Gram Swensson and several nieces and nephews.
