Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: Welcome to Monument Matters, a podcast produced by the Monument Builders of North America for all things memorialization.
Each episode is an extension of our monthly magazine, MB News. Monument Matters invites everyone to listen and share. You'll find all of the episodes on Apple, Spotify and YouTube.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: I'm your host Mike Johns, CMAICA from the Johns Carabelli Company Cimarano Monuments and Flowers in Cleveland, Ohio.
Hot and steamy today. I'm also a past president of the Monument Builders of North America. Today's episode is some gratuitous promotion titled Monumental the USS Alabama and the Stories It Preserves. So please welcome our guest, Matthew McClooney, associate curator and volunteer coordinator at the USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park Park. For the past 10 years he has been working to develop exhibits, support preservation and restoration products, coordinate volunteers, and help interpret the USS Alabama's military history for visitors.
The USS Alabama historical site is one of the many reasons MBNA's 2027 Monument Industry show is going to Mobile, Alabama in February. Hello Matthew and welcome to our podcast.
[00:01:26] Speaker C: Thanks for having me.
[00:01:28] Speaker B: Pleasure to have you here. So the USS Alabama was once scheduled to be scrapped. Please tell us the story about how it avoided the scrapyard and made the transition from active warship to permanent memorial.
[00:01:42] Speaker C: So it's, it's kind of an interesting story. Battleships were at, by the time you get to the USS Alabama and the succeeding class, US Iowa and that class, it was kind of peak of obsolescence. Battleships had kind of run their course. Carriers were stepping into their own.
So after World War II, most of the battleships got put away into mothballs and Alabama was officially decommissioned January 9, 1947 and right around 196162 the Navy had decided to scrap the remaining battleships other than the Iowa class, as they were still seen as useful in future conflicts. And this was due in large part to their size and their speed. So the South Dakota class, which is the preceding class class was on the chopping block and some forward thinking Alabamians had decided that they needed to save the USS Alabama.
Something similar was taking place in in North Carolina and prior to Alabama's installation as a monument memorial, the North Carolina did so in, in, well, Cape Fear or yeah, Cape Fear River.
And so we worked with them and they helped us to preserve the Alabama. And so she sat in mothballs from 1947 to 1964. 1964 is when she made her started making her journey from Puget Sound Naval Yard way up in Washington State and came all the way down along the west coast, came to the Panama Canal and then transited the Gulf and ended up here in mobile, Alabama in June 1964, where she then opened as Memorial park that we see today on January 9, 1965.
And if you'll recall, she was retired on January 9, 1947. So there was a nice.
[00:03:37] Speaker B: Brought.
[00:03:38] Speaker C: Brought her back into service, as it were. I call this her last mission.
[00:03:41] Speaker B: Okay, that's quite a period of idle, right?
Amazing. So the USS Alabama is now both an historic artifact and a monument. How does that shape the way you preserve and interpret it?
[00:03:57] Speaker C: That is a very interesting question, because people might not.
When they come into the battleship, they'll look at the preserved spaces and that kind of thing, and they don't. May not. May not think of the battleship as artifact. Number one is what's called a macro artifact, a large artifact, and she's the first one in the park.
And so when you start talking about what we have to do to preserve her as not just an artifact, but also as a national historic landmark, you know, we, we are beholden to trying to keep her as original as possible in our stewardship. This is just our turn with her. You understand? That's how. That's how I look at it. This is just my turn. And my goal is to hand her off in better shape than what. Than what we received her in.
And so you have to pay attention to things like hull integrity.
You can't.
You just. You just have to pay very special attention. Right now, we're working on our O1 level, which is, you have main deck, and then the next deck up is the O1 level. And we're, we're fixing a lot of wasted metal that has, that has deteriorated over time. So we're replacing a lot of steel, and that's one of the things you have to do. And you might think, well, you know, so you're cutting part of this original artifact, but you have to in order to preserve her on a grander scale.
So there's, There's a balance. But you want to.
[00:05:22] Speaker A: Do.
[00:05:22] Speaker C: You want to catch things early, as early as you can, and do as little work as you have to and, and keep up preservative, which is paint, believe it or not, paint is the superior preservative. There was a. An instructional video, but put out by the U.S. navy after World War II, and they called paint the superior preservative. If you can paint it and keep paint on it, it will keep anything under it preserved until you. You reveal it, until you've removed that paint.
So it's. It's a. It's a very large undertaking. And if you talk to our director of operations, Lee Briers, who's been here for over 40 years, if you ask him how long it takes to paint the ship, he'll tell you that he's been here for over 40 years and he hasn't finished yet.
[00:06:04] Speaker B: That was. I was going to ask, so thanks. Yeah, amazing. So how do you. How do you paint under the water line?
[00:06:11] Speaker C: So that in about the early 2000s, I think we finished up the project in 2003, there was a cofferdam installed around the ship, and that was specifically to affect hull repairs, which included replacing wasted metal. But of course, part of that is painting everything below the water lines with the cofferdam allows us to do is we can make that a watertight compartment around the ship and we can pump all the water out.
That allows us to access everything below the water line down to the mud line where the ship sits. Now, during that process, when we were doing the repairs back the early 2000s, there were some excavations done below the mud line to inspect the hull. And what was found is that that is an anaerobic environment. And that the. Basically what they said is that the paint is almost new. So anaerobic means we have a lack of oxygen. You don't have oxygen. You can't have oxidation.
So the, the mud. It's almost counterintuitive. You think the mud being in wet mud like that would. Would be bad for it, but really it's. It's preserving the hull down below.
[00:07:21] Speaker B: Interesting.
Fascinating work, for sure.
So with.
Okay, I'm going to jump a little bit. So it must be challenging to balance the historical authenticity with the need to make the ship safe, accessible, and engaging for today's visitors. So what measures had to be taken to do that?
[00:07:43] Speaker C: So most of where you will see modifications done are on main deck, and we've kind of accepted that. Main deck, you're going to have some modifications done because you want it accessible to the most amount of people.
And so there are what we call knee knockers, which is if you have a watertight door, you'll notice they don't reach all the way down to the deck. They kind of float in the bulkhead above the floor.
And that's done so that you have time, you know, to close that watertight if you have a compartment filling with water.
So what you'll see in some areas of the ship, those have been cut out. Now, this was done decades ago.
We don't.
And when. And when you think about the ship has been here since 1965, and we just celebrated 60 years last year. We're on 61 years. A lot of that kind of work has already been done.
We try to avoid it at all costs, cutting out anything new because it is like we discussed artifact number one. And so you want to keep it as original as possible, but you can see some places in the past where maybe there's a tight corridor and there was some firefighting equipment there and it's just not needed today. And so decades ago, they may have cut it clean flush to the, to the bulkhead to allow safe passage or easy passage for any visitors.
But, but today we're really, we try to avoid that unless it's absolutely necessary.
[00:09:18] Speaker B: So what percentage of the ship is accessible to visitors, would you say?
[00:09:23] Speaker C: So that's, that's a fun question for me because we are, I like, from what I understand, we are one of the more accessible battleships, if not the most accessible. And I might get a friendly email from one of the other battleships later today letting me know that they feel like they are. But there's, it's, it's hard to really quantify that, to be honest. But as far as how much of our ship is, is available public, it's about 20%, which, when you, when you come to the park and you walk the ship and you spend time on her, you will spend hours walking around the ship getting to see things.
And when you tell someone only 20% of the ship is visible, you can see the surprise on their face because they feel like they've been through a lot of the shit and you really haven't, admittedly, most of what's down below that you can't see, they're big empty magazines where we used to keep ammunition, explosives, that kind of thing. So there's large sections around the turrets that were dedicated to that. A lot of it is empty voids that used to hold fuel oil or, or, or those kinds of things. So it's not necessarily that you're seeing real exciting things if you go down below to the average visitor. Now there is percentage of the population that would absolutely love to see that, but for the most part, we feel like we have a very concise tour that lets you see more of the ship than what you get to see on a lot of other ships. We feel like you might, for example, other ships have what they call hard hat tours and you get to go off tour and you have to wear a hard hat and safety equipment. And when you go on those tours, you get to see things that you already get to see for general admission at USS Alabama.
And I think partially that's just because of the layout of our ship.
When they built the South Dakota class ships, they were restricted to treaty standards and in order to add armor over the preceding class, they had to actually shorten the South Dakota class ships to add armor because we were, we had displacement limits. We could only displace 35,000, what they call dry or, you know, without armament, ammunition, that kind of thing.
[00:11:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:35] Speaker C: And so we could only be 35,000 tons. And so if you're trying to do that and the previous class has already done that, you end up having to make your, your ship more compact to add in thicker armor. So when you do that, I think they had to plan the ship out a certain way and I think it just made things more accessible in hindsight, you know, accidentally for a tour, it just made things a little more compact and easier to access.
[00:12:01] Speaker B: Sure, yeah. At the time they were building them, they weren't thinking about touring them, were they?
[00:12:05] Speaker C: No, and I say that all the time. They were, these were built for 16, 17, 18 year old, you know, boys essentially to run around on. And they, they weren't thinking about us.
[00:12:15] Speaker B: No. And it seems to me, you know, I, I visited the USS Cod submarine here in Cleveland and what I found is most of the, the uniforms, the spaces, kids of that age seemed like they were a lot smaller than those same kids today.
It's very interesting dynamic.
[00:12:35] Speaker C: And I'll tell you, when we, when we get donations of crewman uniforms and such, it's, it's obvious that they're smaller, that they, that they were on average smaller. And I just want to say that Paul and Evan are doing a great job out there at cod. And I shouldn't have said that where it's being recorded because they can use it against me. But they're great guys, they're doing a good job.
[00:12:56] Speaker B: Sure.
So with, with thousands of sailors having served aboard the USS Alabama over the years, how do you select the individual, individual stories that help visitors connect with its history? What artifact or personal story in the collection has made the strongest impression to you?
[00:13:16] Speaker C: So that, that's another interesting question because the Alabama served for such a short period of time.
So to help you kind of understand, between 1937 and 1944, we built 10 battleships.
And so when USS Alabama was laid down, within a couple of months, they laid down, the USS Iowa, a couple more months, the USS New Jersey, they were building these things all at the same time.
So Alabama was laid down in 1940, she was laid down in February 1940.
She became. Went into active service 16 August 1942, and then she's put away January 9, 1947. She didn't even have a full five years of service.
But when your crew was over 2,000 men, as many as 2,500 men at a time, we had just under 7,000 men who served on the battleship.
[00:14:10] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:14:11] Speaker C: So that number is big, but also small when you compare it to something like the USS New Jersey, who is a battleship. She was BB62 that served in Korea, Vietnam, and then up through the 80s and 90s. So our crew is relatively small, but also almost 7,000 guys. A lot of guys.
Generally, the stories and the crewmen are chosen almost by the compartment. So we have an area where we talk about the R division, which is the repair division, and we talk about Navy divers.
And then when we look at our crew and we look at our division and then we look at our Navy divers, lo and behold, we have a gentleman, Mr. Gray, that donated some items. And so we can pull from his items and we can pull from his stories, but we don't. I think there was a. One more. There was one more diver, and his name escapes me at the moment that we pulled from his. His information.
So you actually are almost.
It seems like you'd have an overabundance of stories to tell, but you're almost at a loss sometimes to tell a story because you start looking at a compartment and you say, okay, well, we're in the. The cobbler shop. Well, do we have any stories from any ship cobblers? And you find out that, you know, maybe we don't have any stories from the ship cobblers.
[00:15:29] Speaker B: So even though you would have a ship cobbler, we did.
[00:15:33] Speaker C: They. So the, you know, battleships were small cities.
We had everything down to a cobbler. We had a tailor.
The cobbler is usually the one that I'd like to point out to kind of surprise people, because we don't. You have a hard time finding a cobbler today?
[00:15:47] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:15:48] Speaker C: But in 1942, there was a cobbler on the corner. You know, so we're. We're almost limited sometimes in. In the stories we're allowed to tell. And, you know, with that number of men, we absolutely do not have artifacts from even a quarter of the men who served.
Matter of fact, none of our. None of our African American sailors ever, as far as I know, have ever even made contact with the museum. And I would love to hear from. From those sailors if they're still around or their family.
[00:16:22] Speaker B: Right.
[00:16:23] Speaker C: Those are stories we don't have access to.
So it's. It can be difficult at times. So it's. It would seem like we'd have an overabundance, but. But really we're. We're lacking sometimes.
[00:16:35] Speaker B: Okay, so is there. Is there a particular artifact or story that. That hits you in a special way?
[00:16:43] Speaker C: You know, there's. There's a couple of items that we have on main deck that were. That you don't. You don't get to see today. Right. You can't take home, you know, war trophies. But. But In World War II, you know, on main deck, we have an Arasaka rifle that was captured at Yakuza Naval base in Japan after the surrender. One of our guys. Well, really, it was before the surrender because our guys landed in late August and secured the naval base, and the surrender took place on September 2nd. So these items were secured before. We have this rifle and we have a samurai sword that were secured before the. The surrender was signed. And those are. Those are very interesting. But, you know, some of. Some of the ones that are. That are a little closer to home, I think, are the ones in our crewman association room, we have a Coke bottle that one of our volunteers, Chip Dobson, found up in the bow of the ship that's off tour.
It was just sitting on one of these I beams here like this. It was just a Coke bottle just sitting there. And when you pick up the Coke bottle, it says it was produced in 1945 in Bremerton, Washington. We know where USS Alabama was in 1945. In January, February 1945, she's sitting in Bremerton, Washington, getting refit.
[00:17:59] Speaker B: God.
[00:18:00] Speaker C: So it's like, you know, was this a yard worker that was taking a sip and said it? You know, there's a lot of. A lot of things like that that you find on the ship.
[00:18:09] Speaker B: Fascinating.
So the USS Alabama Battleship Memorial park includes many other memorials honoring veterans from several conflicts and branches of service.
So can you please tell us a little bit more about the park and share what's coming for the park?
[00:18:26] Speaker C: Well, I can't talk too much about what's coming because you'll get me in trouble with my boss.
[00:18:31] Speaker B: Got it.
[00:18:32] Speaker C: The executive director might not be happy if I talk too much about what's coming up, but I will say that you should always pay attention to what's happening at Battleship Memorial park because there's always something new coming. And I can tell you there's something new coming soon. But, you know, right now we have Memorials dedicated to the fallen heroes of 911 and the global war on terror. We have memorial for Vietnam. We have a memorial for the Korean War. We have memorials for submariners that are still on patrol. If you're not familiar with that, when a submarine is lost, and we haven't lost a submarine to enemy action since World War II.
But these, these submarines would go on patrol and then you wouldn't hear from them until they come back from patrol.
So when a submarine is never returned, we say they're still on patrol.
So we have a, we have a memorial for those submariners that are still on patrol.
Most of the memorials are located to your right as you're entering the park.
And they, they have parking specifically for those memorials for you to visit.
And they're. Like I said, there's more planned. There's, there's more coming up. I just can't be too specific about it.
[00:19:40] Speaker B: Sure, I understand. But it sounds like there will be a change between now and when we visit in February.
Okay, got it.
Loose lip sync ships. Understood that.
[00:19:53] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:19:55] Speaker B: All right, so from your perspective, you know, you, you, you interact with the volunteers and the visitors, but what can monument builders and memorial designers learn from USS Alabama about creating places of remembrance?
[00:20:11] Speaker C: I think it's, it's important to, to make sure that when you have these places for remembrance that you have space to kind of rest in that space. And that may seem like a weird term, and I don't just mean to sit down, but obviously a place to sit down, but to kind of absorb what's around you and to appreciate what, what it is you're looking at and, and understand what, where you are.
If you go to any of our memorials, we try to include attractive landscaping and, and just make it a pleasant place to be while you also are there kind of absorbing that remembrance. You know, it has to be a comfortable space. And you know, a lot of places do a very good job of that.
If you've ever been to the, the World War II memorial in, in D.C.
or, or the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, it's, it's solemn, it's quiet place, and you, you can, you can kind of have that time, but the, the rest isn't just for you time. A. A place to rest, a space to rest. It's also for those that you're remembering to, to give them, to give them a place. And for a lot of guys, maybe, maybe they don't have a, a proper grave site. This, this might be one of the places the only, maybe some of the only places that they that they can be remembered.
[00:21:31] Speaker B: No, I think that's a really good point. You know, you create a space that's inviting for visitors, but really the solemnness and the importance and the horror, you know, of what we're commemorating so that we can appreciate what we have today individually as American citizens and those that went before us, making the ultimate sacrifice to make sure that those things are maintained.
Absolutely. Well, I am certainly looking forward to visiting the park and the USS Alabama, as well as other historical and interesting points of interest in Mobile. So Matthew, I'd like to thank you and our audience for joining MBNA's Monument Matters podcast today.
I'm really looking forward to visiting Mobile February 25th through the 28th for the MBA Monument Industry show and seeing what other local gems the city has to offer.
The July issue of MB News has more information about the 2027 Monument Industry show in Mobile, including details of exhibiting exhibitor registration, which opened July 6. So I encourage you to read this issue and if you have a topic you'd like to have covered in a future podcast, please leave a comment.
So thank you for listening to today's installment of Monument Matters. MB&A invites you to stay connected through Facebook and LinkedIn, or visit us at www.monumentbuilders.org for upcoming events and webinars. Again, Matthew, thanks for taking time out of your day to give us a little peek into what we have in store in February.
[00:23:15] Speaker C: Well, thanks for considering Battleship Memorial park, and we look forward to seeing you.
[00:23:20] Speaker B: Absolutely. Well, again, we appreciate your time and all the listeners time. So all of you, thanks again. Have a great day.
It.
