Showboat Debut: Making a Grand Entry

Commissioning:

"We were in the New York shipyard, getting the ship ready to go to war. The people in the shipyard had the same feeling that I have and that I still have about the wonderful ship the NORTH CAROLINA. Every man on that crew in Brooklyn worked just as hard as they could to make it a going concern; and it had to be because it was known that the Japanese were building up their fleet and that we were not quite as superior to the fleet of the Japanese at that time. It was only until we got some real power in our naval shipyard and ... the NORTH CAROLINA was in the vanguard of this fight.

My wife and I were invited to the commissioning ceremonies in New York City. It was a really electric and satisfying result. The ovation that ended the celebration in New York when the ship was commissioned was a tribute to a bunch of hard working people that our shipyards were. Our sailors and men were ready to go out and do what ever had to be done to win this war. And they did it. They really did it."

- Admiral Alfred G. Ward , USN (Ret)

Shakedown:

"We had various sea trials, after it was sea worthy enough to go to sea, and engineering testing and finally the gunnery testing. We would to New Port and Hampton Roads. Down the Caribbean to Guantanamo Bay to Kingston, Jamaica and even Casco Bay, Maine. That lasted until around June of 1942."

- Leo Neumann

NORTH CAROLINA Receives a Nickname: The Showboat

"The ship hadn’t been in commission very long before we became known as the "Showboat". The WASHINGTON, which was our sister ship, was built at the same time and was commissioned about a month after we were in the Philadelphia Navy Yard, received absolutely no publicity, and we got it all. There was envy and perhaps jealousy in the WASHINGTON wardroom (officers) especially and great rivalry between the two ships. With scorn or whatever, they started calling us the "Showboat". We liked it and pretty soon our band started playing "Here Comes the Showboat". "The Showboat" was a revival of the musical on Broadway that year and every time the band struck up "Here Comes The Showboat" it evoked the same enthusiasm and vocal and emotional appeal that "Dixie" does throughout the South."

- Rear Admiral Julian T. Burke, Jr., USN (Ret)

"Well, the battle ship itself received an awful lot of publicity at the time. It was on the front page of the New York papers which were the Daily Mirror, the Daily News, and the New York Times at the commissioning. It was glorified quite a bit to a point where it was called the "Showboat." There was a favorite play in New York at the time called "The Showboat" which was where they got the nickname, because we were going in and out of the harbor so much in New York, "Here comes the Showboat again!" "Showboat! Showboat!" It stuck, the name stuck."

- Leo Neumann

The Best 50 Cent Investment:

"The School Command Yeoman came to our barracks and advised several of us that for 50 cents he would give us our choice of available ship assignments. That 50 cents was the best investment I ever made. My best buddy, Walt King, and another sailor also "anted" up 50 cents and the next step in our Naval Career was assignment to the precommissioning crew of the NORTH CAROLINA on February 25, 1941."

- Chief Lewis D. Metz, USNR (Ret)

Liberty in New York:

"Being in New York City was just great at that time. We could ride the subway from Sand Street to Manhattan for about ten cents. We could always get free tickets from the YMCA for the shows in NYC. We saw most of the big bands during that time - Glenn Miller, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Benny Goodman and many others. At that time it was a great city to have fun in. Also, we had Coney Island, the amusement park. I have gone on a liberty in that city and had only fifty cents and still had a great time."

- Leo H. Bostwick

Home in New York:

"The next few weeks there were many working parties, ‘Now here this, ten men from each of the six deck divisions report to the quarter deck,’ was heard every day. I never knew a ship could hold so much stores, and when you thought it was full, it would start again. We had three-section liberty and I went home every night as I lived in the Bronx. It was an hour and a half trip by streetcar, subway and bus. It cost me twelve cents each way (that was a long time ago). I went out the Sands Street gate. It was a notorious street with lots of bars and ladies of the night. They had names like Hungry Helen and Big Bertha and I was scared to linger long there. I was only seventeen."

- William R. Taylor

Executive Officer has Shakedown Fun in Maine:

"I would go out in Casco Bay and take the old garbage from the ship, the old fish heads and anything I could find, and bait lobster traps every afternoon after we had finished our days work underway. I would get other people to go with me, but I soon found that a lot of the sailors liked it better than the officers did because it was quite a little bit of work pulling them in. We would go out and get all the lobsters we wanted.

Nobody had ever told me about the limit on them, so I took everything that was in every trap. I thought some of them were a little small. I used to wear a baseball cap; and when we would come back on board the ship, I would take the small ones and I would put them in between my fingers as I was coming up over the side. The next week the ships paper came out with me coming up over the side with my baseball cap and my lobsters in my fingers with the title, "Kind of big for shrimp, aren’t they, sir?" So I quit taking small ones, but I did get enough in two days to feed the entire wardroom mess (officers), which was about a hundred men.

Then I decided to take fifteen or twenty of them back to my wife since we were headed for Norfolk. So I put them in the bottom of the shower that Tom Hill, the gunnery officer, and I used on the level where our cabins were. I ran salt water over them. I tried to tell Tom I had them in there. We got underway and we darkened ship before I could tell him; and Tom went in to take a shower. He stepped into these things and he stepped out in a hurry. I don’t know what he did in the short time he was there, but they were all dead in the morning."

- Rear Admiral Joe W. Stryker, USN (Ret)