Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome back. Well, we just recognized the United States Navy's 250th birthday anniversary. And now it's time for the U.S. marine Corps onboard the USS Salem at the Quincy Shipyard this weekend. So Margaret Laforest, president of the United States Naval and Shipbuilding Museum, which happens to be on board the USS Salem, is here to fill us in. Hey, Margaret, Great to see you.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Great to see you, Joe.
[00:00:22] Speaker A: Appreciate it, as always. You have to come by more often, tell us.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: So much going on.
[00:00:25] Speaker A: So much going on on the Salem. It's only been here, as I always say, since 1994.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: Correct. Ye.
[00:00:32] Speaker A: People are still finding out about it.
[00:00:34] Speaker B: And, you know, now that we're at the other location, deeper into the shipyard, there's always confusion when people visit us. You have to come in off of south street across from Pete's. So always try to remember people like, I tried to get to you. I know.
[00:00:46] Speaker A: Just keep going till you can't go anymore, and then you'll be there.
[00:00:49] Speaker B: Right? Right. And of course, you can see us from everywhere.
[00:00:51] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. How do I get over there to that big ship?
[00:00:54] Speaker B: So go across from Pete's Bar and Grill, come right through and you'll get there.
[00:00:58] Speaker A: I guess the last big event was Heritage Days. Right on board the ship.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: How'd that go?
[00:01:03] Speaker B: Spectacular.
You know, really credit to the mayor and the Quincy 400 Committee for getting all the historic attractions. That was so in Buck Daven. So much coordination.
What I believe is that the U.S. of Salem was the number one most visited attraction that day with 600 visitors. Wow. Yeah. So we were really, really thrilled.
[00:01:22] Speaker A: I didn't know that. That's great.
[00:01:23] Speaker B: We had almost 50 volunteers that day. We have a lot of interns. It was really an all hands on deck because, you know, not sure what to expect. We could have had a thousand people. We didn't know what to expect.
And it was really well showcased. We kind of did open house style. Had volunteers throughout instead of self guided tour or guided tour just to make sure we could handle that crowd volume. And being a 717 foot vessel, we can handle the crowd volume pretty easy, right?
[00:01:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:01:47] Speaker B: Yeah. And the Rotary Club set up on our fantail to help us sell snacks and kind of, we set up our tent so that people could really relax and have a snack and enjoy the beautiful water view and the bridge. Yeah. It was a really. What a great day to celebrate Quincy history.
[00:02:03] Speaker A: Oh, that's fantastic. And do you see a lot of new faces during the day?
[00:02:07] Speaker B: And, you know, there's so many great Stories of I've lived local. I've never been here. One person was a bus driver. She got city employee, got the city employees, got the newsletter about an email, you know, letting them know about what was happening. So I got this email, and my daughter's teacher at the Marshall had told the kids they should do this this weekend. And so here we are. They had a great story, a really diverse audience, and so we were really thrilled. You know, we track our visitation.
We had the scouts actually also volunteer because the city was sending transportation.
[00:02:39] Speaker A: Yes, yes.
[00:02:40] Speaker B: And so we set up two whiteboards to say, what state are you from? Which city are you from? Which country are you from? You know, we really get visitors from all 50 US states.
[00:02:49] Speaker A: Neat.
[00:02:50] Speaker B: Throughout the Commonwealth, in multiple foreign countries. So it's so nice to kind of see all of that culminate. And what a great day for Quincy. Yeah, yeah.
[00:02:58] Speaker A: But also to your point, for locals to kind of explore their own backyard. Right?
[00:03:02] Speaker B: Yeah. And a lot of them, it was great because it was. Geez, you didn't know, are they going to make a whole day of this or are they going to pick one thing? And, you know, there were kids who I think it was like, after the soccer game, one of the parents brought a bunch of the kids and hey, let's go do this for the day as an activity. So, you know, it was interesting to see some people were hitting multiple attractions. Some people just came, visited us and. Yeah. So we were thrilled.
[00:03:25] Speaker A: Nice.
[00:03:25] Speaker B: Yes. You know, people, like you said, hadn't thought about us in years or been here years ago or. We got a lot of. We used to love the haunted ship, which we don't do anymore.
[00:03:33] Speaker A: Right?
[00:03:34] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:03:35] Speaker A: That's great. That's good to hear. I think it's going to be a yearly event that Heritage Days.
[00:03:39] Speaker B: We're hoping it was really great.
[00:03:41] Speaker A: It was well received. You know, all the historic sites to be open on one day at the same time, and it's never happened before.
[00:03:47] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:03:48] Speaker A: So nice to see for sure. But you're not done yet.
[00:03:51] Speaker B: No. And after that, I think I was here for Navy 250.
[00:03:54] Speaker A: Oh, right, yes.
[00:03:55] Speaker B: Right. So that was really a spectacular experience.
[00:03:56] Speaker A: Yeah. The weather wasn't so great.
[00:03:58] Speaker B: Unfortunately, on the Saturday, we did get the ship dressed, so we always kind of bring it down to the wire. So it looks like we're address the ship with all her signal flags from bow to stern tomorrow.
[00:04:07] Speaker A: Nice.
[00:04:07] Speaker B: And that's a really special occasion for us. We received funding for that through the city's community preservation Act. A few years ago, we did that in anticipation, knowing Quincy 400 would be.
We try to do it on annually on flag day. But you know, it's a lot of. It's labor intense. And so our interns, as the flags all get pulled down, I have them folding flags and wait till they get to see. They'll be doing that again this week, next weekend. Yeah. But it looks spectacular. Really kind of showcases that, you know, we're a museum in port, not just a ship in the shipyard. Right.
[00:04:40] Speaker A: Yeah. A living museum.
[00:04:41] Speaker B: People really connect with that when they see the ship all dressed out. And, you know, it means so much too to some of the crew members who served on her that still live local. Certainly, you know, they had tears in their eyes when they said, we're going to dress your ship. You know, it just was really meaningful because you only do it on celebratory days. And now Marine Corps 250, I mean, Quincy, the US asylum did have a Marine detachment on board.
[00:05:03] Speaker A: Oh, I didn't know that.
[00:05:04] Speaker B: Yeah. And it was really actually one of our Marines who was a former command, former Commander of the USSail Marine Detachment Detachment made it through the ranks to be the commandant of the Marine Corps, Paul Kelly. And he grew up locally and raised his family locally. And so that's a nice connection. He's since passed, but recognizing him. Oh, okay. And we have a retired Marine Corps colonel who volunteers for the USS Salem and he did an interview with a former Salem commander of our Marine detachment who is also a colonel, Bill Rocky. He lives down south. And so we have their interview that we'll be showing as well. We'll probably put that up online after the big weekend.
[00:05:48] Speaker A: Oh, fantastic.
[00:05:49] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:49] Speaker A: Okay. So there is so much local history connected to military service, you know, right here in our own backyards.
[00:05:56] Speaker B: Yeah. So. And we're doing free admission for any Marine active duty veterans, Veterans this weekend.
[00:06:01] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:06:01] Speaker B: You know, and I think part of it too is, yes, the US of Salem is a ship. She was built here in Quincy and she celebrates our shipbuilding heritage. But there's so much more to it because others who, whether they're naval service or the other ships that was built there, you know, we celebrate a lot of that on board and make sure to preserve that history.
So there's so many great personal connections. And that's why, you know, for someone like me who cares about the preservation of that history, because it goes back generations in our community.
[00:06:29] Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah. That's very nice to see. So it is this weekend, both days.
[00:06:33] Speaker B: Both days, yes.
[00:06:33] Speaker A: Tell me all about what will be happening.
[00:06:35] Speaker B: Yeah. Dressing ship is only Saturday because it's such a, you know, work process.
[00:06:40] Speaker A: Very intensive.
[00:06:40] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay.
[00:06:41] Speaker A: That's when put the flags up, basically.
[00:06:43] Speaker B: Right? Yeah.
[00:06:44] Speaker A: Although we did get stem to stern.
[00:06:45] Speaker B: Stem to stern. We did get some winches to help with some mechanical assists, opposed to the human assist, but, you know, wind blows, mother nature doesn't cooperate. It's, you know, you skip that.
[00:06:55] Speaker A: I think, I think you're gonna be okay.
Good.
[00:06:57] Speaker B: I like to hear that. So we'll be dressing ship. We'll be having self guided tours. Guided tours, like I said, the special Marines programming.
And then also something special that if you were an officer in the Navy or the Marine Corps, when you would board a ship, they would render honors and kind of bong you aboard the quarter deck. Bell whistle.
[00:07:17] Speaker A: You want?
[00:07:18] Speaker B: I think.
[00:07:18] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:07:18] Speaker B: And so for a Navy birthday, what we decided is, you know, we're going to render that honor in recognition of the special occasion to any Navy veteran who comes on board. So we're doing the same with the Marines.
And then as we learned at the city's Navy 250th celebration, it's an eight bell day. So we'll be ringing the main bell, eight bells in honor of our celebration.
[00:07:40] Speaker A: Oh, what does that mean, eight bells?
[00:07:41] Speaker B: You know, it's kind of the celebratory, you know, different, you know, different ranks would render a different number of bells. And so because it's 250 years, eight bells.
[00:07:54] Speaker A: Okay, fun. All right. So what are the hours, Margaret, for the events?
[00:07:58] Speaker B: Saturday and Sunday, 10am to 4pm and we just have a few weekends left. We close for the season on Sunday, November 23rd. So the Sunday before Thanksgiving is that late this year? A little bit, yeah. We usually try to get, you know, sometime mid November, it gets chilly on board. So visiting us, we always tell you dress warm and wear smart shoes.
[00:08:17] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:08:18] Speaker B: We are going to partner with the City of Quincy Veterans Services and Braintree Veterans Services to host the Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day in December.
So we won't be fully open to the public, but we'll have the museum open for that event right on December 7th. On the 7th, yeah. But we'll probably just do 10 to noon or something to accommodate the event.
[00:08:38] Speaker A: Very nice. So this is a couple of great opportunities to see it if folks have any. Sounds like the dress ship event, though, is going to be like the pinnacle time to see the ship for sure.
[00:08:48] Speaker B: Yeah. And I know with Revolution 250 and tall ships next year we'll have more days Next year we'll get to do it. And in the meantime, we're keeping busy with a lot of onboard preservation projects.
[00:08:58] Speaker A: Yes, to tell.
[00:08:59] Speaker B: Yes. So super thanks to the city of Quincy, to the mayor, to the city council, to the Community Preservation Committee. You know, that's really been our primary. We're a small nonprofit. People call us every weekend. Are you open? The government shut down and we don't get government operating funding. So we are a private nonprofit organization. So yes, we will be open.
And the city's funding has been for some preservation projects. So we focused this year on our gangway area. We had to rip up some of our deck that is rotting out and do some painting there. We are finishing up right now the three inch gun. So the port side has been completed, the stern has been completed. Now we're working on the starboard side.
So that's been a big project that we have professional contractors doing.
[00:09:44] Speaker A: Gotcha.
[00:09:45] Speaker B: Then we have the turret. Three is the back of the ship turret that our volunteers are doing. I'll be putting up a video on social media this week. Kind of, you know, time lapse. It's been really great to see that underway because it's high impact. When you have some of these larger equipment rusting, that doesn't look good. So we're really doing our best to tackle some of this long overdue preservation needs.
[00:10:10] Speaker A: Nice, nice. I know the big focus first was on the hull. You have to make sure the ship will stay afloat, right?
[00:10:15] Speaker B: Yeah. So a couple years ago we did a full marine survey, also funded by Community Preservation. What is the conditions?
We had the underwater of the hull thickness gauge. So you see, you know, the deterioration of the hull. We had a brand new impressed active cathodic protection system installed. And that was a real big ticket item for us. And you know, that preserves the hull's integrity. And so it's really important to have that.
[00:10:39] Speaker A: It's like the foundation of your house, right?
[00:10:41] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. And so we're in great shape, but we've tackled a lot of those big projects.
And so our volunteers are actually painting the boot stripe. They call it the black boot stripe of the hull. So we got some more of that done and we really have a good game plan for the spring with a kind of intense volunteer plan to knock off the starboard side of that super. Yeah, we're getting there. You know, we're a small group. Many of them are volunteers, a local. Many of them are veterans, some are retired, some are young. We have student volunteers.
We have a lot. Usually kids find us in high school, they're interested in going to Mass Maritime or into the service. Someone says, jesus, go volunteer, go. Call those over.
[00:11:20] Speaker A: It's right in the backyard.
[00:11:21] Speaker B: Right. We have a real, you know, it's really like a family, the crew down there.
[00:11:24] Speaker A: Is that right?
[00:11:25] Speaker B: You know, we do everything from preservation work to, you know, welcome to Walmart. I call it like just greeting visitors in the corridor, giving tours. Yeah. So really something for everybody. And. And I know I was telling you earlier about one of our exciting projects funded by community preservation. So this is probably, I think, our sixth year that we've been doing student internships, paid student internships, Quincy kids, some Quincy kids, some non Quincy kids, mostly Quincy students, mostly Quincy kids.
And so the Mass Hire Youth Works program funds some internships, and some of them we've been able to extend their hours.
Bob Damon, in the summer youth corps have pinned some of the kids. So kind of depending on their interest, what we assign them with. So it could be working in our admissions shed, selling tickets, talking to customers. It could be greeting visitors, giving tours. But one project that has really been a passion of mine is our collections management. So we have thousands and thousands of items, whether they're on display in an exhibit or. Or in our storage. And so back in the early days of the museum, Jim Fahey is kind of a local legend, was our curator and had lots of paperwork and that piece of paper that said, you know, Joe Catalano donated something is in a file cabinet.
And so. Great. That's great. We have Joe's paperwork.
[00:12:47] Speaker A: Yeah. But nobody knows it's there. Right. It's stuck in a file cabinet.
[00:12:50] Speaker B: So these kids started with, let's put all that donor paperwork in that Google sheet so we can have it searchable. Now we're going to go through each of the exhibits, take pictures of the items. It was almost. Let's see what we can match up. Do we find what Joe donated? We have a picture and his paperwork. Is it all organized? So it's been a massive undertaking. We have about 8,000 items digitized.
[00:13:11] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:13:11] Speaker B: Yes. But some of it's kind of junk. Like, here's a group of magazines. These magazines aren't really related to the mission. Somebody gave them to us because back in the day, maybe they were like, cleaning out the attic.
[00:13:21] Speaker A: It's World War II ephemera.
[00:13:22] Speaker B: Right.
So, you know, so it's not. We need a lot of quality control. But I have to tell you, getting there. Right. And this is all being done by mostly high school students. And so we are going to Offer some collegiate internships as well. Maybe a little bit more subject matter knowledge. But the kids have done fantastic. And one of the collections we're so excited about is we are the only museum ship that still operates our print shop. Yes. So when a ship would go to sea, they would print newspapers, newsletters.
[00:13:51] Speaker A: It's a small city on the water. Right. Really.
[00:13:53] Speaker B: And so for us, our, you know, our tour brochure or our marketing materials or postcards, thank you notes. Can we. Do we use the ship's printer to print those?
[00:14:03] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:14:04] Speaker B: And so we have a collection of the newsletters from when the ship was.
[00:14:07] Speaker A: In service that's really interesting.
[00:14:09] Speaker B: Each page is getting scanned so you could go online and it'll be a great kind of social media winter contact for us. But people be able to be searchable, people's names that are in the database that you'd be able to find, you know, because we hear all the time almost every weekend we have families who have had a dad, you know, serve on board.
[00:14:25] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:26] Speaker B: And they come and visit. This is my dad's ship.
[00:14:27] Speaker A: So they can look up like the day and time that their, their father served and see what happened that day.
[00:14:32] Speaker B: On the correct cruise books or, you know, it's great if you know where he served or what his rank was. We can give.
Our tour guides will look and say, you know, this is maybe the area that where he would have been working and give him that firsthand knowledge. And you know, we do still have some crew members who are still alive who come to visit us and you.
[00:14:52] Speaker A: Know, and they want to look up the time they served. Right. The ship went all around the world.
[00:14:56] Speaker B: Yes, yes. She spent a lot of time in the Mediterranean, a lot of town down in Cuba.
She was in Villa France. She was the flagship of the sixth Fleet.
[00:15:03] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:15:04] Speaker B: We actually.
He was a United States Senator Denton. He was an admiral in.
I'm no sorry. He was on the admiral's staff. He later himself became an admiral.
He was the man who was a POW and did Morse code through his. Through blinking that the Americans were being tortured.
He passed on, but his family just visited us. So we have these stories that every weekend you don't know who's going to cross that threshold to come on board.
And here we are. Yeah. So we really have great joy for the volunteer crew. We welcome people to join us. That's great.
[00:15:40] Speaker A: So for this weekend at celebrate the U.S. marine Corps, 250th onboard the USS Salem, Saturday and Sunday, 10 to 4, free admission for active duty Marine Corps and veterans.
[00:15:50] Speaker B: And I should tell you, a General admission is 5 to $15. We participate in the Car to Culture program, which is our $5 admission. So if you have an EBT card, if you have the healthcare connector card, you qualify for a $5 admission.
[00:16:04] Speaker A: Nice.
[00:16:04] Speaker B: Yeah. Otherwise it's 12 or $15.
[00:16:06] Speaker A: Thanks so much, Margaret. Always great to catch up.
[00:16:08] Speaker B: Same. Thanks so much, Joe.
[00:16:09] Speaker A: You are welcome.
