September Meeting 2001 September 2001 Program
Taken from the Pawtuxet Valley Historian Volume 15 Issue 2
Our speaker for the evening was Mr. Frank LENNON, President of the USS Saratoga Museum Foundation. Mr. LENNON, a Providence native and graduate of West Point, served two tours in Vietnam, one as a Green Beret and one as a member of the 173rd Air-Borne Brigade. After leaving the service he worked for the airlines and later started his own business in marketing and public relations. His desire for a career change led him to his present position working to establish a military museum at Quonset Point. The all-volunteer effort received the green light in September 1999 when Governor ALMOND and the RI Economic Development Corporation voted unanimously to allow the project to proceed. In January of 2000 the Secretary of the Navy signed off on the Saratoga thereby placing it on donation status. Endorsements and support have been received from labor unions, environmentalists, businessmen and veterans. The cost to develop Phase One will be in the $7.5 million range. (To date $6 million has been committed.) This would include towing and mooring the carrier and preparing key spaces such as the bridge, flight deck and hangar deck for public viewing. It would also include development of the Visitor Center and refurbishment of the machine shops in order to open the first stage of the vocational school. Quonset Point has a carrier pier that is ideal for berthing an aircraft carrier. It is 1,000 feet away from the Quonset Air Museum and only 2,000 feet away from an active 8,000-foot runway, which could be used for aviation events. When the ship went to sea it was a self-contained city, housing 5,000 men. To give you an idea of its size: the flight deck is 1,069 feet long (one-fifth of a mile); it is four acres in area; its displacement when empty is 65,000 tons and with a full load of air-craft, fuel, supplies, crew, etc., it is about 85,000 tons. While a lot of the internal systems have been stripped the shops are equivalent to any vocational school in the state. The institutional cooking facilities are intact. The ship was only decommissioned in 1994 and since a lot of the machine shop tools were computerized they would only have to be updated with software programs. The Saratoga will be a living laboratory for children in the area by giving them an opportunity to work on the ship and experience the life of a crewman in wartime or peacetime. It will bring educational, cultural and economic benefits to the state. It will create more than 100 direct jobs and 550 indirect jobs within the surrounding communities and could generate as many as 500,000 visitors a year. In accomplishing their mission the USS Saratoga Museum Foundation will bring a valuable asset to the community. We endorse this project and wish them continued success. For more information visit them at their web site:
Saratoga Museum
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