They Didn’t Give Up on the Ship

--The brigantine Niagara had been restored three times in the past, but Pennsylvania didn’t give up on the ship that carried Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry in the War of 1812. Exactly 175 years after Perry’s fleet defeated the British on Lake Erie, the Niagara was launched again, thanks to a fourth restoration that cost $3.8 million in state and private money. The ship, at 182 feet long and 278 tons, will tour the Great Lakes and East Coast after it gets 20 aluminum cannons, 118- and 113-foot masts, square rigging and sails. “We are starting a new page in Pennsylvania’s history . . . “ Gov. Robert P. Casey told about 5,000 people at the launching ceremony in Erie. Earlier, Melbourne Smith, a marine architect who dismantled and rebuilt the Niagara, said: “Perry would recognize his old ship. This is as exact a restoration as there can be.” Perry’s nine ships met British Commodore Robert Heriot Barclay’s six ships Sept. 10, 1813, near Put-in-Bay, Ohio, with 135 Britons and 123 Americans lost. Perry transferred to the Niagara and raised his famous flag, “Don’t Give Up the Ship,” after the flagship Lawrence was disabled. After Barclay surrendered, Perry reported: “We have met the enemy and they are ours. . . . “ The Niagara had been scuttled in Misery Bay in 1820, then raised and restored by Erie residents for the 100-year anniversary of Perry’s victory. It also was restored in the 1930s and 1940s. Smith said it now contains 42 pieces of the original ship.

--Leaders of the American civil rights movement received honorary degrees at a reunion at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. “We have lost some of our leaders, but we are still very much involved in the same movement for liberation,” said Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a former chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and one of the recipients. Among the others receiving degrees were Rosa Parks, whose refusal to surrender her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus in 1955 is cited as the start of the movement, and the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, former president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

--One of the nation’s largest collections of wax figures was lost when fire swept through the Southwestern Historical Wax Museum in Grand Prairie, Tex. Almost 300 sculpted figures were destroyed, including those of Elvis Presley, John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy, Robert Redford, Paul Newman, and others in detailed scenes from Texas history. More than 100 firefighters fought the blaze at the 25-year-old museum, which Mayor Jerry Debo said was “a major attraction in the community.”