Anchors Away : Prairie, Navy’s Oldest Active Ship, Is Decommissioned

They looked out at their ship for the last time. They saw the American flag descend from its towering yardarm and heard taps. Before the bugler’s last notes had faded, Frank Hart, one of the old sailors, said: “That’s kaput, that’s the end.”

The Prairie, a 52-year-old destroyer tender that was the oldest active vessel in the Navy, was taken out of service Friday morning. But when the decommissioning ceremony was over, Hart and a few hundred other men and women who had served on it were reluctant to leave the dockside parking lot at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard.

The Prairie, 530 feet long and the color of a stormy sea, loomed in front of them. On its decks the last crew, none of whom were born when the ship was built, stood in dress blues and white hats.

The ship had been in every U.S. war and conflict since World War II. It served as a repair facility, with the ability to fix any part on any ship in the world.

“There shouldn’t be a dry eye around here,” said Hart, 73, of Costa Mesa, who wore a USS Prairie hat and carried a camera. “Thank God I lived to see this. A lot of people don’t live long enough to put a ship in commission and take it out again.”

Hart, one of the first of the Prairie’s more than 30,000 sailors, was on the ship when it was commissioned in Philadelphia in 1940 and served for three years as a crane operator. “Working those two up there in the middle of the (smoke) stacks, that was my first job,” he said.

The steam-driven Prairie, which has been home-ported in Long Beach since 1982, was just too old to continue. A familiar sight at ports throughout the world was that of “tin cans” (destroyers) wedged next to the Prairie, waiting to be fixed. In addition to its many repair shops, the ship offered medical and dental services.

“There will never be another Prairie,” Capt. Wilton R. Stewart, the 44th and last of the ship’s captains, told the audience Friday. “When you step aboard, the spirit becomes a part of you, and it has continued, passed down from one generation of sailors to the next. The sailors courted her and cursed her, used and abused her. When her makeup was in need of repair, they painted her.”

Built for $11 million, the Prairie served in the Pacific, Atlantic, Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf. At Pearl Harbor in 1944, it prepared 70 ships for action. In 1975, after a decade of supporting ships in Vietnam, it shuttled 3,000 refugees out of Saigon. It was underway for the last time in September, 1992.

The first female crew member came aboard in 1982, and in recent years about a third of the crew of 900 were women. In his speech Friday, Retired Rear Adm. John Higginson said: “And while the debate still rages today about women and homosexuals in the Navy, the Prairie has proven the women aspect with eminent success.”

The spirit that Stewart talked about was evident Thursday when former crew members visited the ship.

Ben Davis, 67, of Kingston Springs, Tenn., a signalman in the early 1940s, climbed up one of the ship’s many steep ladders to the flying bridge where, as a young sailor, he messaged other ships with lights and flags. “Would you believe,” he said over the whipping wind, “the Prairie got a commendation for sending more messages than any ship in the Navy? Six hundred in a day.”

His wife, Marina, watched her happy husband in his camouflage cap and reminisced. “I met him when he came home in ’46 and we were married in ‘47,” she said. “He was the best looking thing. In his sailor uniform? You bet. Tanned, blond hair, beautiful blue eyes.”

“And teeth,” he said.

Just below the Davises, on the bridge, a group of men had been reliving the old days. They recalled old captains. Old craps games in the torpedo room. And typhoons. “I was in two,” said Tom Kenny of Philadelphia, standing next to the wheel. “The first time I wanted to give my soul to Jesus, and the second time I wished I’d had.”

He looked out through the large circular windows and remembered not being able to see over the waves.

Arlie Baskins, 62, of Granada Hills, a burly man with a weathered face and a bristly mustache, looked at the compass, the telegraph and the other brass fixtures. “I spent a good many hours standing right here (at the wheel),” he said.

Baskins was fresh out of boot camp when he came to the Prairie. “They flew us to Subic Bay in the Philippines, and that’s where I picked up the ship,” he said. “It was the biggest vessel I had ever seen. It scared me to death. I still remember going aboard and not knowing what direction to go.”

Now, years later, the former crewman knew where to go, but it was not the same. Steve Sterry, 50, of Whittier, who had been a lieutenant on the ship, watched sadly as welders, carpenters and pipe fitters found their once clattering shops quiet and stripped of machinery.

“It’s like seeing a ghost,” Sterry said.

Higginson offered some hopeful words at Friday’s ceremony about “material reincarnation,” that perhaps “it will be recycled and have its spirit live on in some innovative consumer product--a car, a bed frame, an appliance.”

But no one was buying it.

The Prairie will be scrapped, and “that’s the saddest part,” said Hart, the former crane operator.

The cutting up will be done after the Prairie is towed to Singapore, mercifully out of the old sailors’ sight.