Building on Their Past

John P. Langellier thinks you oughta be in pictures. And someday he hopes to put you there.

With a little computer magic, he would slip you into the 1944 movie “The Fighting Seabees.” There you’d be riding with John Wayne, ignoring withering enemy fire, as he heroically maneuvers a bulldozer up to an enemy tank and topples it with his earthmoving blade.

Langellier is the new director of the Civil Engineer Corps/Seabee Museum, housed in two massive, 50-year-old Quonset huts at the U.S. Navy Construction Battalion Center at Port Hueneme. He was showing around a group of visitors one recent morning when he stopped and stared into one of the antiquated display cases and began forecasting five years into the future.

“I can see a CD-ROM, a touch screen, where you can access data and move it around. Where you can allow yourself to be in ‘The Fighting Seabees’ right there with John Wayne for a few moments,” he said. He was describing an attraction similar to the “star in your own movie” exhibit he helped design eight years ago when he worked at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Los Angeles.

The 45-year-old Langellier speaks rapidly, his eyes lively and expressive, his excitement palpable. His enthusiasm has spirits soaring among the brass on the base as well as among business leaders in surrounding communities.

“Anything that we can do that gets people up here is a plus,” said Kevin Bernzott, the president of the Oxnard Chamber of Commerce. “If people are going to come up and see that museum, maybe they can lodge in some of our hotels.”

Bernzott and others are intrigued by Langellier’s estimate that an additional 10,000 people a year will flock to Port Hueneme if the old-fashioned museum--with its aging weapons, portraits of retired officers and mannequins wearing old uniforms--is transformed into a high-tech cultural attraction.

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A professional museum specialist who has written books, advised filmmakers and earned a doctorate degree, Langellier also has a deeply personal interest in this assignment. His father, Donald B. Langellier, was a World War II Seabee who wanted to return to Ventura County but fell ill with leukemia and died in 1960 at the age of 47.

“He was a history maker and I’m a history teller,” Langellier said. “He always talked about Port Hueneme and what a wonderful area it was and how he always planned to move back here someday. He didn’t make it, so now I’m going to carry on.”

A sheet-metal worker from Illinois, the elder Langellier was one of the sailors who designed and nailed together combat-zone military bases, performing such legendary feats as carving runways out of jungles. Their motto was--and still is--construimus batuimus (“we build, we fight”).

Many Seabees returned stateside with the spoils of war--small enemy weapons, tools, uniforms, civilian clothes, household utensils, foreign currency and captured flags. The booty piled up here until about 1947, Langellier said, when somebody thought of putting it on display for visitors.

“This didn’t start as a museum,” said head docent Jack Caughman, a retired Navy captain. “We have two big old Quonset huts built in the ‘40s. They used one as a post office; the other was a beer hall.”

The collection grew, forcing out the Postal Service and then the beer hall, which was moved a short distance and became a tavern called Duke’s. Now located just inside the base’s Sunkist Street entrance on Ventura Road, the 25,000-square-foot museum attracts 40,000 visitors annually--mostly local schoolchildren, new Navy recruits, active-duty personnel passing through and vacationing military retirees.

Former Seabees comprise most of the 1,500-member CEC/Seabee Historical Foundation, a nonprofit group that would pay for the multimillion-dollar museum modernization. The president of the foundation, Rear Adm. Arthur W. Fort, said the group will launch a major fund-raising effort, seeking private and corporate donations, before the end of the year.

“The museum will need to be replaced within five years, and it’s going to cost in excess of $5 million,” Fort said. Under the law, he added, the task of building or improving museum facilities falls to nongovernmental organizations. The Navy’s role is to repair, operate and staff the museum.

Which is why Langellier, a Navy civilian employee, was brought in, base spokeswoman Linda Wadley said. He joins historian Vincent Transano, who will continue as the curator of records and documents.

“We need to upgrade the exhibits so the Seabee story is more intelligible, more interesting and more easily accessible,” said Langellier, striding through the museum. Visitors feel overwhelmed, he said, because virtually every bit of the collection is on display. There are rows of flags in the rafters and photo exhibits in the short corridors between the main galleries.

The sheer variety of Seabee lore and Americana appeals to many different visitors.

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Among the younger generation, the most popular exhibits are model ships and the old weapons and uniforms, said schoolteacher Velda Patton of Oxnard’s Art Haycox School, describing a recent field trip.

“But we could have used some more audiovisual components,” she said. “That would have been really nice.”

Langellier has firsthand experience with one of the more vivid examples of a high-tech museum exhibit. As director of publications and productions at the Autry cowboy museum, he and Disney engineers joined to create an attraction with a saddle in front of a blue screen that projects youngsters into a Western movie with dozens of horseback-riding gunmen firing at each other. The 90-second scene ends in a spectacular train wreck.

“I had to watch 50 movies to get 12 snips of film for that minute and a half,” Langellier said.

His former boss, museum executive Joanne Hale, said the movie attraction is one reason the Autry draws about half a million visitors a year.

“Believe me,” she said, “technology is where it is. You’re forced into it because this is what people want.”

Even though Langellier is ready to use such tricks of his trade to tell the Seabee story to younger visitors, the museum has a special place in the hearts of the older generation. Those who can remember World War II enjoy the old books of ration coupons and posters glorifying Rosie the Riveter, the proverbial housewife on the aircraft assembly line.

Older Seabees can pause at a display honoring Marvin G. Shields, the only Seabee to win the Congressional Medal of Honor. Or they can step into the small chapel and pay quiet respects to fellow sailors who laid down their lives for their country.

On a lighter note, they can view whimsical exhibits such as the cartoon showing Seabees casually welcoming ashore invading Marines. Or they can revisit the creation of the corps logo, a determined-looking bumblebee wielding a machine gun and construction tools, which was designed by illustrator Frank J. Iafrate in 1942.

The bee was created about the time the late Adm. Ben Moreell launched the corps of fighting construction workers who could defend a position while building a base on it. Moreell is commemorated with a room-sized re-creation of his Port Hueneme office as it looked in the late 1950s, complete with a mannequin at the desk wearing his uniform.

Hearkening back to World War II, there are numerous recruiting posters that speak volumes about America’s need to attract the older men, such as Langellier’s father, who had journeyman skills.