Navy Center Turns 40 Amid Changes

Miss Nemesis does not fit in the new Navy.

Discharged along with typewriters and no-girls-allowed warships, the annual beauty pageant of the Port Hueneme missile control center folded decades ago to make way for a more liberated Woman of the Year award.

It’s one of many changes that NEMESIS, which stood for Naval Ship Missile Systems Engineering Station, has undergone since it opened in 1963. Now called the Port Hueneme Naval Surface Warfare Center, the facility celebrated its 40th anniversary Tuesday.

Home to Tomahawk cruise missile testing and a hub for warship radar and weapons development, the place is not the same as it was when Olga Webb arrived there in the facility’s first weeks.

Most women in the Navy then were secretaries or nurses. A 58-man crew operated the center that now employs nearly 2,300 people.

Webb, who organized the pageant, was a secretary to six captains, a base counselor for alcoholic sailors and president of the center’s alumni association before retiring in 1996.

She is one of four surviving “plank owners” -- people who worked at the center during its opening weeks -- honored by the more than 100 people at the anniversary ceremony at the center on Naval Base Ventura County. All but one of the founders has retired.

Life inside the base’s command center will continue to change as more women filter in and the Navy cuts the size of ship crews to make way for new weapons and communications systems, speakers said. Webb sees the disappearance of Miss Nemesis as just another ripple in 40 years of progress.

“We women became more liberated ... and we got more away from the beauty part of it and more into the talent,” she said. “Now we have engineers, technicians” who are women.

In fact, even the Woman of the Year award has been replaced -- by a nongender-specific award.

Despite all the social and operational changes, Capt. Alan Maiorano said the center’s mission remains the same.

“If you boil away all the big words, it’s pretty simple,” he said. “We provide our sailors with the confidence to go in harm’s way.”