significance of those teak walls was just being lost to the people who were passing through the cafeteria,” Valdez said. “If you look at the planks closely enough, you can see fire markings from battle. People died on those decks.” In fact, a number of sailors on the battleship were killed during a kamikaze attack in the Philippines, and during numerous battles over the course of the war. “To those of us who served on the Colorado, that decking has a hallowed meaning, because it was baptized with the blood of our shipmates,” said Ken Jones, now 86, who was a heavy machine gun operator on the Colorado from 1944 to 1945. Jones recalled maintaining the teakwood decks and, at times, sleeping on them. “Those decks were not painted; there was just bare wood showing,” Jones said. “We spent many an hour scrubbing the deck, hosing it down, removing the water with squeegees, then swabbing it down. Those decks were clean enough to eat off of.” Since the Colorado was not air-conditioned, Jones sometimes took a blanket and slept outdoors on the teakwood deck. “The problem there was by the time I got to sleep, we’d run into a rain squall,” Jones recalls. “I’d then have to grab my blanket and run below deck and wait out the rain.” The Colorado’s crew, including Jones, witnessed the Japanese surrender on board the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay in August 1945. Valdez, a U.S. Navy veteran and a USO Northwest board member, said she was delighted when Lombardi asked whether the USO might want to make use of the teak. The new USO center at Sea-Tac Airport will replace an older facility that’s about half the size, which has been providing hospitality to service personnel and their families since 1966. When it opens, the 7,500-square-foot (700-square-meter), $1.7 million facility will better accommodate the approximately 10,000 local and traveling military personnel who visit it each month. In July 2013, the project received a $335,000 donation from the Boeing Employees Community Fund, which played a big role in helping to get it underway. Don Leingang, executive director of the USO Northwest, also a Navy veteran, said there is enough decking to cover most of the floor of the new facility. It will be given a coating to help protect it from damage, and signage will be used to tell the story of the Colorado and the significance of the decking. “The teak decking is an amazing piece of history,” Leingang said. “But even more important is the mere fact that Boeing employees immediately thought of the USO as the appropriate location for its new home.” The USS Colorado, launched in March 1921, had an interesting history even before World War II. In July 1937, famed aviator Amelia Earhart and her co-pilot, Fred Noonan, disappeared while flying in a Lockheed Electra from New Guinea to Howland Island. The USS Colorado, which was on a training mission, joined the search. While the Colorado continued to search for nearly a week, Earhart and Noonan were never found. What happened to them is one of the great mysteries in aviation history. Seattle’s Museum of Flight recently acquired one of the few remaining Model 10-E Electras, which duplicates the appearance of Earhart’s plane and is on display in the Museum’s Great Gallery, along with other Earhart memorabilia—soon to include a small share of teakwood from the deck of the battleship that helped search for her and was later salvaged, not once but twice, by Boeing. n william.j.seil@boeing.com PHOTOS: (Far left) U.S. Navy veteran Ken Jones, shown with a replica he’s building of the USS Colorado, the ship on which he served in World War II. ASSOCIATED PRESS (Insets, from top) Don Burnside of BNB Construction stacks teak planking removed from a Boeing cafeteria wall; the teak was donated to USO Northwest, shown, for a new facility; Jeff Doan, left, Boeing Site Services planner, shares a sample of the planking with Museum of Flight Curator and Director of Collections Dan Hagedorn for inclusion in the museum’s Amelia Earhart exhibit. MARIAN LOCKHART/BOEING Frontiers March 2014 35
Frontiers March 2014 Issue
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