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Mike Dubost -> RE: Museums worth a stop or specific trip (5/31/2018 2:56:27 AM)
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I have a couple of suggestions.
Quite a few years ago, I was in the Boston area and I went aboard the cruiser Quincy. My father had been there shortly before and mentioned that he’d gotten a tour of the engine room. When I asked about this, the volunteer I spoke to said that they normally did not do that. However, it was a slow day, and I had asked, so he would. Then we went down the engine room and he proceeded to spend nearly an hour pointing out all the machinery and telling me stories of his time in the engine room of a similar cruiser. I got the impression that I was one of his better recent audiences.
If you are in the San Francisco area and want to see some military sites, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) has shore defenses of multiple time periods. Everything from Fort Point (right under the south side of the Golden Gate bridge) to the Nike Hercules missile batteries on the headlands north of the bridge.
When I was in grade school, I recall visiting Fort Point and seeing a reproduction of the plans for the fort hanging in the visitor’s center, complete with facsimile of the approval of the plans by Secretary of War Jefferson Davie. Yes, that Jefferson Davis. I later read Richard Henry Dana’s account of his return to California in the late 1850’s, in which he mentioned visiting the fort under construction. The engineer in charge was “the son of the celebrated Mexican War hero” Robert E. Lee!
By going north of the bridge, you can see Spanish American War vintage shore batteries, and some WWII vintage emplacements too. I am not sure what is open to visitors nowadays, but in the 1980’s, when I was a teen, quite a few of them were more or less open, at most, a chain link fence you could squeeze through gaps in.
I do know that the Nike Hercules batteries are open for visitors. If you look at the GGNRA’s website, you can see when they have docents there.
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