The Keepers
The people who keep her
Nothing of the hull itself was saved — she went to the breakers at New Orleans in 1993. What remains of Newport News is what people chose to keep: artifacts, photographs, memorials, reunions, and the names.
She nearly survived
Twice, preservation reached for her. Within weeks of her final return from Vietnam, the Virginian-Pilot reported plans to make her a museum ship near the Mariners' Museum in her namesake city; in the 1980s the City of Duluth, Minnesota, pursued her for its waterfront. Both came to nothing, and in 1993 she went to the breakers. What the community kept instead was piece by piece — and the keeping is a story of its own.
The Foundation and the exhibit aboard USS Salem
The USS Newport News Museum and Memorial Foundation maintains a museum exhibit and artifact collection in space aboard USS Salem (CA-139) at Quincy, Massachusetts — one of Newport News's own Des Moines-class sisters, preserved as a museum ship. Among the collection is a memorial to Turret No. 2 and the twenty men lost on 1 October 1972. The Foundation lists serving officers and directors and remains the living organization of the ship's veterans, families, and friends.
The Turret No. 2 memorial — twice dedicated
The ship herself began this memorial. On the morning of 12 July 1974, by her own command history, crewmen of the last Vietnam deployment, families of the deceased, Captain Zartman and Chaplain John McElroy, Vice Admiral Finneran, and Mayor Harry Atkinson of Newport News gathered at the Mariners' Museum; Captain Zartman and Master Chief Personnelman William M. Keough unveiled a bronze plaque "commemorating the sacrifice of 20 NEWPORT NEWSmen killed in the Turret II explosion 1 October 1972," and the plaque became a permanent part of the museum. In 2001, Foundation members found the tablet out of sight behind bushes on the museum grounds — and secured it for the exhibit aboard Salem.
The next year the Foundation made the memorial larger. In 2002 its work parties restored Turret No. 2 aboard Salem herself — decades of congealed hydraulic fluid removed, brass polished — and dedicated the sister turret to the Newport News sailors killed in 1972. A visitor who steps into Salem's Turret No. 2 stands inside the memorial.
The bell on the dusty shelf
Her ship's bell spent years in the keeping of the Mariners' Museum in Newport News. In June 2001, by the Foundation's own account, members who had been told it was on display found it instead "gathering dust" on a storage-shed shelf. A long loan campaign followed: the bell went north in a rented truck, and was craned onto Salem's deck with help from Quincy's fire department. It is displayed in the museum aboard Salem now — the ship's own voice, kept.
What else the record tracks
A mooring bitt from the breakers. In January 2001, retired Commander Frank Dengler advised the museum group that he had bought a mooring bitt from the salvage yard where Newport News was being scrapped and taken it to the Battleship Texas area at San Jacinto Park in La Porte, Texas. The Foundation also secured a mooring bitt in 2001 for the Salem museum; whether these are the same bitt or two, the sources do not reconcile — and the site says so rather than guess.
Her name board. The ship's name board is displayed in the Hampton Roads Naval Museum's gallery in Norfolk, above the museum's signature 15-foot model — a model the record notes was built by Bethlehem Steel's Fore River yard as Salem, and has stood in for Newport News through six decades of display. What is truly hers in that gallery is the name board.
The schoolchildren's silver, still voyaging. The silver service the city bought her in nickels and dimes stayed aboard until 1975, then was lent to the city of Newport News for display; in 1977 the Navy reissued it to the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower; and when the submarine USS Newport News (SSN-750) was commissioned on 3 June 1989, silversmiths restored a portion of it for her wardroom — the city's gift sailing on under her name. The submarine's page tells the other half of that story.
Wisconsin Square, Norfolk. Beside the museum battleship Wisconsin in her homeport, the Lone Sailor statue — dedicated 25 May 2002 — stands ringed by bronze plaques for the Norfolk-based ships that met tragedy. Hers is among them; two members of the ship's reunion association represented Newport News at the dedication.
The mothball years, photographed. The record keeps watching her sleep: an official Navy photograph of October 1978 shows three stricken cruisers in Philadelphia's Reserve Basin — Newport News, Springfield, and Northampton — their hull numbers already painted out; and interior photographs taken aboard her at Philadelphia on 30 September 1987 show her preserved machinery spaces twelve years into the sleep.
The December 2000 list. Naval Historical Center correspondence to the Foundation recorded items of hers then available for loan to the Salem museum: the name board (now at the Hampton Roads Naval Museum), her ship's wheel, the builder's plaque, the Navy commendation plaque, and assorted machinery plates. Which of them actually made the journey to Salem, the record does not settle — so the list is printed as the list.
Where the community lives
This site is a tribute, not a home. The Foundation's own website — its reunions, memorial services, artifact collection, and the people who carry the ship's memory forward — lives at uss-newport-news.com. That community is theirs. We defer to it, and we do not speak for it.