Author Topic: Navy is retiring the last of its storied cruisers. To San Diego veterans, they were ‘the pinnacle of  (Read 64 times)

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Navy is retiring the last of its storied cruisers. To San Diego veterans, they were ‘the pinnacle of naval power’

By GARY ROBBINS THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE •
 
SAN DIEGO (Tribune News Service) — Falling in love can happen in a snap. Dave Hatzenbuehler knows this from the way he responded nearly a half-century ago upon noticing a big, brooding presence in San Diego Bay. He’d caught sight of a Navy cruiser, a famously dynamic type of ship that had been turning heads since the 1880s.

This one was the USS Long Beach, a muscular brute measuring 721 feet from stem to stern. It also was the world’s first nuclear-powered missile cruiser. “It was so powerful and sleek and beautiful,” recalled Hatzenbuehler, who was vacationing in San Diego at the time. “I joined the Navy as soon as I went home to Dallas.

I wanted to be on a ship like that.” This wasn’t a singular response, or a random one.

Read more at: https://www.stripes.com/branches/navy/2025-08-17/san-diego-navy-cruiser-18790655.html
Source - Stars and Stripes
The unity of government which constitutes you one people is also now dear to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very liberty which you so highly prize. But as it is easy to foresee that, from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth.  George Washington - Farewell Address