Time travel long has been a staple of fiction. However, as appealing as it might be to project ourselves physically to another era, it remains an unrealized fantasy. But mentally—ah, that’s an entirely different matter.
So it is for Ron Waude, president and general manager of the Paine Corporation, a company that produces equipment for use in the aerospace and oceanic industries. While the rest of the country observes the 100th anniversary of the Spanish-American War, Waude can sit in his waterfront Seattle condominium and mentally take himself back to the 40th.
In 1938, he was a grade-school student in Portland, Oregon, drawn to the battleship Oregon, then a memorial on the city’s waterfront. She was the most famous ship that fought in the war—in part because of a dramatic race from Puget Sound to the East Coast, in part because she had the biggest role in the victory at the Battle of Santiago on 3 July 1898.
Waude had a newspaper route and used the income to pay the ten-cent admission price to the Oregon. He went aboard nearly every other weekend in the late 1930s and early 1940s. What he saw was an old ship that was a time capsule of technology and weapons far removed from those days, during World War II.
The ship was for him also a sort of playground. He walked the decks; saw the turrets bearing 13-inch, 8-inch, and 6-inch guns; and observed the compactness of a ship that was in her time among the biggest in the fleet but still only 351 feet long and 11,700 tons in displacement.
In his imagination, Waude traveled back to the era when the United States was just beginning to emerge as a world power and using naval forces as instruments of that emergence. Cuban revolutionaries were restless and eager to throw off Spanish repression. Energized by the explosion of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor in February 1898, the Navy prepared to order the Oregon to come around from the Pacific to be on hand for potential combat.
She was in San Francisco when she received the order to head south on 18 March. Just before departing, the ship received a forceful, courageous new skipper, Captain Charles E. Clark.
Concerned that the Oregon might encounter the Spanish fleet once he got to the Atlantic, Clark made sure the crewmen were well trained and well motivated. He also put some hair on their chests with a run through the ferocious waters around Cape Horn at the tip of South America. On 24 May, the ship arrived in Florida, ready for battle. Her 66- day, 14,000-mile journey demonstrated both the flexibility of naval power and the need for an interocean canal across Central America.
On the morning of Sunday, 3 July, the Oregon was one of the U.S. warships off the harbor of Santiago, Cuba, where Spanish Admiral Pascual Cervera and his squadron of cruisers and destroyers was bottled up. When the Spanish ships emerged, they were blanketed by gunfire from the Oregon, the Indiana, and the Iowa. Because the Oregon had steam up in all her boilers when the fight started, she was able to go in hot pursuit when the Spanish cruiser Cristobal Colon attempted to escape. Firing her 13-inch guns at maximum range, the Oregon put the last enemy ship out of action. The battle was a decisive U.S. victory.
The Oregon remained in the fleet for a while but was quickly outmoded by advances in warship technology. While her contemporaries were sunk as targets in the 1920s, she was preserved because of her wartime achievements and became a floating monument in Portland. In 1942, to the great dismay of Ron Waude and many other citizens of the state, the Navy callously sold the Oregon so her steel could be recycled to help fight World War II. The gesture was more symbolic than useful. In fact, after her superstructure was stripped off, her armored hull was taken to Guam as a dynamite barge, and she was eventually scrapped in Japan in the 1950s.
Today one of the old warrior’s masts remains intact in Portland’s Battleship Oregon Park. And memories of her are scattered throughout Waude’s home. He has a book on the Battle of Santiago, autographed by the author, who was in the ship’s crew during the battle. On the walls are some three dozen framed photos of the Oregon and almost that many more unframed in his files. The highlight is a magnificent oil painting of the ship. Waude spotted it 15 years ago in an art gallery and knew instantly that he wasn’t going to leave without it. Would that the government of the United States had cared about the Oregon as much as he.