From the collection of Dave Rees
 

Hello! Your website is a terrific resource for the America! Thanks!
   I thought you might enjoy some pics of the S.S. America model I made that is radio-controlled.
   She is 55 inches long from stem to stern. She was built last May and has been through many adventures and sometimes-too-exciting voyages. Here are some nice pics I got on yesterdays cruise. Please enjoy. I love showing her off.
   Anyway, please enjoy the pics and keep up the good work!

Best wishes,

Barrett Hochhaus
 

Bill Lee SS America fan and ship's historian writes on 3/13/04

This is not another picture taken after her forward funnel was removed, but a rare image of her during construction with just her forward funnel installed.   The following picture was obviously taken sometime in the winter of 1939/1940.   There is ice in the water - unusual for the fairly salty James River.   But then, its also unusual to see a color photograph from that era.



Her funnels were prefabricated (probably in - or adjacent to - the yard's sheet metal shop) and each installed in one big assembly, using the 'hammerhead' crane that dominates this image.   I have seen pictures of both funnels 'on the hook' in old shipyard publications, but have yet to find any photographs of her while the funnels were being raised in June of 1940.

In the background is the superstructure that supported the gantry-type cranes that serviced the sliding shipway that was her birthplace.   The big crane, the skeleton-like steelwork and that sliding shipway are long gone; replaced by more modern shipbuilding facilities.

09/13/2009

Bill Lee Writes 

   As so often happens, on a rainy day here, I was looking through my old - very old - NNS Apprentice School yearbooks for something entirely different - a particular memory of when I was an Apprentice.
 
  While I found what I was looking for, I also discovered the following picture.

  Most of the people in this picture are of no interest to most of you - except, perhaps, one.   The elderly gentleman, third from the right, is VADM (Retired) Emory S. Land - and at the time was one of the yard's 'outside' directors. As the first Chairman of the US Maritime Commission, he presided over her lengthy and trailblazing subsidized contract formation as 'MC Hull #1' and then actually 'drove' two of the first rivets installed in the keel of AMERICA on August 22, 1938.

   And it was Admiral Land who was personally ordered by President Roosevelt to requisition the AMERICA in May of 1941 and convert her to the troop transport USS WEST POINT.

  I suspect seeing her in 1957, mid-career as a transatlantic ocean liner, brought back many memories for him.