(Classic Olympia Beer label, circa 1914. Legacy Copyright SABMiller Corp.)
 
I remember the slogan for Olympia-brand beer, from the Great Pacific Northwest. Maybe you do, too. “It’s the water!” they proudly proclaimed in the days when there were three television channels and life made a certain non-ironic sense.
 
I haven’t seen any Oly beer around in a while, which is completely understandable.
 
The brand had a good run. Olympia was a very popular regional brand in the Pacific Northwest  for half of a century, eventually expanding nation-wide with appeal to the low-priced lager market and the snappy advertising. The brewery acquired Hamms and Lone Star in the 1970s, the former being a brew from the “Land of Sky Blue Waters” and the other one from the tepid Rio Grande, which in some places dries up altogether.
 
I understand the end of the brand began when the President of the company was caught in one of those embarrassing “wide stance” things in a public rest room like Senator Larry Craig (former R-ID), only the times then were not quite as progressive as they are now.
 
The scandal made the brand subsequently slip through the hands of Pabst, G. Heileman, and Stroh’s of my hometown Detroit, eventually being relegated to the avaricious hands of beer conglomerate SABMiller.
 
The Miller people (Less Filling! More Taste!) shut the doors in 2003, since economies of scale at the little facility in the Northwest made it an unprofitable enterprise.
 
That was about the time I ceased to care about budget lagers and began to concentrate my consumerism on budget high-octane vodkas like Popov, whose brand slogan: “It’s Oblivion!” works for me and this decade perfectly well.
 
Anyway, the only reason I bring that up is that it is water and Olympia that is causing me to take a train this morning. In this case, it is seawater (“It’s the Salt!”) and the former USS Olympia (C-6/CA-15/CL-15/IX-40), a magnificent and final example of the “protected cruiser” (“It’s the steel!) that ruled the waves in the days before HMS Dreadnaught appeared on the scene and made them irrelevant.
 
She was on active service in the United States Navy from her commissioning in 1895 until 1922. She served as the flagship of Commodore George Dewey at the Battle of Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War in 1898. She was the fulcrum of the great lever that moved America’s presence in the world hierarchy of imperialism after Manifest Destiny was achieved.
 
Olympia was decommissioned for the first time after returning to the United States in 1899, but returned to active service in 1902, and served as a training ship for naval cadets and as a floating barracks in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1917, she was mobilized again for war service, patrolling the American coast against the U-Boat scourge and escorting transport ships like the one that took my Grandfather to France.
 
Following the end of World War I, Olympia participated in the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War in 1919, and conducted cruises in the Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas to promote peace in the unstable Balkan countries, which turned out to be a century-long mission she could not complete any more than the rest of the SIXTH Fleet could.
 
Her last official act was to transport the remains of The Unknown back from the fields of France to the Washington Navy Yard, for further transportation to the solemn ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. She was again decommissioned in December 1922 and placed in reserve.
 
She was last out of the salt water in 1946, when the Navy Department gave up on her.

Olympia then languished on the hook until 1957, when the government ceded title of the grand old lady to the Cruiser Olympia Association, which restored the ship to its 1898 configuration. Since then, she has been pier-side as a museum ship in Philadelphia, and now part of the Independence Seaport Museum.
 
She is the oldest steel warship still afloat, though that comes with an asterisk. Admiral Togo’s IJN flagship Mikasa is older, but not afloat, having been fixed in a concrete lagoon long ago. Olympia is actually still floating, and never had the indignity of being un-gunned and put to use as a dancehall for Allied troops as Mikasa did. The problem is that the water- the salt being the corrosive substance that it is- has eaten the hull down to the thickness of a pencil in some places, and weak enough that you can push through with a finger.
 
Times being what they are, the Museum has been unable to fund essential maintenance for the old ship, and attempts to secure outside funding have failed thus far, though I sent them a crisp twenty.
 
The museum says it may have to sell the ship for scrap or sink her as an artificial reef. I suspect that is a strategy on their part to induce panic in the minute segment of the population that has any recollection of the impact of what Olympia represents in our history, or what she did for the generations that passed with our Great Grandparents.
 
The season closes soon, and I am not taking any chances. A former Main Propulsion Assistant Chief Engineer from the Good Ship Forrestal CV-59 (“First in Defense!) was as alarmed as I am, and imposed on the over-tasked volunteers who serve Olympia for a special below-decks tour not available to the casual visitor, and thus I have the chance to see the steel lady in her underwear while she still lives under the sun, and not the waves.
 
It is the water that is implacable and not to be denied. I will have more on this after the trip, but you can rest assured that after the tour, I am damned well going to have a beer.

(ex-USS Olympia at her berth in Philly. Photo courtesy Wikiepedia Commons)
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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