President Mike Howe called our hybrid zoom/in person meeting to order promptly at 12:11, and welcomed everyone to today’s meeting.

Sabrina Kemper was our greeter and Sabrina introduced the members who brought guests.

Mike McIntosh announced that fellow Rotarian and former member of our club Valerie Corson passed away September 10.

Kevin Murphy let us know that Whit Bradley is out at Primrose and at age 93 is still delivering Meals on Wheels.

Miamie let us know that Bill Mortimer’s Son Scott is in the hospital with Covid and is not doing well.

Steve Loftin nominated everyone that helped with the Food Bank this last week, Al Scroggins, Dick Wimbish, Becky Byron, and Guy DeWitt. Also, they went up to the falls to figure out how to tighten the cables, he will find a time to go up and tighten them and will let us know.

John Griffith nominated Dan O’Dell for volunteering to take his place on a presentation at District Conference over the weekend when John was unable to go, then he nominated Miamie for actually ending up doing it as Dan was unable to do so.

Lisa Scroggins nominated Miamie for her work with Mimi’s house and the award she received from The KFC Foundation.

Miamie nominated all those who attended District Assembly, Lori Klatt, Lisa Scroggins, and, Edis Allen,

President Howe announced that on September 30th we will have a club social at the Yellowstone Garage and you are encouraged to bring guests. Rotary at the Rockies is this Sunday. Happy Birthday to Charlie Shopp on the 22^nd, Mike Sullivan also the 22^nd, and, Greg Dixson on the 25^th.

Eric Schlidt let us know that they are looking for the next big project for our club, there are surveys on the table and they will also be sent out via email so if you have anything you would like to see us get involved in, please fill out the survey.

Mike Lougee announced that there will be an orientation on Tuesday October 19^th at the Gruner Brothers Brewery, everyone is invited and especially red badgers should attend.

Miamie announced the official numbers for Duck Derby, we sold $51,964 in just ticket sales. Then with sponsors we raised an additional $26,000 for a total of $75,662.10

Dan O’Dell then auctioned off two tickets to Jeff Dunham which Tim Havasi won from Duck Derby and is unable to use them. The money will go back in to End Polio. They Sold for $55 to Michele.

President Mike Howe awarded Lisa Scroggins a certificate from RI for our club achieving all of our goals during her presidency.  

Eric introduced our student today from NCHS, Brooklyn Youmans. What a busy intelligent young lady, very impressive.

Carol Johnson gave her classification talk today. She has lived in 5 different States and has had 3 different distinct careers. She grew up in the Chicago suburbs and received her Poly Sci degree from West Illinois University. After college she moved to Colorado to ski and started her first career in law as a legal secretary then a paralegal, then she went to law school while having a 3-year-old and a new born child. She worked in private practice with Elder Law then went in house ion the energy industry. Her second career was as an elected official, serving as the only woman on two City Councils in Golden and Loveland CO. After serving in elected office, she then switched to her third career working in NP fundraising. She has two groan married children and was able to move to Casper to accept a new position here which unfortunately did not work out so she is currently looking for her next career. She is now starting her service on the City Planning and Zoning Commission and looks forward to serving wherever she can.

Ben Winckler received his Blue badge today, Congratulations.

PE Miamie Sleep introduced our speaker, Brian Schimpf, Docent at the USS Midway Museum in San Diego CA. Brian came to us via Zoom. He also introduced his fellow Docent, Mike Zolezzi who is also joining via Zoom.

He showed us a picture of the Midway that is berthed right downtown easily found. It was named after the battle of Midway, it did not participate in that battle. He gave us the dimensions of that ship which is about 1,000 feet long and 140 feet wide. Fully loaded it sat about 35 feet in the water, now it sits about 29 feet deep. The water displacement is about 69,000 tons. He said that the newest carrier, the USS Gerald Ford has a displacement of about 120,000 tons, so big ships!

There were about 4500 people on the ship when in service, about 2500 of the ships company and 2,000 were from the airwing, which include mechanics and pilots etc. They consumed about 10-15 tons of food daily. The ship was built in VA during WWII was commissioned Sept 10, 1945 so saw no action in WWII. In the mid 1950’s she went through her first transition from being able to support just propellor craft to being able to support Jet aircraft as well. They added an angled landing deck to help be able to land a jet and if it needed to abort it goes angled to the side instead of running into everything at the end of the deck as it would have to on a straight deck. The second modification about ten years later made a more angled and slightly larger landing deck.

It’s first combat tour was in the Vietnam conflict and participated in the evacuation of Saigon at the end of that war. Also participated in Operation Desert Storm then was decommissioned in San Diego in 1992 and taken to Washington State to the mothball yard.

He then gave us a little history on the battle of Midway for which the Ship was named. On June 4, 1942 which was about 6 moths after the attack on Pearl Harbor, American Morale was very low due to the attack. Japan wanted to gain control of Midway Island and destroy the US Aircraft Carriers, Admiral Yamamoto who was the commander of the Japanese Navy during the war had a very good understanding of the importance of Aircraft Carriers to the war effort. So, he was very anxious to take out all of the US Carriers. Thankfully there were none of the Carriers at Pearl Harbor when we were attacked, which was a great disappointment. Midway Island had a US Army Airforce Base on it so that was an important target for the Japanese. Taking Midway would give Japan control of almost the entire Pacific area. Midway is named such because it is midway between the West coast of the US and East Asia.

Midway was the first location of carrier launched aircraft for war purposes. The actual combatant ships were never in actual site of each other, everything that happened was by aircraft launched from the carriers. There were three US carriers involved, The Hornet, The Yorktown, and The Enterprise, and there were four Japanese carriers.

Admiral Yamamoto was hoping to lay a trap in order to destroy all of the carriers and take over the island, however, unknown to him, the Americans had broken the Japanese secret code they used for sending messages and were aware of the trap. So, the US was able to turn the tables and surprise the Japanese. During the battle both sides struggled to locate the other side. Three squadrons of our dive bombers located the Japanese fleet and was able to attack and within 6 minutes 3 of the carriers were attacked and set on fire. A few hours later the fourth carrier was also attacked and destroyed.

The Japanese lost four aircraft carriers, 261 aircraft and over 3,000 men which the majority of were the pilots and crews that knew how to work the carriers which left the Japanese without enough men with this expertise to regroup for the rest of the war.  The US lost the USS Yorktown which sunk and its wreckage was found a few years ago by the same man who found the Titanic, Robert Ballard. We also lost the Destroyer the USS Hammann, 109 Aircraft and 307 men. This was one of the most important Naval battles ever fought and that is why this ship was named after the battle.

The Midway was decommissioned in 1992 in San Diego then was taken to Bremerton WA where the Navy mothball fleet is located. This is where decommissioned ships go while they decide what they are going to do with them. Midway was scheduled to be scrapped but there was a group formed called the San Diego Aircraft Carrier Museum which was founded in 1993 by a group of businessmen and civic leaders who wanted to build a museum of Naval Aviation which began back in the 1920’s in San Diego. So, this group wanted to build this museum and they thought that putting the museum on an actual Aircraft Carrier would be the best way to do so. This generated a little controversy in the beginning but they were able to put to rest all of the objections very amicably. In August of 2003 the Navy Donated the Ship to the museum but required the museum to have $50,000 set aside because they did not feel that the museum would be successful so they wanted to make sure they had the money to return the ship to the mothballs when it failed. In January 2004 the Midway was returned to San Diego harbor and docked at Naval Air Station North Island. They had to do a lot of work to the ship to turn it into a museum and to bring it up to code. They had to do emergency lights, sprinkler system, stairways in place of the ladders, a chain-link fence around the deck and they had to add restrooms and of course a Gift Shop. June 7^th 2004, they had the grand opening and nobody knew what to expect, they had over 3,000 people show up. They are constantly changing their displays and adding new things, especially more aircraft on the landing deck. In 2012 they went over 1 million guests and in 2019 they had over 1.3 million that year. With Covid numbers have dropped but this year they will beat a half of a million.

He then opened it up for questions.

He was asked if the 33 aircraft they have on display were ones that served on the Midway, he said that they have a rule that any of the aircraft they display have to be of the style that actually did serve on the carriers but not necessarily from the Midway. They have several volunteers that served as aircraft mechanics who help put together the planes and they sometimes have to cobble together one plane out of several other planes.

He was asked how much of the ship is open to see, he said that there is so much on the lower decks that is just repetitive of the other decks that they don’t include those in the tour as it would just be boring. He did say that all of the important interesting things are open like the tower, the captain’s seat, the mess hall and one of the engine rooms as well as the flight deck and airplanes. He said that it is so big that it takes a long time to see it all.

  

 

President Mike Howe concluded the meeting at 1:03, he let us know that next week, we will be back at the Ramkota and our guest speaker will be Tina from Never Forgotten 77 who will speak about Suicide Awareness.

 

“We serve to change lives”