It was the fall of 1953. America was involved in the war in Korea, and my husband, Dean Weibel, had enlisted in the U.S. Navy nearly three years before. His ship, the USS Lenawee (APA-195), had returned from the war zone and was now stationed in San Diego, making weekly training runs out of port and returning on the weekends. This continued until spring of 1954, when we found out the Lenawee was due to go to Hawaii for dry dock, which was a periodic happening for those big warships. Next, we found out that the crew could take their dependents along on the sail to Hawaii.
How excited we were to be able to have a second honeymoon in Hawaii, courtesy of the U.S. Navy! We were able to take our car and everything we could fit into it, so loaded it up with our household necessities, and on the Monday before Easter that year, we sailed out of San Diego Harbor headed for Pearl Harbor on Oahu. We arrived the Monday after Easter and lived there for three months while the Lenawee was being refurbished and made ready for more service.
Our parents were likewise as excited as we were that we would be going to Hawaii — after all, how lucky we were to be able to live in Hawaii in the 1950s. Meanwhile, my dad, Ken Cone, who was working for Clark County in the roads department, was remembering his days during World War II at Vancouver’s Kaiser Shipyards. He was in the engineering department that was responsible for taking the finished vessels down the Columbia River, performing trial runs on them, and turning them over the U.S. Navy at Astoria, Ore.
Dad looked through the old files he had saved on each of the ships he went on the trial runs with, and — wouldn’t you know it — he found out that the USS Lenawee was built right here in Vancouver at the Kaiser yards. It was a real family affair because my husband’s father, George (Archie) Weibel, worked on the outfitting dock in the shipyards during those years and no doubt had worked on the Lenawee as well.
