Battleship South Dakota Memorial speech
Speech at Sertoma Club by Diane Diekman, July 23, 2024
Good afternoon. Thank you, Ray [Brooks], for inviting me here today, and thanks to all of you for being interested in the Battleship South Dakota Memorial. I would like to introduce Karen Dunham, one of my fellow board members, who is with me today. She owns Dunham Residential Real Estate; I’m sure many of you know who she is. She’s been with the Battleship Memorial since its beginning. She was a sailor at the Naval Reserve Center when it was dedicated in 1969, and she has worked with all the crewmember reunions since then, and she puts together all the ceremonies we do now.
When you first walk into the Memorial, you’ll see a large model of the battleship that was built in 1937 as the design for the newest class of battleship. It has been on loan from the U.S. Navy at the Memorial since it opened. Battleship South Dakota BB-57 was commissioned in March of 1942 during the dark early days of World War II when it looked like Germany and Japan were planning to take over the world.
She went out for a shakedown cruise to check out all the equipment and do some training for the sailors. The crew was probably about fifty percent new recruits. They went from Philadelphia down the East Coast, through the Panama Canal, and headed to the South Pacific in September 1942, to help the Marines at Guadalcanal. For the next three years, other than time spent in shipyards for battle damage repair, she was in the war. She was in Tokyo Bay in September 1945 for the surrender ceremony. With Admiral Halsey onboard, she led the Third Fleet across the Pacific and back to the United States for their triumphal return under the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco in October 1945.
Then back through the Panama Canal, back up the East Coast to the Philadelphia Navy Yard where the South Dakota was placed in the mothball fleet and stayed there until 1962, when the Navy sold her to be cut up for scrap.
At that time, South Dakotans got involved. The Mil/Vets Committee from the Sioux Falls Area Chamber of Commerce sent a delegation to Philadelphia to go through the ship and make a list of the pieces they wanted for a memorial to be built here in South Dakota. They established a 501.3(c) organization—that I am now the president of—and Sioux Falls donated the land at the corner of Kiwanis Avenue and Twelfth Street.
The list they had made of all the components they wanted sent to South Dakota turned out to be far too expensive a freight bill to ship them all here by rail, so maybe only half the list got sent. When these components arrived, there was no place to store them until the Memorial was built, so they were farmed out into garages around town. There must not have been a very good inventory, because pieces were turning up decades after that. One component was found on the bank of the Sioux River that somebody had thrown away. I guess they tired of it being in their garage, or the people died, and the kids cleaned out the garage. They’d see those old pieces of metal in there. We have no idea what happened to a lot of components. If you happen to have a garage that has stuff in it from sixty years ago, you just might have some of the components of USS South Dakota in your garage!
The Battleship Memorial was dedicated in September 1969, and for the next fifty years, it was a lowkey operation, a museum where the crewmembers gathered, starting in 1970, for their crewmember reunions, to reminisce. Over the years it filled up, and they needed to build an addition. So they built the east addition in the 1990s. That filled up, and they built the west addition in 2009.
When I moved home to South Dakota, I was asked in 2011 if I would take over as president, because they needed a new captain. The current captain was 85 years old, and he wanted to retire. That was Dave Witte; I’m sure many of you knew Dave Witte.
I said I’m an aviation officer, but if you want me to be in charge of a battleship, I guess I can do that. But on one condition. I am not a fundraiser person, and if there has to be fundraising done, then I’m not the right person for this job. I’m no Dave Witte, and there is no way I could come up with the kinds of money and the things he did. I was told, no, no, we’re all set, there won’t be any need for fundraising. Well, within three years, we were talking about how we didn’t have enough space.
We had no storage room, we had no classrooms, no office space. When a bus tour arrived, they had to come through in shifts because there wasn’t room for everybody inside at one time. We talked about that for several years, and tried to find a fundraising chair to help us come up with some ideas of how to get some money. We didn’t find anyone.
Then in 2019, we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the dedication of the Memorial, and we realized that we had a new audience. And a new focus. This was no longer a place of reminiscence and remembering, because most of the World War II generation was gone. A lot of our visitors had been born in this new century. To them, World War II was as distant as the Civil War had been to me when I was in school. Our new focus had to be education.
So then, we got serious, and we hired an architect to design an addition. We knew we wanted something that would last for fifty years; we didn’t want to be building a fourth addition another ten years from now. We hired Jeff Nelson and Bob Natz, three of my board members joined them, and those five worked on a design that would keep us inside our existing footprint.
When they showed us the design they came up with, I was completely blown away. They had removed the top of the center part of the Memorial and made a two-story atrium, with a two-story glass bow facing Twelfth Street. The struggle they had while they were working on this design was—is this a museum or a memorial? How do we capture both aspects? Well, they did a masterful job.
The north side would be the memorial. There were benches and waterfalls and a contemplative atmosphere—if you ignored the traffic going by on Twelfth Street! You could go in the north entrance and see the photos of the sailors and their memorabilia, and then go through to the other side.
The south side would be the museum. Sioux Falls Parks & Rec has for years been wanting us to change the front entrance to the south side, where the ballfield parking lots are. This design took care of that. You go in that new front entrance, and you have the store, and the theater, an events center, you go upstairs to the classrooms and the archives and the office space. It was everything we wanted, and we knew it would last for a long time.
The price tag was five and a half million dollars. So how do we get that? Still no fundraising chair. We started with a feasibility study, which we were told you have to have when you’re trying to raise that much money.
And then about that time came COVID, and the South Dakota Military Heritage Alliance bought a building to turn into a military museum. Well, you can’t have two fundraising efforts for two military-type museums in the same town at the same time. Also, the Alliance had another idea. They wanted to build a regional military park in the space where the Armed Forces Reserve Center used to be and the old Elks building used to be; those are now both empty lots, up against the Holiday Inn on Russell Street.
They wanted the Battleship Memorial to move there as the anchor, and they would bring in Army tanks and Air Force planes, and many other military items to make it a multi-day tourism experience. We agreed that we could demolish our fifty-year-old building and build a new one out there, but we insisted we needed enough space that we could replicate the outline of the ship like we have now, the actual size of the battleship, and then build our building inside that. We didn’t want to be part of another building.
That percolated for a while, and then the idea must have died, because I’ve not heard any talk about buying those two pieces of property, and you sort of have to own the land before you can do anything with it. Also, I never heard anything about the design of what the military park would be.
We have decided, for the time being, that we will improve our existing space. We still want to build that new addition someday, but we don’t have the ability to raise funds. We’re re-curating the inside, and we’re trying to do more advertising, a new website and stuff. We have started having an annual USS South Dakota Day of Honor the second Saturday of every August.
That honors the crewmembers and descendants of the three USS South Dakotas, the armored cruiser from World War I, the battleship during World War II, and the submarine that is currently on active duty. This year the program starts at ten o’clock with the brass quintet from the Sioux Falls Municipal Band. Our guest speaker will be former Lieutenant Governor Matt Michels, who was also a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve. We will have one battleship crewmember attending, Leon Gee from California. He’s 98 years old, and he says he will come every year as long as he can. This is a ceremony that Karen has put together. It’s a community event, free to the public, and we hope you’ll come down on the 10th of August to see that.
The museum is open every day of the week, from 9:30 till 5:30 in the afternoon. How we currently get our operating money, we have a little store where we sell things, and we also accept donations. I’ll mention that our board consists of ten members, all volunteers, of course. We run the operation, and our bylaws allow for fifteen board members, so if any of you are interested in being part of this organization, talk to either Karen or me, we’d love to hear from you. Also, if the idea of raising probably eight million dollars by now excites you, we’re still looking for that fundraising chair to help us get the money to eventually build our new building.