THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, September 22, 1995 TAG: 9509220531
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: CHARLESTON, S.C. LENGTH: Short : 48 lines
The ghosts of thousands of sailors hovered over the guided-missile destroyer Kidd on Thursday as it slipped down the gray-green Cooper River, ending almost a century of operations at the Charleston Navy Base.
Admirals in Navy whites and a Pentagon official in a suit assured the crowd of about 1,500 that Charleston would recover from losing the largest domestic base the Navy has ever closed.
But it was small comfort to 67-year-old Hilda Kizer, who has worked at the base longer and knows it more intimately than anyone.
While enlisted sailors and officers have come and gone, Kizer has worked here for 51 years.
Starting in the shipyard during World War II at age 16, she now works as a top administrator in the base commander's office. But the only thing remaining for the commander to do, now that operations at the base have ceased, is to secure the buildings and prepare it for closure in April.
``I would never have imagined it,'' she said. ``I hate to see this. When you work with people for so long they become part of the family. I feel like I'm a grandmother to all of them.''
The end of the era was noted Thursday with bagpipe music, speeches and a silent salute from a solitary tug boat spraying streams of water in the air as the ship faded in the distance.
The base, formally established in 1902, had grown to the Navy's third-largest homeport by the late 1980s, with 80 ships and submarines.
Now only two remain - a submarine tender and a destroyer under repair. For the ceremony, the Kidd was borrowed from Norfolk Naval Base, the Navy's largest, to which many Charleston ships were transferred.
Redevelopment efforts aren't going well. The process has been stymied by local political infighting and now a third redevelopment commission is trying its hand at finding new uses for the base. ILLUSTRATION: ASSOCIATED PRESS photo
Chief Petty Officers Bill Watkins, left, and Stanley Richards take
down the commissioning pennant at a base closing ceremony for the
Charleston Naval Base on Thursday.
KEYWORDS: BASE CLOSING by CNB