Final Years
The WSA then sold her to a private corporation for transporting bananas out of South America. In 1967, the ship suffered a broken crankshaft and was laid up for repair at Tampa, Florida. At that time, Eugene Kinney, McDonald's nephew and Zenith Corporation vice president who had grown up on the Mizpah and served as a naval officer in the South Pacific during World War II, learned of her plight and purchased her. Finding Mizpah's crankshaft irreparably damaged, however, Kinney scuttled her off the coast of Palm Beach, Florida, on 9 April 1968, along with another ship, the USS PC-1174, to serve as an artificial reef to prevent beach erosion.
Sitting in ninety-five feet of water with her hatches purposely removed to enhance her accessibility, Mizpah is now one of the chief attractions of an offshore scuba diver's area known as "The Mizpah Corridor".
Read more about this topic: USS Mizpah (PY-29)
Famous quotes containing the words final and/or years:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
—Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969)
“Social Security is a government program with a constituency made up of the old, the near old and those who hope or fear to grow old. After 215 years of trying, we have finally discovered a special interest that includes 100 percent of the population. Now we can vote ourselves rich.”
—P.J. (Patrick Jake)