Most were teenagers when they boarded the ship more than seven decades ago. One was born just a few months after workers bolted together the first steel plates for the ship's hull. A narrow miss, a repository of memories - a tragedy to be forgotten, one that never could be.

The crewmen who witnessed that final morning and lived knew the Arizona as something else. Three hundred thirty five men would escape death.ДЄnd as the ship rested beneath the water of Pearl Harbor, in the decades that followed, it only grew larger in meaning.ДЄ nation knew the Arizona as the catalyst for a world war, a nuclear war, a cold war and generations of peace that came with the vigilance and burdens of a superpower. One thousand, one hundred seventy-seven members of the Arizona's last crew would forever seal their fates to that of the ship named for the desert state. Twenty-seven years after Esther swung the two bottles toward the ship's prow, the ship would sit, moored safely in Hawaii's Pearl Harbor, and become the center of the Japanese attack that pulled the United States into World War II. George Hunt to select Esther.Д«ut in that defining moment, she would draw the United States into a global conflict, one that would distinguish a generation and change the course of history. When the Navy announced it would name its new battleship after the 48th state, Ross decided he wanted his daughter to serve as sponsor at the christening. Miss Ross, as the New York papers called her, was 17 years old, the daughter of William Ross, a prominent pharmacist back home in Prescott. Workmen pounded away at supports beneath the hull, which sat on the slideways above the surface of the water. From the platform, the crowds looked like a sea of straw hats and frilly bonnets. Tens of thousands of people had gathered near the Brooklyn Navy Yard along the East River in Brooklyn. The hull measured 600 feet and the center beam was almost 100 feet across. The ship wore a red coat on this day, a temporary one of primer that would be covered soon with the flat gray of a battleship. He motioned toward two bottles, one filled with sparkling wine from Ohio, one with water from Roosevelt Lake in Arizona, and then toward the prow of the ship, a vessel soon to take its place at sea as the mightiest battleship in the world. Esther Ross strained to hear as a man in Navy whites repeated once more the steps required to christen a battleship.

Burly men at sea walk