San Diego — 'It sure will take up a lot of room," says Allen Beddoe about the USS Midway mooring this fall at Navy Pier, where it is scheduled to become the permanent home to the San Diego Aircraft Carrier Museum. As a young man, Beddoe left New Jersey for 27 years of service in the Navy. Today, at 75, he lives in Clairemont and welcomes the Midway, as an old friend, back to San Diego for its final berth.

Beddoe served as chief radioman on the Midway from 1957 to '59, a peacetime period. "But the Chinese got a little rambunctious once," he says, referring to a dispute in 1958 between Communist China and Taiwan over the islands of Quemoy and Matsu. The United States sent the Midway into the area to do "some patrolling." Beddoe remembers Chiang Kai-Shek "and his entourage" coming onboard during the crisis.

Scott McGaugh does public relations for the Aircraft Carrier Museum project and maintains its website (www.midway.org). He is also writing the first book about the Midway's life story. Largely an oral history, his book will rely heavily on the recollections of people like Allen Beddoe, one of some 225,000 seamen who served on the Midway during its 47-years of active duty.

"The most fortunate thing I did along the way," says McGaugh, "was to save every e-mail that we ever received through the website. Many of them indicated that the e-mailers were Midway vets. So I had a running start in terms of getting the story.

"A neat thing I've been able to do has been, through coincidence, to reunite best friends from 50 years ago." A name comes up over the phone and "The caller will say, 'Haven't talked to him in 47 years.' 'Well, I just talked to him last week,' I reply. And you can hear the man's voice thicken with emotion. 'He's alive?' 'Sure, would you like his phone number?'

"The other thing that's amazing to me is how trusting these men are. This guy from Florida sent me his entire scrapbook. He was a member of the original crew. I'll introduce myself by phone to complete strangers, and they will send me cruise books that they've had for 50 years, which obviously they cherish. I'm touched by that."

The Navy built the USS Midway in Newport News, Virginia, over a three-year period during World War II and commissioned it in September of 1945, only weeks after the war ended. During the Korean War, it plied the waters of the Mediterranean, because, says McGaugh, it was in a class of carriers large enough to handle planes armed with the nuclear weapons the U.S. thought were necessary to deter Josef Stalin. It joined the Pacific Fleet in the mid-'50s, where it remained for the rest of its service.

Many a jet pilot flew sorties over Vietnam from the decks of the Midway. But from 1966 to '70 the carrier was decommissioned for repairs that, according to McGaugh, became controversial for how expensive and long lasting they became. The Midway returned to Vietnam and participated in the mining of Haiphong Harbor in 1972 and intense bombing of the North. After action in the Gulf War, it went on to the Philippines, where it helped evacuate American military personnel from Clark Air Force Base, which had been threatened by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo. In 1992, the Midway came home and was decommissioned. It has been sitting in mothballs in Bremerton, Washington, ever since.

Although its homeport was Alameda, the Midway moved in and out of San Diego many times during its service in the Pacific Fleet. One of its roles off the coast here was to provide training for pilots at Miramar Naval Air Station in landing on and taking off from aircraft-carrier decks.

Some people have worried that when the Midway returns to San Diego, on the downtown side of the harbor, its size will block scenic views. But McGaugh points out that, though large, the ship is only two thirds the size of modern carriers and is not as tall as the Navy's loading depot at the foot of Broadway or some of the Princess Line ships, which tie up a little to the north of the depot.

The Environmental Health Coalition of San Diego thinks that citizens should have more serious concerns, however. Spokeswoman Laura Hunter says, "I recognize that the Midway is a vessel, but it's a vessel that will take up acres of deep open water in San Diego Bay. That will be water that's unavailable to marine life for decades into the future. Who knows how long?"

The Midway project has been required by the California Coastal Commission to create new wildlife habitat in the bay. Still, "We have to get away from this idea that, on a whim, we can fill in San Diego Bay," says Hunter, who believes that putting the Midway at Navy Pier will be like filling in that spot of water with dirt. "Exactly the same thing. Maybe worse, because it will be rusting and discharging." Hunter wrote last summer to the Port District to object to its petitioning the Navy for the conveyance of Navy Pier. "We believe the pier will become contaminated, too, because every other Navy property we've ever looked at is contaminated, and the public is going to have to pay for it.

"We have three carriers here already. We were very opposed to bringing nuclear carriers here in the first place, homeporting them so close to people with no independent oversight, no emergency planning for local residents that's site specific. And we don't need a fourth carrier now. If people want to visit a carrier, the three carriers have tours all the time.

"And what is the purpose?" asks Hunter. "If the purpose is to have a museum that honors Navy history, then what are the options for doing it? People may come out on various sides of that issue, but the point is that we never got to debate where the best place is. Maybe it's the Naval Training Center, maybe it's on one of the bases, and maybe it's in the Midway district. But that never got discussed.

"Another concern we've had is that we do not believe that the funding for the Midway project is available or will be available in the future. In that kind of situation, this vessel will fall onto the backs of the public to pay for its upkeep. It is very expensive to keep those ships up. What will the cost be in one to five to ten years down the road?"

Chuck Nichols denies that the Aircraft Carrier Museum will ever have to rely on public money. For a while Nichols was a paid project manager for the museum project, but now, as a volunteer, he sits on its executive committee and acts as a coordinator with government agencies.

"We've probably got a better funding plan," says Nichols, "than any ship that's ever been donated to a private organization. And we have by far the best location to ensure our revenue stream. We have more maintenance dollars in our budget than any of the others, and yet I think we have a simpler problem, because the ship is much newer than the others that are out there, since this ship was refurbished in late '88 to become the Navy's principal platform in the Gulf War. A lot of these other aircraft carriers have teak decks, which have been on the ships since the early '40s, and those are maintenance nightmares, whereas we have steel decks. And San Diego is much less hard on a vessel than, say, the gulf at Corpus Christi or the Atlantic in the Northeast. The environment is much tougher on things in those places than it is here."

Nichols says that the source of the museum's funding so far has been private donations and guarantees of loans by private individuals. "In the future," he says, "it will be based on the revenue we generate from operating the museum. There will be an admission charge, there will be special events, and other things on the ship that will cost money, like food and beverage.

"When people come to the museum they'll be able to see restored aircraft from prior service back to the Korean War and even older. We have one of the most interesting exhibits of military history anywhere. It's 250 cases of memorabilia from John Paul Jones to the present day. That's been donated to us. It's a marvelous exhibit called the Hovis collection. And we'll have a simulator that allows you to simulate landing on a carrier.

"The museum will be a tremendous tribute to the history of the Navy in San Diego. It will feature the history of naval aviation. Naval aviation from carriers started right here in San Diego. And this will be an education platform as well as an entertainment facility, because we're arranging with the schools to bring their kids through it. The kids will get a history lesson that includes the Midway and its place in the history of United States defense. We'll be showing people how crews go out for extended periods of time and live under difficult circumstances, lonely circumstances, being away from their families in our defense, and I think it's important that people come to grips with that now and then on a more realistic basis than they find in their newspaper. This will allow them to have a reality check and think about the sacrifices that are made to keep this country free."

But the Coastal Commission's Laura Hunter isn't buying it. "We're being sold a bill of goods," she says, "that the museum has all the money it needs to run on private donations forever. I'm very concerned that there's only X amount of dollars that can be invested in historic vessel maintenance. The Midway, the Star of India, the Berkeley, they all compete for a finite pot of public investment. Or maybe it's an environmental protection program. We don't know what tradeoffs we're going to be asked for. Some future project that has a lot of merit or an existing project that's been publicly funded might be sacrificed. What are we not going to have because our public monies go into the Midway?"