Remember the Maine!
The American battleship U.S.S. Maine ACR-1, which mysteriously sank in Havana harbor in 1898, an incident that led to the Spanish-American War, continues to have California connections! Two men were arrested at around 3:15 PM yesterday after an alert worker at Schnitzer Steel, a scrap metal recycler on Embarcadero West in Oakland, recognized a ring-shaped piece of brass that was over 2,000 pounds to be part of a ship. The ring was used to port torpedoes on the battleship Maine, and had been STOLEN from its concrete base in Lakeside Park on Friday night! Parts of the Maine were shipped all over the U.S. after the sinking in 1898, and the torpedo port was incorporated into a monument.
Scrap brass can currently bring $1-3/pound when recycled.
Photographers “remember the Maine” as the result of a statement supposedly made by another Californian, William Randolph Hearst, who sent artist Frederic Remington to Cuba after the sinking. Supposedly, when Remington cabled that all was quiet, with no war in sight, Hearst fired back, “You supply the pictures, I’ll supply the war” (although others say that this is a myth). The resulting Spanish American War fueled the newspaper industry in New York City, where Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World and Hearst of the New York Journal battled for dominance. Both men blamed the Spanish for the sinking and published details in the type of incendiary language that became known as “yellow journalism.”
A mortar from the Spanish American War decorates part of the grounds of Hearst Castle, near an outdoor pool, on the Central Coast of California.
Hearst died of a heart attack in 1951 at age 88, in Beverly Hills, and is buried in Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Bay-Area Colma (a necropolis with the city motto, “It’s great to be alive in Colma” 
).
-Bill at
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