Wayne Irwin Cdr.

The Hopewell badly needed an overhaul when I reported aboard.  The Fletcher class destroyer was a wonder when it was designed in 1939.  It's 36 knot speed and five, five inch guns made it the most powerful destroyer in the world.  Hundreds were build during the war. The fast carrier task forces that reinvented naval warfare could not have been formed without Fletcher's as ASW screen and AA umbrella. You may remember when she took part in a demonstration off San Diego in the Fall, 1963.  It was put on for the incoming SecNav. He was aboard the carrier we plane-guarded  while he observed flight ops.  We took position off the starboard beam of the carrier for him to observe us fire a full hedgehog pattern.  Then Hopewell went alongside and highline SecNav aboard.  ( You can imagine my worry about dropping SecNav into the Pacific.)  I took him on a tour of the ship.  That was intended to show him that the WW II  navy ships had been worn out fighting two wars and the cold war.  Also to show that twenty-five year old designs simply could no longer be economically upgraded.    I regret that your source for some material on a website be from the 1965 cruise book.  It was a disaster.  The man who collected the money in advance was discharged shortly after the ship returned to San Diego from deployment in Feb 65.  He took the money with him.  I belatedly learned that little or no work had been done to compile or edit the book.  A crash effort resulted in an slender cruise book.  The FBI persuaded the man to return the cruise book money.  I suggest you obtain copies of all the different Hopewell cruise books for reference when compiling the website. (Wasn't a cruise book published for the Hopewell's deployment from late '62 to early '63?) Hopewell was decommissioned in San Diego in 1969.  It was sunk as a target off San Diego in '72.  I don't know what weapon was used to sink it, perhaps a cruise missile then being developed. 

I served in six ships.  All had been built  during WW II, and all have long since been decommissioned and scrapped, like me. My second career was as a community college teacher in Merced, California.  My subjects were physical geography and world regional geography, a discipline I had studied at Stanford.  I retired from teaching in 1988, and we built a home in the Sierra Nevada foothills near Sonora, CA, near an airport.  I resumed civilian flying in 1970, the year I retired.  I made an experimental homebuilt airplane in the early 80's, flew it for ten years and sold it in 1994.  I started building two Questair Venture experimental kit airplanes in 1990.  I started the Venture Association in 1999.  I'll use the custom signature to give you the website for that.  If you have absolutely nothing else to do, check it out. Wayne Irwin