AZ: The History of Arizona podcast · David Rookhuyzen

Episode 234: I Held History in My Hand

·32 min·1 clip

Takeo Yoshikawa said, “For a brief moment, I held history, in my hand.”

The episode opens with a date. It is March 16, 1914, when the keel of the battleship that would become the USS Arizona is laid, and the story moves from shipyard metal to the public ceremony that followed more than a year later in Brooklyn. The launch drew a crowd. Thousands turned out on June 19, 1915, alongside a delegation of Arizona notables including Governor George W.P. Hunt, U.S. Senator Henry Ashurst, and Major General Leonard Wood, all there to see Arizona claim a battleship with its own name and symbolic weight. Esther Hunt gets the honors. She is the governor's 17-year-old daughter, and the episode pauses on the human detail that she had practiced in Prescott by swinging syrup bottles full of water against a fence before breaking two bottles across the ship's hull. The commissioning follows. The Arizona is officially commissioned on October 17, 1916, and the narrative keeps the ship moving through its early service rather than treating the launch as the finish. Then the ship goes overseas. Two years later she is in England with the Utah and the Oklahoma, and soon she is part of the escort for the USS George Washington as it carries President Woodrow Wilson to France, where he would propose a treaty in hopes of peace. The episode then turns local. Instead of staying with admirals and treaties, it names the Arizona men whose deaths or disappearances landed in Arizona homes, from Harvey White and his mother Laura Skeen White to the Phoenix native sons George Allen Birdie Jr. and George Sanford Hollowell. Nogales gets a hard stop. James William Horrocks receives a letter from his wife before he is officially declared missing in action and presumed dead, and the episode uses that detail to show how news moved from the ship to a family mailbox. Yuma appears next. Lewis Edward Clemens and Roy Eugene Wood are remembered as longtime residents, while Harold Pat Patterson's path runs from Texas to the Civilian Conservation Corps to Yuma high school to the Navy, because history likes to complicate any neat local map. The point is not just a list. It is the idea of localizing a national story, which here means following the ripple of one warship into towns, mothers, families, and the long afterlife of names on paper. The closing looks ahead. The episode ends by promising the home front in World War II, the arrival of soldiers and airmen, the racial barriers they would face, and the Thanksgiving Riot that would eventually spill into Phoenix streets.

As heard by us

A battleship history that stays grounded in names, towns, and the people left behind.

Episode 234 follows the USS Arizona from its March 16, 1914 keel laying and June 19, 1915 launch through commissioning, then keeps circling back to the local names attached to its wartime losses.

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Why you'd press play

You want Arizona history that starts on the Brooklyn shipyard floor and ends with named losses and local fallout.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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