Deseret News, by Steve Fidel, Staff Writer: Published on May 5th, 1992

The U.S.S. Salt Lake City earned 11 battle stars during WWII before it was subjected to two aerial atomic blasts and then sunk as a target hull in 1948.

Now the heavy cruiser rests beneath 10,000 feet of water 130 miles west of Long Beach, CA. But its likeness has been re-created in a detailed model on display at the Fort Douglas Museum. Building the Salt Lake City played into a lifelong ambition for Salt Lake modeler Curt Grinaker, whose other naval modeling ventures include passenger and crew figures aboard the Enoch Train clipper ship, finished in 1981 and now on display at the Museum of Church History and Art west of Temple Square; and his re-creation of Christopher Columbus' Santa Maria, which he finished in 1982.

Grinaker undertook the project after modelers calling their group "Utah Ships" had its first meetings at the military museum at Fort Douglas. The group contemplated a major shipbuilding project, but Grinaker decided to build the model solo even though the museum could cover only the cost of materials, which ran about $2,400.

Much of that cost was tied up in research, which also soaked up a lot of time. Grinaker first started asking the National Archives for information about the ship during the fall of 1987. A full year passed before a volunteer at the archives' was assigned to dig out once-classified photographs and original drawings Grinaker used to start assembling the ship, which he finished one year ago.

A fiberglass hull, bought from a California firm, needed only minor modifications to meet construction specifications. The rest of the 1/96-scale model was built from scratch out of fiberglass, aluminum, resin, wood and plastic.

The Salt Lake City underwent several modifications after being launched Jan. 23rd, 1929. Grinaker chose to represent the cruiser after its first major remodeling in May, 1943. His research of the ship's construction and modifications gave him a good dose of World War II history.

The Salt Lake City was returning from Wake Island as an escort for the carrier Enterprise and was 200 miles west of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7th, 1941, when the ship received word of the Japanese Attack. It saw battle action at Wake Island, Midway and Samoa and was part of the task force that launched the B-25 Doolittle raids on Tokyo in April 1942.

American ships were poising to intercept the flow of Japanese vessels maintaining reinforcement to Guadalcanal, when the Salt Lake City sent out one of its catapult-launched search planes. But flares ignited in the cockpit and the plane crashed close to the ship.

Japanese flag officers saw the fire in the darkness and assumed they were seeing the signal flares from their own landing forces, so they responded with a blinker light that gave their location away to the Americans.

The Salt Lake City and companion cruisers, Boise, Helena and San Francisco, began firing on the Japanese ships, which initially thought their own forces were taking them under fire by mistake. About 30 minutes later, the American ships had sunk a Japanese destroyer and a cruiser, had destroyed a second cruiser and crippled a third.

The Salt Lake City continued to fight in the Pacific through the balance of the war with the Japanese. It was headed for deactivation in October 1945 after the war's end when it was diverted to atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll, where it was subjected to two aerial nuclear blasts. The ship was decommissioned Aug. 29th, 1946. It was sunk as a targe hull on May 25th, 1948.

The spectacular war record was one reason Grinaker chose to recreate the Salt Lake City instead of the USS Utah, an older battleship that had been converted to a target ship before it was sunk during the Japanese attack over Pearl Harbor.

At times, Grinaker said he spent 30 to 50 hours a week working on the ship, in addition to his marketing job with AT&T, just to get the project finished. But modeling remains both a professional pursuit and an avenue for adventure and relaxation that has stuck with him since childhood.

Grinaker hopes to win a commission from the museum to build another U.S.S. Salt Lake City - the Navy's Los Angeles-class nuclear attack submarine that was launched in Oct. of 1983.

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