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USS Indiana model sub makes star-spangled stop at courthouse
Driving down Hoosier highways, towing a replica of the submarine USS Indiana with his big black Ford pickup truck, Ray Shearer was destined to get some strange looks and odd comments.
“People pass you, and then you see them turn around like this,” Shearer, the chairman of the USS Indiana Commissioning Committee, said Tuesday afternoon, pantomiming someone trying to take a photo from a moving vehicle while holding their cell phones out with one hand.
And when they catch up to Shearer, who has embarked on a mission of taking a photo of the USS Indiana replica in front of every courthouse in the 92 Hoosier counties, inquiring minds often want to know what that was rolling along behind his truck.
“Is it a smoker?” he offered. “I get that one a lot. Is it a bomb? Is it a missile?”
Indeed it is a model of the real nuclear-powered sub that is nearing completion (95 percent, he said) at the Newport News, Va., ship-building yards.
”The real one is basically goalpost to goalpost (as on a football field),” Shearer said, specifying it is 377 feet long and 36 feet wide while having a crew of 135 on board.
“What makes this so special,” Shearer said, “is that Hoosier hands are building the Hoosier boat.”
More than 100 Indiana companies have been involved in supplying elements of the USS Indiana, he said.
“That’s pretty special. All the steel is coming out of Burns Harbor,” Shearer said, noting that the (nuclear) reactor was made in Mt. Vernon, while the sub’s back-up diesel generator came from the Caterpillar plant in Lafayette.
The weapons and defense systems were made at Fort Wayne and Columbia City, he added, while “a whole lot of stuff was done at Crane (Naval Depot, southwest of Bloomington).”
That was part of the motivation for Shearer to tour Indiana’s 92 counties and snap photos of the replica sub in front of the courthouse as he did about 2 p.m. Tuesday in Putnam County, marking the 68th county he could cross off his list.
It had been a busy day for Shearer by the time he pulled up on the north side of the square to be greeted by District 44 State Rep. Jim Baird and others. Greencastle was his last stop on a day that included a stint in the Linton Fourth of July parade and photo ops with the Vigo County Courthouse in Terre Haute, Owen County Courthouse at Spencer, Greene County Courthouse at Bloomfield, Morgan County Courthouse at Martinsville and the Clay County Courthouse at Brazil.
Besides having 24 more courthouses on his agenda, Shearer plans to have the model sub on hand for Navy Week with five sailors from the real vessel due to visit Indianapolis during the Aug. 7-13 Indiana State Fair.
Meanwhile, the real sub was floated for testing a couple weeks ago and is slated to go out for sea trials in December and January, Shearer said. It has been christened but not yet commissioned (a commissioning ceremony will likely occur early in 2018).
The next-generation “fast attack” Virginia-class submarine will be outfitted with Tomahawk cruise missiles. As one of the quietest operating subs in the U.S. fleet, it is also designed for special forces delivery and support.
Dozens of onlookers and visitors got a glimpse of the model USS Indiana in the two hours it was deployed on the north side of the square Tuesday afternoon.
Shearer had many of them sign a book that lists the county-by-county stops he’s made on his photo-op tour. He plans to present the book to the crew of the sub once it is commissioned.
In the meantime, someone suggested taking the model sub out to the Big Walnut Creek for a test run.
“It’ll submerge all right,” Shearer assured. “It’ll just be a little problem coming back up.”