Alcohol had just been outlawed in Arizona, so a compromise was struck when the new state’s namesake battleship was launched on June 19, 1915. Two bottles were used to christen the USS Arizona — one filled with champagne, the other with water from Roosevelt Lake on the freshly dammed Salt River.
The champagne bottle from that ceremony has spent the past few decades on display inside the student union at the University of Arizona.
Source: University of Arizona Libraries Special Collections
The water bottle lives a quieter life these days, tucked away inside Box 43-A in the climate-controlled basement of the UA Libraries’ Special Collections.
That’s where the university keeps some 15,000 historical items connected to the battleship, which was destroyed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 79 years ago today, killing 1,177 people on board.
The UA’s USS Arizona collection includes thousands of photos, documents and audiovisual files, as well as 150 artifacts.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
