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grew up in Tidewater and have fond memories of seeing the "Big E" come and go.

I only saw her a few times, and then only from a distance on a few occasions when I was in the area and taking the tunnel. I have a few pics stashed somewhere that I took of her from behind that old motel that was on Willoughby Spit. Always wanted to figure out a way to get aboard (I had a friend who worked for US House of Reps committee that managed a trap and cat shot from her aboard a C-2 during pre-deployment workups about 10 years ago - spending most of a day aboard in between), but wasn't able to make it in last week for the final public tours. :-(

Enterprise was pretty critical in the development of my decidedly amateurish interest in military history. In a short period of time in 5th/6th grade in the early 1980s I read "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" (found the Landmark abridged edition tucked away on a shelf at my local bookstore), saw the movie adaptation of it during either a Veterans Day or Memorial Day movie marathon, saw the movie "The Final Countdown" and bought a copy of the old early 1960s National Geographic that had the iconic picture of "Task Force 1" (USS Bainbridge, USS Long Beach and the USS Enterprise with the crew lined up on the flightdeck to spell out "E=MC²") on the cover for $0.25 at a church book sale.

The last piece of all that was repeatedly checking out from my grade-school library the American Heritage Junior Library edition of "Carrier War in the Pacific" The page features an early picture of CVN-65 (billboard arrays and "beehive" on her island) steaming at speed in front of another supercarrier (probably a Forrestal class ship from the looks of it.).

I found a copy of that book several years ago in a used bookstore and snapped it up without negotiation at a fraction of the price I would have been willing to pay for it. The last two paragraphs tie the legacies of CV-6 and CVN-65 together pretty well:

In 1959 the Big E was scrapped.

Yet her name and her fighting spirit did not die. Even as the shipbreakers went about their work, wrote Enterprise's historian, 'a colossal structure was growing in a graving dock at Newport News, Virginia, not far from where the Big E was launched twenty-three years before ... Early in 1961 the dock was flooded and Enterprise, the first nuclear carrier in history, the biggest ship in the world, again the pride of her country and its Navy, first felt the touch of the sea. The story of the Big E had begun again."