← WETSU: a BattleshipNJ Podcast
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- [00:00]
Ryan Szymanski
Foreign quarters, all hands, man your battle stations.
- [00:12]
Marshall Spivak
Welcome to Wetsuit, a Battleship New Jersey podcast. I'm your host, Marshall Spivak. It's my honor to serve as CEO of the Battleship New Jersey. ELUX 825. The labor and Boyer Cooperative of Operating Engineers 825 is today's sponsor, Local A25. Still members operated the cranes that removed the battleship's mast and radar and reattached them following dry dock. Today on wetu, we're giving the people what they want. You asked for him and here he is. Mr. Ryan Szymanski. Ryan is the Deputy Executive Director for Curatorial and Educational affairs at The Battleship New Jersey. He's our curator. He's one curator size tall. He hosts the 1, 271,000 subscriber Battleship New Jersey YouTube channel. In July, Ryan celebrated his 19th anniversary working on museum ships. A graduate of UMBC with an undergraduate degree in history and a minor in ancient studies, his parents told him to get a job to help pay for college. In July 20, July 2006, he started working for the USS Constellation Museum as a part time tour guide. When the museum became part of Historic Ships in Baltimore and merged with other museum ships, Brian worked as a tour guide, as the overnight manager, the collections manager and in charge of maintenance. There isn't much Ryan hasn't done on museum ships. In Baltimore, he also worked on the dry docking of the Coast Guard Cutter taney and the USS constellation. In 2013, Ryan started going to Hinsa conferences, paying his own way there. He met Jason hall, then the curator of the Battleship New Jersey, and struck up a friendship. In 2017, Jason called Ryan and told him about his unfortunate cancer diagnosis he'd be leaving the ship and encouraged Ryan to apply to succeed him. He's been here ever since. Sadly, our friend Jason all succumbed to cancer shortly thereafter and we at the battleship miss him dearly. In 2020, Ryan and our Director of Curatorial and Education, Libby Jones started this YouTube channel to keep educating the public during the COVID 19 lockdown. 270,000 subscribers later, here we are finally. 2021 to 2025, Ryan also served as the Executive Director against the Historic Naval Ships Association. Ryan, welcome to wetsu.
- [02:19]
Ryan Szymanski
Thanks for having me Marshall. Happy to be here.
- [02:22]
Marshall Spivak
Normally, you know, I start this and I ask, why did you join the Navy? So let me just rephrase that a little bit and say, why did you start working in museum ships?
- [02:32]
Ryan Szymanski
When I turned 16, my parents told me, you're going to college, you're going to pay for it yourself. Get a job this summer. So I'm sitting there asking myself, what? What can. I can't even flip a burger. I can't get a job at McDonald's. What am I supposed to do? So I started working on museum ships, thinking that would help me in an application to the Naval Academy in a year or two. Somewhere along the way, I decided that I absolutely hate modern warships. They're ugly, they've got none of the charm that World War II vessels like this one have. And then many, many years later, I realized that, wait a minute, there are other people my age who are making a career out of working on these ships. What I've been doing part time for fun on the weekends and been here ever since. Well, we.
- [03:16]
Marshall Spivak
I mentioned in your intro, you know, all the different jobs that you had sort of along the way. Can you tell us a little bit about how some of those jobs prepared you for what you're doing now?
- [03:26]
Ryan Szymanski
Oh, yeah, absolutely. The reason that Phil and Jason were interested in me for this job as a 27 year old know nothing from Baltimore was that I had worked on Constellation in dry dock and they knew that redecking New Jersey was going to be happening very soon. So the woodworking skills I'd had would help with that. And they knew that dry docking New Jersey was going to come at some point in the near future. Jason told me when he started that I had to figure out a way to convince the museum to do it in the next five years. And it was totally possible and it would be great. It ended up taking six years, but there was a pandemic in there. But yeah, those two experiences, I think, are what really helped me get this job.
- [04:11]
Marshall Spivak
And we mentioned you previously were on the team at Drydock Taney and the Constellation. What lessons did you take from helping to be part of the team at dry dock? Those ships not a battleship. But what lessons did you take from there that you were then able to apply to our project here last year?
- [04:26]
Ryan Szymanski
It's incredible how many things are the same, even though those ships are significantly smaller and one of them is made entirely out of wood. It's amazing how much crossover knowledge there was, such as the day that you dry dock a ship, it will always rain every single one. I've done lots of things. A lot of the things that we were looking for, especially with Taney, which was built in the exact same dry dock as New Jersey just four years earlier and then serves up until 1986 a very parallel life to this ship. A lot of the Problems that we've had with her were things that we knew to look for in New Jersey and at least say, hey, are the propeller shafts intact because tannies were leaking? Is the k. Are the. Is the cathodic protection intact? Because Tanis has been largely consumed over time. So even though in some of those instances we looked and we found that there wasn't an issue here yet, in some of those instances, we were like, oh, yeah, we're, you know, what's up? Exactly.
- [05:19]
Marshall Spivak
So going back to when you first started here, it was December 2017, January 2018. What was the state of the battleship? Upkeep, maintenance, all that kind of stuff.
- [05:34]
Ryan Szymanski
When you first started here. I would say that the history of the battleship has been a series of ups and downs with lots of people coming and visiting and then consequently having a lot of staff hired and then stuff slowing down and staff being laid off. So when they hired me, they were really. They had been at a lower place where Jason was the only employee for the entire curatorial education Department. In fact, the curatorial department and the education department, which had been separate, were merged together under him so they could reduce the staffing. The museum was on the right trajectory, and we're starting to hire more people and do more things. But it's been really incredible seeing that happen.
- [06:13]
Marshall Spivak
And from just more about the ship itself, less about the organization. What was the status of how the ship looked?
- [06:23]
Ryan Szymanski
Honestly, she didn't look bad for a museum ship. I've worked on quite a few, and New Jersey didn't look terrible. But looking back on her now, after all the work that you and I and the rest of the team here have done over the last couple of years, you wouldn't recognize her. The tour route was significantly smaller. The hall had running rust and flaking paint. She hadn't ever been dry docked as a museum. The deck, there was grass growing in the deck. It was mulch. It wasn't safe for people to walk on. In some places, we had sections closed off.
- [06:56]
Marshall Spivak
Libby's Zen garden was a lot bigger with all the grass growing through. That's what you wanted to say. I know. So I mentioned your, you know, your friendship with Jason, how you came to work here at the ship. Can you tell us just a little bit about your first days on board and some of the things that you were doing back then on a daily basis?
- [07:12]
Ryan Szymanski
So Jason had gotten a. A cancer diagnosis, and they had told him that he had about five years left to live. So he had planned on working for two years and then going retiring and traveling some and then spending his last year or two at. At home doing hospice sorts of things. But weeks before I started working here, after I'd already moved from Baltimore to Philadelphia, he had seizures over the Christmas holiday. And so when I started working here, we had no idea what his status was. I showed up on my very first day. Well, my very first day was working New Year's Eve fireworks. Coldest day of my life. Did that. Showed up the next morning, which was supposed to be my first day, and Jason wasn't here. And the security guard. Who are you? And nobody else was here because everybody had been here until midnight the night before for the fireworks. So the. I eventually talked my way through the guard, found my way to Jason's office, which, of course was locked. Unfortunately. I visited the ship a couple times and there was no one here to show me. Eventually, I was able to break open a door into an office that had been abandoned for a couple of years, but it had some tour guide manuals and things in it. So I started reading the ship's history and. And that sort of stuff. And a couple days later, everybody came back from the holiday vacations and started giving me directions on what to do, like where we stored our collections.
- [08:31]
Marshall Spivak
Important things to know.
- [08:32]
Ryan Szymanski
Yeah, yeah. And it's worth pointing out, Jason was legally blind. It was something that progressively got worse. But because he wasn't fully sighted, he didn't store things in a way that was logical to us. He stored things in a way that he could absolutely find it. It always amazed me when I visited him in his office, he could walk over to a pile and grab something. It was exactly what you would ask for. When I walked into his office, I did not have that luck. So I spent a large part of probably my first six months working here just going through the various curatorial spaces and reorganizing things in a way that I could find them and going through piles of stuff and being like, okay, do we really need this paperwork from. Jason had been here for about a decade before I started. Do we really need this paperwork from 5 years ago or 10 years ago? Or can we. Can we get rid of it?
- [09:17]
Marshall Spivak
Fast forward to today. I think there would be a lot of people interested in. And you and I both know that no two days are ever this the battleship. But I think people would be interested in knowing what the typical day of the curator of the Battleship New Jersey. What does that entail?
- [09:35]
Ryan Szymanski
I like to show up earlier in the morning than everyone else when before the museum is opened. And that gives Me a chance to talk with the maintenance folks and the volunteers. Because the curator of a museum ship, our main artifact, is the ship itself. So it's important for us to catch up with the folks who are doing that maintenance work on your macro artifacts. So with the volunteers I get to work with helping pick out projects and figuring out where we're going to focus our efforts. And with the maintenance guys, we talk about how we're going to do the projects in a way that's least invasive to the ship and least invasive to the tour route. So that's. That's usually how the morning goes. Oftentimes, Libby and I will film that night's video at some point in the morning before the ship opens. And then that gives her time to go back and edit it. We will. A large part of my day is spent at the computer answering emails, things like that. The number of questions I get about really esoteric things that I'd never thought of. I'm supposed to be the expert who's been doing this for years.
- [10:29]
Marshall Spivak
It's giving you ideas for future videos.
- [10:31]
Ryan Szymanski
That's the key. People ask how we come up with the ideas for the videos. We haven't come up with videos ideas since, like, episode 100. Ever. Ever since then, it's been somebody's asked a question in the comment section or somebody shot an email. I was like, well, if I've got to do the research to find this.
- [10:43]
Marshall Spivak
Out, might as well make a video. Yeah. But I remember very distinctly walking into my office one day, you will be shooting a video of you winding clocks. And I said, well, someone must have asked for it. You had mentioned earlier Jason's comments to you when you first were coming on board about dry docking the ship and your previous experience with Canadian Constellation. But it really didn't come to fruition until June 2023, when we received the state appropriation for $5 million that really kicked this project off in earnest and allowed us to go out and raise the remainder of it. Do you remember your reaction when you heard we got the money and that dry docking, this battleship, was actually going to happen?
- [11:27]
Ryan Szymanski
I honestly don't remember my reaction. When I get that ecstatic, it just all goes black.
- [11:33]
Marshall Spivak
We spent obviously several months really in depth in the planning process of the various movements of the ship, the shipyard work. Can you talk to us about some of the things that you. You did sort of role and prepping the ship to move and to head into dry dock.
- [11:50]
Ryan Szymanski
My biggest concern was the ship hadn't moved in something like 30 years or 20 years, but she hadn't really done much for 30. So I was really worried as we're towing the ship out, moving her, that we might start to get leaks in some of the places that I had seen on quite frankly, older, smaller, thinner skin ships that I'd worked on. So it was really important to me to set up a team to go below decks and check all the spaces. We had done that. When Kaney went into dry dock, there were four of us and we had like 18 tanks to check and a couple of lower spaces. So we sort of quartered the ship. New Jersey has something like 800 spaces below the water line. So it was very much okay. You know, all of these spaces could flood and we would still stay afloat. This is the one where I think it could be a problem and this is the one where, you know, if it does flood, that's going to cause us some serious issues. So we divided up who was going to go where, made sure we had the two man rule, knowing that we weren't going to have lights on board, made sure we had all that. That was for the move of the ship. For the time in dry dock, I got to work with other folks to craft what the major things we're going to focus on were what, what are the important projects. When Missouri dry docked over a decade before we did, they spent something like $18 million, $20 million on the project. And here we were a decade later with costs going up and we had half money to spend. So it was okay, we can't do everything we want to do. What are the critical things if we're not going to see this again for another 30 years. So it was awesome to be a part of that decision making process. Humbling to what experiences do I have to.
- [13:27]
Marshall Spivak
And if you're saying that, I'm saying that. I'm certainly saying that coming in as CEO in November of 2023, and frankly some planning being done, but not a tremendous amount and trying to figure it all out and obviously on you and Libby and Jay and some of our consultants to help us along the way was an experience and we all learned it together, which was nice. I think for me, you know, the movements of the ships and being on board the ship was certainly, I gotta say, probably some of the highlights of my career, my life. We moved an Iowa class battleship four times, near flawlessly. Was getting underway the first time on the battleship what you hoped for, what you expected.
- [14:18]
Ryan Szymanski
It was more than I could have ever imagined. I was down below checking things and I Came up on deck and realized that, oh, my God, we're already in the middle of the channel. So at some point in the last half hour, we pushed away from the pier and got out here, and Kevin Benton's already rotating us.
- [14:32]
Marshall Spivak
So when we first pushed off, you were below deck.
- [14:35]
Ryan Szymanski
Yes.
- [14:35]
Marshall Spivak
Wow. Okay. I didn't realize that.
- [14:36]
Ryan Szymanski
Yeah, I was doing one of the. One of the checks and came up was like, oh, shoot, we're actually moving.
- [14:41]
Marshall Spivak
Well, I remember coming. I think I was probably the very last person to come on board that day after the ceremony on the pier, which you probably saw none of, and going up on the high reach onto the ship, and I was still wearing my suit and tank high and going into the officer's lounge and trying to change out of it. And when I came out and I was on the main deck and we were probably 3, 400 yards off of. Probably less than that, actually off of the pier. And I just looked, I was like, holy shit, this is, like, happening. And then we start to turn around and it was. It was a day to remember. It was a cold day. That was certainly part of the day to remember, but it was. I thought it was everything we. We had hoped for. And you're right, because when we started planning this, you know, on the later movements, we had more people on board, we sold tickets, we had press and volunteers and things like that. And I remember on the first trip, we said, no, we're not going to do anything that. We just need to make sure we get there and we'll worry about the rest later. So moving forward to the ship, getting to Hallsburg, our first stop on the trip to. To dry dock. I think one of the things that I know you guys talked about extensively during, you know, at the time on YouTube, but the ballasting, we balanced Debal again. We debounced it again. You know, can you talk us a little bit about the effort that went into balancing the ship, our work with Resolve and how they went and sort of, you know, got the ship trimmed out so we could make it into the dry dock.
- [16:09]
Ryan Szymanski
Yeah. So we spent years researching what we're going to do, what we have to do, what have other ships done to get a sense of that. And then we move the ship and the realization hits that now the real work begins. So we get to Paulsboro, and either that same afternoon or very, very early the next morning, the combined team from Northstar and Resolve showed up to start the ballasting process. Essentially, Iowa class battleships have a big armored box around the steering gear back aft that makes them sit about 10ft lower at the stern than at the bow. If they don't have their full fuel and ammunition. Allotment says we don't as a museum ship. Missouri might have hers for fighting aliens, but we don't have that.
- [16:49]
Marshall Spivak
But we don't talk about that movie here.
- [16:51]
Ryan Szymanski
So we, we had to put calculate out about 2,000 tons of water into the forward part of the ship in what had been former fuel tanks or void spaces. So we, we plotted that out. We'd work with the engineers over at the shipyard where we were going to make sure that we could get her to the point where she'd sit on the blocks. And the folks from Resolve came and made it happen over the course of. It took about a week to pump the water in. That was an interesting experience. The, the tanks held water great. The valves and the piping that cross connected the tanks did not.
- [17:23]
Marshall Spivak
Probably could have been worse though.
- [17:25]
Ryan Szymanski
It could have been way worse. But we ended up having water moving from some of the tanks we'd intended to some other tanks that we hadn't intended. They were still there for holding water. The, the valves were closed. They just didn't hold anything anymore. So regardless of which tanks the water went into, we got it into all the tanks we needed to to get her to the right displacement.
- [17:45]
Marshall Spivak
We then go from Poulsboro into dry dock number three. The fourth time that this battleship has been dry dock number three. We went in stern first, which was a unique viewing experience at least moving around the gilly land that was out Pier 6 outside of us and Joe, Ben and his McAllister team, of course, doing the incredible job that they do pushing us into. Into the dry dock. This ship was on the block for 78 days. It would not be a stretch to say that you basically lived at the dry dock for 78 days. I don't think I could get you an or Libby to go home. Can you walk us through. I asked you about your typical day on the ship as curator, but can you talk us through your typical day at dry dock number three at the Philadelphia Navy Yard?
- [18:26]
Ryan Szymanski
Yeah. So two typical days there was the typical day where work was happening, the typical day where tours were happening on the weekend.
- [18:32]
Marshall Spivak
Give us your typical day of work first, then we'll talk about tours in a little bit.
- [18:36]
Ryan Szymanski
Perfect. So first thing in the morning, like 7 or 8 o', clock, we all meet with the museum staff and the dry dock staff. We talk about what's going on that day where we were in the process. All that sort of stuff. Really valuable meeting. I don't generally value daily meetings, but the situation changed so often. It was really useful having these meetings every single day and catching up with everybody and figuring out what the schedule of the day was going to be from there. We had a little bit of stuff that we were doing with, like managing our own contractors, but the large part of it was the quality assurance stuff. They would section out the areas they were going to do, and as they finished sections, representatives from the museum and we all took turns at that, would go down and inspect the work they had done and sign off that, yes, they said they were going to paint this, and they have painted it.
- [19:24]
Marshall Spivak
You mentioned dry dock tours. A huge team, important part of our overall project, and obviously an important source of funding for us. While we were closed, over 6,200 paid tours were given and frankly, hundreds, probably more people, family, friends, VIPs, officials, Navy folks who came on board, and everything went off pretty much without a hitch, which is just an incredible feat that in and of itself, this was basically your Libby's idea to do these tours and to convince. Try to convince the dry dock company, our friends at nasr, to allow us to do this. Did it go off how you imagine it would?
- [20:02]
Ryan Szymanski
Yes and no. Everything worked the way we expected it to. Crank up to 11. We didn't think we would get that kind of interest. We didn't think we'd be raising that kind of money. We didn't think we'd have that many people coming out knowing that we wanted to dry dock the ship. We started to visit other ships in dry dock years before we went in. Um, so we. We got to see Taney, we got to see Constellation, we got to see Slater. Um, and there are a couple other ones we. We went to see.
- [20:26]
Marshall Spivak
Went to see the USS Texas in February, right before we left.
- [20:31]
Ryan Szymanski
Texas was the one that they pioneered this idea of doing tours in dry dock. So. So we got to see what those tours looked like and hear how they did it. And that really helped us craft what we were doing. And I dare say that the precedent of them doing it is what helped convince everybody on our end that it was possible, from Ford, who was always supportive of the idea, to the shipyard, who was not always supportive of the.
- [20:55]
Marshall Spivak
Idea, but who later complimented us on how well things went.
- [20:59]
Ryan Szymanski
Yeah, well, we've no idea how to dry dock a ship, but we know how to get a tour of the ship. That part of the plan was, believe it or not, the easiest thing. I think we did.
- [21:06]
Marshall Spivak
There's no way I could get through this interview without saying the following words. 2 part coal bonded polysulfide sealant. The perfect example of never knowing what the hell you're going to find on the hull of a battleship. When something like this happens completely unexpected, you don't even know what the material is that you're looking at. How do you pivot and figure out what to do, how to handle that type of situation for, for the sealant itself and then some of the other issues that be then later found.
- [21:37]
Ryan Szymanski
So when we take the ship out of the water, we find that all of the riveted seams are covered with this caulk compound that's not mentioned in any of the dry dock reports. It wasn't on Missoura when she was dry docked in 2009 and she had been decommissioned in the exact same yard within a year of us being decommissioned. So we had no idea to expect that. And then we found it and we had no idea how we were going to figure out what it was, why it was. We had a couple of sources, but we'd read them all to prepare for this and we'd see nothing at all like that. But part of getting the ship ready for dry dock that we'd been doing for the last five years was getting a handle on the collection. The ship came here with a tremendous amount of resources, blueprints, original documents, things like that already on board. And over the 20 some odd years that the ship's been a museum, more have been given to us and we haven't even to this day haven't had a chance to fully catalog them. We're talking about tens of thousands of documents. But prior to dry docking we at least had a handle on. We've pulled them all into one place. We've organized them so that all the engineering stuff is here and all the gunnery stuff is here. And so we were able to go down and this was primarily Libby's work. She's the best researcher I've ever met in my whole life. We were able to go down to the space with all these primary resources and go to the dry docking type area and start filling through it. And she pulled a document, I'm trying to remember now, it wasn't specifically about.
- [23:02]
Marshall Spivak
It, but it referenced it in some way.
- [23:04]
Ryan Szymanski
It said that it had been done to specs according to X manual. So we went over to the other shelf and pulled that manual and the manual specifically listed a product. So we're like, oh well this was 1991. Let's see if that product still exists 30 some odd years later and sure enough the same company still manufacturing the same product.
- [23:21]
Unknown
Very thankfully operating engineers are the men and women that move mountains. And the engineers labor employer cooperators, ELEC puts them to work. They create opportunities for the men, women and union signatory contractors of Local 825 repaving our roads, keeping our homes bright and warm, and even building our favorite team stadium. We understand infrastructure. That's why ELAC and Local 825 are ready to get to work.
- [23:51]
Marshall Spivak
We've covered this extensively but you mentioned earlier and sort of the, when the question was about you know, how are we prepping and everything and being part of the decision making and figuring that out. And I just think back to that time and I and okay, what's the system of co we're going to use? Right, what we're going to switch out the anodes from zinc to aluminum. I would go, I would venture to say you did make those systems. I mean ultimately the buck stops with me I guess. But I look to you to make those decisions for what you feel was best, especially when it came to, you know, the painting and stuff like that. Because frankly as we talked about earlier, I didn't have a clue. So you know, how did you, how did you know that these were the right things for us? How did you figure out that this was the right system of coding we needed to switch from zinc to aluminum, you know, examples like that.
- [24:43]
Ryan Szymanski
I had no idea either but thankfully I've been around long time.
- [24:47]
Marshall Spivak
It's a common theme that we keep saying. But it all somehow turned out well, right?
- [24:51]
Ryan Szymanski
Yeah. I'm sure this gives the viewers great confidence in our museum run abilities. So no one person knows it all but fortunately through Historic Naval Ships association and how long we've been around doing this meeting people, we were able to find other people who had also run in these problems and figured it out in some instances the hard way. And so we were able to draw on it really tremendous amount of experience from folks from other museum ships and other expertises like Lance Thomas at Anode Solutions has done cathodic protection on a number of museum ships. So we, we got his advice on what to do there. Texas had just dry dock worked on other ships in dry dock. So we knew that various paint companies had various systems that worked really well and we were able to go to to them and say hey, this is what we're looking for. We were permanently moored. We don't need to normal system, we don't need expensive anti fouling Paint that's, that's not a problem. Give us what you normally paint the inside of a water tank in. That's never going to get touched again because we need something that's going to last a long time.
- [25:50]
Marshall Spivak
Well, we get into the dry dock, took us a little bit longer to pump down the water when we first got in. But then we. It gets low enough, it gets dry enough, and we see the all for the first time. You've been working here since 2017? I've been here since 2017 as a board member first, you know, but then even, you know, folks who have been here since who are part of the crew, you know, even in the 80s, never saw the underside of the ship. Can you talk to us about the condition of the hull when we first got there and then also your reaction to the condition of the hole?
- [26:29]
Ryan Szymanski
Well, after I picked my jaw up, out ships are so much like icebergs. I can walk down the pier every day and see the ship and know it's my office building. But you see it out of the water, you finally get an idea of, oh, my God, this is three times bigger than I ever thought. Fathomably large. It was incredible to stand down that dry dock and look up and it just fills your field of view for as far as you can see.
- [26:54]
Marshall Spivak
I just love coming, doing tours and bringing people down and getting about halfway down the staircase and just. And you said picking your jaw, you know, picking your jaw up. I mean, that was the reaction to so many people who didn't realize the enormity of what they were looking at because all they see is what's above the waterline, which as you noted, is not even half of the ship. And looking. I remember usually I would go down the staircase first and turn around and then look at the people's reactions when they were love that.
- [27:23]
Ryan Szymanski
Because it didn't matter even if they dry dock ships before or worked on the ship like, like you said, members of the ship's cre crew, it was always that, wow, she's just not built like other ships. She's got those, those gorgeous sweeping lines. She was designed very much to be a ship of state, to be powerful and to look good while doing it in a way that, quite frankly, modern ships don't have.
- [27:46]
Marshall Spivak
We push, push away from dry docking for a moment and talk about the curatorial side of things. Just in the calendar year 2025.
- [27:56]
Ryan Szymanski
We'Ve.
- [27:56]
Marshall Spivak
Accomplished a tremendous amount of things. We got our 1911 gun returned to us thanks to our friends in the Navy. We now have an RPV Pioneer drone on board, a full complement of 50 cows, original 1980s powder bag. Can you speak to sort of the recent successes we've had here at the battleship?
- [28:17]
Ryan Szymanski
I would dare say that the first half of 2025 so far has been the second most successful time period in the museum as far as collections go. The first most successful being when the ship first opens and they had nothing. And somehow they were able to build a museum around this empty ship. I still marvel at the work that had to have happened back then when we were still in grade school. But I'm absolutely blown away by what we have found this year, and it's largely because of the folks who are watching this video right now. We would have never found most of these things on our own. 1911 was tracked down by somebody who watched one of our videos, the drone control radar dome, tracked down by somebody who watched one of our videos, the drone itself. We had multiple viewers who helped us with that. We had a group of viewers who worked for the Navy who had one of those drones where they were and requested to transfer it to us. And they happened to ask somebody who just had a spare in the box laying around waiting, and then another viewer offered to ship it here to us at no cost to the museum. Yeah, it's all happened thanks to crowdsourcing, essentially.
- [29:27]
Marshall Spivak
Absolutely. And one of the things that I like to tell people when I give tours is one of the things I love most about the ship is that we either find something new every day, we learn something new every day. Of course, the WETSU flag replica behind me, but finding the original in the black trash bag. And what compartment was it in?
- [29:47]
Ryan Szymanski
It was in an uptake for the smokestack.
- [29:49]
Marshall Spivak
Smokestack compartment or the nuclear permission of fire key on a random key ring in the maintenance office. What's your favorite thing that you just happened upon working here?
- [30:04]
Ryan Szymanski
It's got to be the. The nuclear launch keys. Just. Just the. The mind blown of. No, it can't be. They wouldn't have let this. What it fits.
- [30:14]
Marshall Spivak
That was. That was something special for sure. You know, we. We mentioned before that, you know, the difference between what the ship looked like when you first started here, working here in late 2017, to what it is today. I know over just. In the last couple months, we've had a number of active duty Navy personnel on board, multiple flag officers, active duty flag officers who pretty consistently tell us that the condition of this battleship could rival an active duty Navy ship of any class. Today we had some chiefs up here from. From Mayport the other day when we were down in the engineering room, they couldn't believe how clean our engineering room was. They couldn't believe that actually, a lot of the equipment and things that are on this ship that was built in 1940 are still on Navy ships today. And, you know, but just that hearing that, especially, you know, from folks who are active today, I mean, to me, that's one of the joys of working here, and it makes me tremendously proud for the ship, for our team. Keep this ship up. What does. What do those types of comments mean for you?
- [31:21]
Ryan Szymanski
It's the best evaluation of our work that we could possibly receive. Hearing that sort of stuff. It's incredible how much everyone around here cares from, of course, the staff and volunteers who are doing this, but they're not just here to collect a paycheck. They're going above and beyond across the board. But even visitors who come on board leave. They might come completely uninterested, and then they leave caring about it. And many of them come back as volunteers or as donors or to another event. It's really incredible.
- [31:52]
Marshall Spivak
Stepping back to 2020 for a second, obviously an interesting time in not just here, but in the world, you and Libby decided we're going to start a YouTube channel and we're going to make some educational videos. We're going to put them out and try to keep some content going and things going for the battleship during that time. Well, flash forward, it's halfway through 2025, a little bit more than that now, and 271,000 plus subscribers later. Can you talk to us a little bit about the evolution of the YouTube channel and the evolution that you and Libby have taken in sort of shaping the YouTube channel from what it was when we started to what it is today.
- [32:29]
Ryan Szymanski
So we had started talking about doing something like this even before the pandemic started. But obviously the education department, it's always meant that we're the ones who give tours. 2020, when the museum closes, we can't do that anymore. So we're worried about being laid off. And the museum would have been perfectly correct to lay us off because we couldn't do our normal jobs. So. So we went to the executive director at the time, Phil, and. And said, hey, we. We would like to keep doing our jobs. And we think we can reach even more people this way than we've been reaching with regular tours on board. And he said, oh, that's a great idea. I've heard that there are kids who make millions of dollars on YouTube. Phil, really appreciate the confidence. We're not going to do that. But we, we will get some advertising out there for the museum and it won't cost anything. And then when we realized that yeah, this isn't just we're closed for two weeks, we're like, okay, we really have to justify our jobs. We're going to make a video every single night. And so we, we just started doing that. Some of the early videos we kind of just filmed in my house talking about like World War II history, that sort of stuff. And then eventually things got to the point where we could come on the ship and film about off the tore out spaces. And there was originally some, some pushback from staff about that. Like if we show them videos of these spaces, they'll never come out and see it for themselves. How many times have you seen a picture of the Eiffel Tower? Does that mean you don't want to go to Paris and wait in line and go on the Eiffel Tower? So we have found that that wasn't the case and that large percentages of the folks who visit the ship now have watched the channel. Yeah, people. Everybody says the first thousand subscribers are the hardest. And that is absolutely true. If it wasn't for folks like Alex at the Drakenefeld channel or him on the museum ships advertising our stuff when we had no subscribers, we would probably still have no subscribers. But between those guys and a couple others, they got us to the point where we had enough that YouTube was like, okay, they're real. Eventually we got to the point where we were able to monetize the videos and get sponsors and things like that. And that's really been transformative for the curatorial department. In a normal museum the curatorial department requires a lot of money to do their work, but they don't make any money. So the fact that this museum has fostered that kind of organization where, where various departments can go out and do money making things to help support them really lets everybody contribute in a way that other places just don't.
- [34:51]
Marshall Spivak
I know you shy away from the limelight, but I have to say it's unavoidable to say you have a bit of a YouTube celebrity status. You know, are you gratified that really so many people care not just to be about the battleship itself, but really about the, you know, whatever your drill down topic of the day is that you're talking about. I mentioned before I came into my office, you were, we're talking about clocks. Finding how you wind clocks on the ship and that video, like tens of thousands of views. It seems like the more random or pedantic thing you talk about, the more views you get, you know, but are you, by the amount of people who tune in and you know, putting your. Taking yourself out of the equation for a second, but just about how many people care about what we're doing here, what you're doing here, what Libby's doing here, what our whole team is doing here, you know, to, to spread educational awareness about the ship.
- [35:38]
Ryan Szymanski
You have no idea how gratifying that is because growing up I was the only person who was interested in this sort of stuff, certainly the only person my age. I didn't have any friends that were interested in battleships or even going wider than that, like history in general. So incredibly isolating. Even when I started working on museum ships almost two decades ago, many of my co workers were just there to collect a paycheck and they didn't have the interest. But I started to meet a couple of people who did. But the YouTube channel has really showed me that there are actually hundreds of thousands of people like me out there. And I've met some very good friends who I otherwise would have never met because they live on the other side of the world or states away. And then now I get to talk with them all the time, not, not through the channel, but like email back and forth and call and visit and stuff like that. And without the channel, I would have never known any of these guys who are into the same thing I am.
- [36:34]
Marshall Spivak
You're on YouTube talking every day about things that are going on in the battleship. Is there anything specific you want the watchers, listeners, the fans of this channel to know about the work that's being done day in and day out that maybe they don't necessarily see in the daily videos that you guys uploaded?
- [36:52]
Ryan Szymanski
Oh yeah, absolutely. I feel like too many people out there get the impression that I'm the only person who works here and do anything around here. We're going to an article on Wikipedia about whatever we're going to talk about that night and I spend 15 minutes talking about it and then that's my day. And Libby has to spend four hours editing that into something passable. And the our great maintenance department has to spend time keeping the ship looking good. So much happens around here, staff wise that I'm not involved in at all and could not possibly do if I wanted to. So I really hope that people realize that there is a, I wouldn't say a large team, but there is a significantly larger team Here at the museum than me, with equal or greater dedication to what I have that are making all this happen.
- [37:40]
Marshall Spivak
We look forward for a moment to. We're halfway through 2025. We're taping this in almost the middle of July. What can people expect for the second half of 2025 here at the battleship?
- [37:52]
Ryan Szymanski
I am. The thing that gets me the most excited is opening new spaces to show people, like, making the tour out longer. At a mile and a half, we already have the biggest tour out of any of the museum battleships. But there are a couple of spaces that I'd like to open that we've actually. We started talking about it back in 2020 and obviously took a back seat for a few years. And then dry docking happened and took an even longer backseat. We have a lot of former marines who come back and visit the ship. So we'd like to open some of those marine detachment spaces, which are on the aft end of Broadway. But the volunteers have already gone through and painted them and restored them, and we've already started to put in an exhibit there that Libby's been working on. And part of that is we'll also be able to take people through aft main battery plot, which forward main battery plot is on guided tours right now. And the volunteers did a great job of restoring a lot of the equipment in there, but 90% of our guests don't get to see that. And that space really is the core of the ship, the brain, the part of the ship that's super sophisticated during the great depression when this thing is designed. So I'm excited to get people into that space. We want to open one of the ship's two massive refrigeration spaces. Really can't conceptualize just what those storage spaces look like and just how big they are. It feels like a cathedral when you're in there. So being able to open that up and show it off. And how do you feed 2,000 sailors for a month? Here's a fraction of those spaces. And that will also allow us to get folks into at steering. So that will put a third of our four steering positions on the tour route. That's one of the number one questions that we get from guests, actually, is, well, where's the ship steered from? Go up to the level with all the big windows. Yeah. You didn't see the wheel there? No, the wheel's inside of that 17 inch armored conning tower. So unless you look through the door just right, you don't see that that's where the ship is steered from. So by Adding a couple more of these positions on there. We're giving people that thing that they're looking for. And that brings us to the last of the spaces that I'd like to open at some point in the near future. The 08 bridge, which was originally the primary con, which would allow people to go three decks higher than they can right now.
- [40:01]
Marshall Spivak
I wanted to just sort of do a little bit of rapid fire with you. So there's a number of questions I want to ask you, and I want you to just give me. Give me the answer. Whatever's on the top of your head. Okay. Favorite compartment on the ship.
- [40:13]
Ryan Szymanski
I usually jokingly tell people my office because I get to spend the least amount of time there in terms of space. That leaves me in awe. It's the Combat Engagement Center. Both between the original equipment in there and just how much work our volunteers put into making that space look good, I'd say we've got a couple of spaces that are really pristinely restored. Looks like the crew just walked out, and we got a bunch of spaces that are pretty good, but we're still working to get them to that level. And then we got a bunch of spaces that we still have to restore. CEC is the one that absolutely leaves me in awe.
- [40:42]
Marshall Spivak
Favorite battleship New Jersey.
- [40:43]
Ryan Szymanski
I said rapid fire. This rapid fire. I'm going to go with Captain Penniston.
- [40:49]
Marshall Spivak
Good answer.
- [40:50]
Ryan Szymanski
I've heard a lot of good stuff about him from the crew guys who met him directly.
- [40:54]
Marshall Spivak
His words are immortalized here.
- [40:56]
Ryan Szymanski
Exactly. Exactly. And the fact that the ship was being decommissioned and him pushing back against the Navy for doing that made him the only one of the ship's 19 commanding officers to not make Admiral. That's inspirational. Stand up for what you believe in, and what you believe in is battleships. I think we can all get behind that.
- [41:13]
Marshall Spivak
Your favorite battle to study.
- [41:14]
Ryan Szymanski
Ooh, that one definitely changes over time. I used to not like Leyte golf as a kid because it's just such an overwhelming amount of. Of American superiority in that battle. But since working here and having to bone up on it more because it's probably the most famous battle this ship participated in, I've really gained a new appreciation for it. For part of the Japanese fought even against those odds and how close they came. Honestly, it was a much closer battle than it had any right to be. If you look at how many ships were there on each side.
- [41:47]
Marshall Spivak
What's your favorite ship? I'll say outside of the baby shore.
- [41:50]
Ryan Szymanski
Yeah, yeah. Outside the battleship New Jersey. The perfect ship was never built.
- [41:55]
Marshall Spivak
I could have been the battle carrier.
- [41:58]
Ryan Szymanski
It would definitely not have been the battle carrier. I really like the Lexington class battlecruisers. That's one of my favorite designs and I really wish that any reason in particular CC2 was going to be named Constellation.
- [42:12]
Marshall Spivak
Okay.
- [42:12]
Ryan Szymanski
So even though CC1 became Lexington CV2 and CC3 became Saratoga, CV3 was still a chance that Lexing or that Constellation could have been built as a battle cruiser.
- [42:23]
Marshall Spivak
There was a new new Constellation coming. Right. It's a frigate, is that right?
- [42:25]
Ryan Szymanski
Under construction.
- [42:26]
Marshall Spivak
Yes, Construction. Right. Okay. Do you have a favorite ship in today's Navy? A favorite ship, if you were in the Navy today, you would want to serve on.
- [42:34]
Ryan Szymanski
I do love the Arleigh Burke class destroyers and the the newest generations of them are getting some really, really wild capabilities that should make them absolutely kill terrifying to any of our peer adversaries.
- [42:46]
Marshall Spivak
And you, you and Libby took a cool trip up to Bath, Maine and of course we went for a short tour on the USS John Basselin when we were there for commissioning. Definitely a good choice. You have a favorite admiral who. Let me ask you two ways. You have your favorite admiral and then your favorite admiral from who spent time here.
- [43:06]
Ryan Szymanski
Ooh, okay. This one's really out of left field. Follow along with me here. My favorite admiral of all time is the Carthaginian General Hannibal Barka.
- [43:16]
Marshall Spivak
Okay.
- [43:16]
Ryan Szymanski
Who is primarily known for his generalship during the Second Punic War. Didn't involve ships at all. But after the Romans chase him out of Carthage, ends up being an admiral in the Seleucid Navy or something like that. Pots.
- [43:29]
Marshall Spivak
A lot of people Googling this right now. Yeah.
- [43:31]
Ryan Szymanski
Threw pots full of venomous snakes at the enemy fleet.
- [43:35]
Marshall Spivak
That's what I've gone about it.
- [43:37]
Ryan Szymanski
I think he would have been a really interesting person to sit down and have dinner with.
- [43:40]
Marshall Spivak
And your favorite admiral who maybe was had this as their flagship or just came on board at some point.
- [43:46]
Ryan Szymanski
I'd be remiss if I didn't give Admiral Willis Lee a shout out. But I think my favorite would have to be Raymond Spruance Bruance.
- [43:53]
Marshall Spivak
Another good answer.
- [43:54]
Ryan Szymanski
He's really underrated. A highly, immensely competent person who just did everything in the background and didn't quite steal the spotlight the way Halsey did. But he also didn't make some of the command decisions that Halsey made.
- [44:07]
Marshall Spivak
And I'm in the middle of finishing Admiral Halsey's autobiography. And he's incredibly complimentary of Admiral SPO during that time and the switching between the Third Fleet and the fifth Fleet, you have a. What's your favorite artifact here on board.
- [44:22]
Ryan Szymanski
I think I'm going to go with the powder bag because that's the most recent. But two weeks ago would have been in the drone and two weeks before that it was 1911. Could very well be those nuclear keys too. Oh wait, I got it. The ship herself. The macro artifact.
- [44:36]
Marshall Spivak
Other than the ship itself, that's an easy answer.
- [44:38]
Ryan Szymanski
None of the other artifacts matter without the macro artifacts.
- [44:41]
Marshall Spivak
That is very true. Your favorite museum ship other than.
- [44:43]
Ryan Szymanski
Oh, okay. There are so many great ones out there. I'll always have a soft spot for Tani. I was in charge of maintenance on her for four years before I came up here to the battleship and that ship. She's a 327 foot long Coast Guard cutter. Again built same place nearly the same time as New Jersey. But whereas the battleship goes in and out of service throughout her career, Tani just continuously is in service from looking for Amelia Earhart to surviving Pearl harbor through the Okinawa campaign and then the next 40 years doing her job day in and day out.
- [45:17]
Marshall Spivak
And then a last of the rapid fire questions. What's your proudest accomplishment from your time here?
- [45:23]
Ryan Szymanski
Definitely working on the ship in dry dock, getting to be a part of that.
- [45:26]
Marshall Spivak
I think that's an answer that's shared amongst a lot of us. And so finally I have to ask, this is obviously the wetsuit podcast. Now, you and I are both civilians. We were not in the Navy. But do you have any wetsuit moments that you, that you think about from your time on board here that you'd like to share?
- [45:44]
Ryan Szymanski
Man, so many of them, so many of the staff and volunteers here just jump in. 90 degrees out there today and guys are volunteering to go out and give 90 minute long tours. Last week we had a leak inside the ship and the waters was coming through. The rust got really nasty color that was staining the entire deck and one of the volunteers, without being asked, grabbed a mop and started cleaning it up. There's so many times like that I think we all jump in and clean a bathroom when it needs to.
- [46:13]
Marshall Spivak
Ryan, anything else you want to mention that you haven't already talked about that, that you want the viewers here to, to know about either you or the ship itself or the work that we do here.
- [46:22]
Ryan Szymanski
Watching our videos really helps support the museum that those the guys who are super interested into this. Watching it makes YouTube algorithm push it to other people who maybe didn't know they were into it by watching it and figuring out, hey, there's an empty bracket over Ryan's left shoulder. And I've got the tool that goes there. Here. I'm donating it to the museum. Like people, it feels like they're the big wrench. Yeah, exactly. It might feel like they're not doing much to support us, but yet just by watching it or by reaching out like that really, really helps us. Leave a comment, gives us the idea for tomorrow night's video because we haven't thought about it yet and we certainly haven't filmed it yet.
- [46:58]
Marshall Spivak
Brian Symansky, curator of the Battleship New Jersey, thank you for joining us on wetsu. And most importantly, thank you for what you do and you and your team do here day in and day out and for your dedication to our nation's most decorated battleship, the battleship that we all love, the Battleship New Jersey. Ryan, thank you for joining us.
- [47:18]
Ryan Szymanski
My pleasure.
- [47:19]
Unknown
Operating engineers are the men and women that move mountains. And the engineers Labor Employer Cooperative ELEC puts them to work. They create opportunities for the men, women and union signatory contractors of Local 825 repaving our road, keeping our homes bright and warm, and even building our favorite team stadium. We understand infrastructure. That's why ELAC and Local 825 are ready to get to work.