A Christening Bottle from the USS Arizona

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On June 19, 1915, the super-dreadnought USS Arizona launched from the Brooklyn Navy Yard on New York City’s East River. Named for what was then the union’s youngest state, it was, at the time, the largest ship in the Navy. Arrangements for the launch had been made for 50,000 people; an estimated 75,000 ultimately attended, among them 17-year-old Esther Ross of Prescott, who had the honor of christening the ship with not one but two bottles: one with sparkling wine from Ohio and the other with what was described in etching on the bottle’s copper mesh as “first overflow water” from the Roosevelt Dam, collected a couple of months earlier — a concession to Arizona’s recent ban on alcohol. The latter is now held as item AZ 517 of the USS Arizona collection at the University of Arizona Special Collections Libraries. Ross, who was called on to reenact the christening more than 60 years later over the spot where the original ship was sunk in Pearl Harbor, had practiced the moment for months, smashing syrup bottles of water against a fence behind her house after school.