Blue Jacket statue honors Navy women
Renata Cannon remembers the summer of 1988, lying wide awake on her bunk the first night of Navy boot camp in a new-recruit barracks at the Naval Training Center in Orlando.
The uneasy silence of the wee hours was broken only by an occasional cough or the tearful sniffle of a female shipmate realizing home was far away and she was in the Navy now.
“Oh, boy,” thought Cannon, then 17 and fresh out of high school. “Am I ready for this?”
On Saturday, a bronze statue of a woman in a Navy uniform was unveiled at Blue Jacket Park in Baldwin Park, a community with more than 4,600 homes that sprouted after the 1,900-acre Naval Training Center was shuttered in the 1990s. The statue,
named the Blue Jacket Recruit, a Navy term for an enlisted sailor, honors the 188,000 female recruits whose graduation from the nation’s first coed boot camp proved they were not only as ready as men but also willing and able to serve their country.
It stands alongside a bronze replica of the Lone Sailor, a statue featuring a male seaman in a sailor’s hat and peacoat waiting for his ship to come in that was installed in the park in 2016.
A crowd of a couple of hundred people, including retired U.S. Navy Capt. “Robbie” Roberts, a 104-year-old World War II pilot, and several graduates of the Orlando boot camp watched and applauded the unveiling, which was praised by thousands more across the U.S. who could not attend the ceremony.
“It’s overdue — way, way overdue,” said Heather Ryan, 46, who graduated from the Orlando boot camp in 1992 and is now a Democratic candidate for Congress in Iowa. “It’s so profoundly important for women to be acknowledged in this way for the sacrifices they made to serve. There should be statues and monuments [to service women] on every base, the National Mall in Washington, everywhere.”
She served in the Navy as the Tailhook sex scandal emerged and exposed an indifference to misogynistic behavior in military branches that included harassment and sexual assault.
“It was a rough time for women in the military, and seeing the scandals that are happening now with women still being exploited and abused in the service, it hasn’t gotten any better after some 25 years — it hasn’t gotten a bit better,” she said.
Though no ships ever docked at the landlocked base, the facility known as the Recruit Training Command launched 652,000 Navy careers in its 30-year run as a boot camp and a Naval site for military schools that trained sailors in electronics maintenance, navigation, nuclear power and fleet weapon systems. In 1973, Orlando became the sole site of recruit training for enlisted women.
The last company of 459 recruits graduated Dec. 2, 1994. The command closed officially March 31, 1995.
Cannon, 47, who became a hospital corpsman after boot camp, nearly wept when she opened a digital image of the Blue Jacket Recruit emailed to her.
“I see myself in that statue. That was my uniform, that was me,” the Arizona woman said in a phone call from a hospital where she was at her father’s side. “She absolutely represents me, my accomplishments. I’m heartbroken I can’t be there for the unveiling.”
She has planned a visit to see the monument later this year.
Like dozens of former recruits interviewed by the Orlando Sentinel, Cannon described boot camp as a defining point in her life, where new friendships were forged toiling in Central Florida’s rain and heat, marching endlessly on an expanse of pavement they knew as the “grinder.” It was on that plot of asphalt that Navy instructors whipped young women into shipshape.
Most learned basic seamanship aboard the 240-foot USS Bluejacket, a wooden mock-up of a 1940’s destroyer escort that was anchored for more than two decades on a parade field at the corner of General Rees Avenue and Glenridge Way.
The statue is a project of the Central Florida Navy League, a civilian organization that supports men and women of the nation’s sea services. It was cast at American Bronze Foundry in Sanford, using a molten mix that included brass artifacts from seven Navy warships. The ships included the USS Lexington, the first in the U.S. fleet to sail with a coed crew, and the USS Yorktown, known as the “Fighting Lady.”
Sculptor Don Reynolds, who served a hitch aboard the Yorktown, called Carla Hoskins of Winter Park the “inspiration” for the 6-foot-7, 330-pound bronze figure, which depicts a woman in her late teens or early 20s, wearing dress blues at boot-camp graduation. The figure holds a saber in her right hand, a sign she holds a position of leadership in her recruitment company.
“She’s got the look of adventure, confidence, satisfaction that she’s just graduated, pride and determination to serve her country,” said Reynolds, 73, of Sanford.
Hoskins, 55, graduated from boot camp in 1986 and is a Navy League official who helped raise $100,000 for the statue.
Twelve years before Hoskins enlisted, Diane Jackson, 62, made it through the physical and mental challenges of boot camp. The Ohio native served in the Navy for 24 years and trained companies of recruits here.
Jackson’s voice trembled as she spoke about the statue.
“It brings back a flood of memories — a flood,” she said. “I went through boot camp 10 times in Orlando — once as a recruit and nine times as a company commander. That woman [depicted] in the statue? I trained her. I trained her how to wear that duty belt, how to hold that saber. Wow.”
Other women who served in the Navy after boot camp in Orlando viewed the statue as a long-awaited symbol of recognition for their service and respect for their sacrifice.
“It’s about time,” said Kimberly Lee, 55, who graduated from boot camp in 1980 and now lives in Tarpon Springs.
She studied cryptography after boot camp and served 10 years in the Navy.
Unlike the Blue Jacket Recruit, the Lone Sailor statue depicts a particular person — Dan Maloney, a seaman who was assigned to the submarine USS Alabama. The original sculpture was created in 1987 for the United States Navy Memorial in Washington, D.C. More than a dozen replicas stand as Naval memorials at ports across the U.S., including sites in Fort Lauderdale and Jacksonville. The Blue Jacket Recruit, on the other hand, is unique to Orlando and the historic Recruit Training Command, known to its graduates as RTC-Orlando.
“Ours is a statue that memorializes servicewomen,” said Andy Mohler, a 1978 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, a former president of the Central Florida Navy League and chairman of the memorial committee which raised money for the bronze figure of the female recruit. “Ours is ‘every woman’ who went through RTC-Orlando and whose service to their country started here. ”