By Sarah Brennan
Senator Robert C. Byrd was more than a politician from West Virginia. He, and his wife Erma represented West Virginia on the national stage. Their support was frequently symbolic and always brought positive attention to their home state. One such example occurred during the 1980s, when Senator Byrd persuaded the United States Navy to name a nuclear submarine in honor of the state. Correspondence in the Byrd Collection at the Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies shows the Senator’s desire to have a nuclear powered submarine named the West Virginia as early as May 1987, the same year that a planned relocation of the United States Coast Guard National Operations Computer Center to Martinsburg was to take place at his request. Byrd appealed to U.S. Naval Secretary James Webb, asking him to consider that the previous ship named after West Virginia saw action at Pearl Harbor and Tokyo Bay during World War II. That ship was decommissioned in 1959, and to Byrd, the patriotism of West Virginians warranted the naming of a new one. Note: This post was previously listed under our "News from the Grey Box" blog series By Casey Dehaven
On October 8, 2013, NPR aired a story entitled “Enter The Quiet Zone: Where Cell Service, Wi-Fi Are Banned.” This news item described two scientific installations in West Virginia: the Green Bank Telescope and the Sugar Grove research facility. Senator Byrd was instrumental in securing funding for these two sites, and we wanted to highlight his role in advancing the cause of science in his home state. In November 1988 in the foothills of Pocahontas County, West Virginia, the gusset plate, an integral piece of a structure’s anatomy, came loose and reduced the original Green Bank Telescope to a pile of rubble. Less than a year later, Senator Robert C. Byrd pushed a $75 million Emergency Supplemental Appropriation through Congress in order to secure federal funding to rebuild a more advanced model of the Green Bank Telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia. Construction of the telescope began in the summer of 1993; with Senator Byrd observing in one of his many Byrd’s Eye View columns that the “official operation of the new, technologically advanced National Radio Telescope is anticipated to begin in 1995.” He mentioned that one of his main reasons for funding this project was to ensure that the state of West Virginia was kept in the “front ranks” of radio telescope technology as a “brilliant star” for a scientific future. Note: This post was previously listed under our "News from the Grey Box" blog series
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