USS Lexington (CV-16) - Corpus Christi

Two weeks ago I was in Corpus Christi for a State Bar Board of Directors meeting, and finally got a chance to go see the Essex-class carrier Lexington, now a museum ship.  I went with three other board members Thursday, and then again with another board member and his wife Friday (and then stayed another hour or so for the below-decks tours).  Thursday we watched the IMAX film Fighter Pilot: Red Flag in the theater (which was really, really good).  The exhibits were good - there was a SBD brought from Lake Michigan that was particularly interesting - and the WW II exhibitds on the gallery deck were very good, but the ship just never felt like a WW II vessel for some reason.  I think it was because the Lexington was in service so long as a training carrier - after conversion she had only a few years of active service before beginning training carrier duties in 1962, which continued to 1991.  The hangar deck roller doors were gone, and many other details I was used to with post-conversion Essex class ships were long gone.  For example I couldn't even find the base for some of the port-side 5" guns.  I was standing where they should be but couldn't find any trace.  I was also more than a little disappointed that the flag bridge was closed - that would have been where Admiral Mitscher worked, and where much of the history the ship saw from 1943-45 took place.  Bottom line for me was that the ship just felt like a postwar peacetime ship without a lot of combat history.  The intense action of its first two years in service was documented well, but it just seemed like another ship.  The board members I went through with kept having difficulty separating the first Lexington from this one, and I think it had something to do with the first Lexington having a lot more in common with this carrier's WW II service than the ship we were standing on.  Essentially, this is the third Lexington, not the second, and you have to excavate really deep to see the second.
Of course what I think about the various ships has a lot to do with how familiar they are to me, and this one just wasn't as familiar as I expected - again, because it was in service 35 years subsequent to conversion.  I am used to ships that had about ten years' active service or so before being mothballed, so they didn't change much from what I expected.  It's a good museum ship - don't get me wrong - it's just not what I was expecting.  But I was very happy to finally get to see it.