Suit would reopen
contest for Mighty Mo

By Susan Kreifels
Star-Bulletin

The Mighty Mo is still scheduled to start its final voyage Saturday, despite a lawsuit trying to stop it from being towed to Pearl Harbor.

"We are forging ahead," said Roy Yee, president of the USS Missouri Memorial Association, which won a bid for the historic battleship Missouri to make this its final resting place.

A Bremerton, Wash., group called Missouri on the Mainland filed the lawsuit yesterday in a federal court in Tacoma, Wash., to stop the ship from leaving Bremerton.

The lawsuit, which names the secretary of the Navy as a defendant, claims that Navy regulations forbid the service from donating battleships.

The lawsuit does not, however, call for a temporary restraining order to keep the historic ship in port.

"We want to stop it right now before it even gets off the ground," said the group's president, Russell Nickerson, in a phone interview today. "The intent is to readvertise and recompete (for the Missouri) on a fair and noncontroversial basis."

Although Nickerson said the group's attorney would be meeting with the assistant secretary of the Navy tomorrow, the service said that would not happen.