The Ship’s Store

Touring the ships at Battleship Cove, it was the ordinary spaces that often made me stop and look more closely. The enormous guns and machinery tell us what these ships were built to do, but places like this tell us what it was like to live aboard one.

The ship’s store was a small piece of everyday life tucked inside a vessel built for war. Behind the counter are things we would recognize from any neighborhood store of the period—cigarettes, toothpaste, shaving supplies, candy, toiletries and other small necessities. For sailors who might spend weeks or months away from home, these weren’t insignificant conveniences. They were reminders of ordinary life.

A Navy ship had to function as its own small community. Hundreds or even thousands of sailors ate, slept, worked, received medical care, got haircuts, sent messages home and found whatever recreation was possible without leaving the vessel. The ship’s store helped provide the personal items that weren’t issued as part of a sailor’s standard equipment.

What I particularly like about this display is how familiar everything looks. The cash register sits on the counter. Merchandise fills the shelves. Small boxes and bottles wait behind the clerk just as they might have in a corner store ashore.

But this store could cross an ocean.

Nearby was another service that was particularly important to sailors far from home: the money-order window. Before electronic banking, ATMs and instant transfers, sailors needed a dependable way to send part of their pay home to wives, parents and families. The sign above the barred window announces that money orders were available on Wednesday—payday—from 0800 to 1200. Even that simple sign tells us something about life aboard ship. Military life was organized by schedules. There was a time to work, a time to eat, a time to sleep, a payday and even designated hours for sending money home.

It is easy to visit a historic battleship and concentrate on its size, weapons and wartime service. But sailors did not experience these vessels only during battle. For long stretches of time, this was where they lived. They still needed toothpaste. They wanted a candy bar or a pack of cigarettes. They collected their pay. They worried about people at home and sent money back to them. These preserved spaces at Battleship Cove helped me see the ship differently. Behind all that steel was an entire floating community—and within it were thousands of very ordinary moments of daily life.