Of the 1,051 landing ship tanks the United States built during the Second World War, two survive. One of them is tied up at the foot of Mart Street in Muskegon, Michigan.
Max McKee did not save the USS LST 393. Sand Products Corporation bought her in 1948 as a piece of usable equipment, and for twenty-five years she earned her keep. What McKee and the Mart Dock did was decline, repeatedly, to get rid of her — which over a long enough period turns out to be the same thing as preservation.
Three Battle Stars
LST 393 was built in 1942. She is 328 feet long, flat-bottomed, and designed to run straight up onto a beach and open her bow doors. She earned three battle stars over the course of the war and made roughly thirty round trips to Omaha Beach during and after the Normandy landings, carrying vehicles, weapons, and men.
Ships built for that job were built to be expendable. Most were scrapped within a few years of the war ending. LST 393 was sold into commercial service instead.
Highway 16
Sand Products renamed her Highway 16 and put her to work as an automobile carrier on the Great Lakes. She ran cars out of Detroit factories to Milwaukee and points west, and brought Nash automobiles built in Wisconsin back to Muskegon for eastern markets. That trade kept her running until 1973.
Then she stopped. She sat at the Mart Dock for the better part of thirty years — too historically significant to scrap casually, too expensive to restore, and taking up a berth that could have been earning money. Around 2000 a group approached the McKee family about turning her into a museum ship. That first effort did not come together.
The Preservation Association
In 2005 the USS LST 393 Preservation Association was formed as a nonprofit and began serious restoration work. The organization operates her today as a veterans museum, running tours, a summer film series on the tank deck, and living-history weekends with World War II reenactors and period vehicles.
The Mart Dock owns the ship, the berth, and the parking lot, keeps the parking free, and subsidizes the cost of having her in the water. That arrangement is easy to describe and less easy to sustain, since a berth occupied by a museum is a berth not generating revenue from the port's day-to-day cargo operations.
Conclusion
There is no particularly noble origin story here. A family marine company bought a surplus ship because it was useful, kept it because scrapping it never rose to the top of the list, and eventually found people willing to take on the restoration. Eighty years after Normandy, that is enough. More on the McKee family's marine businesses and the fleet still tied up in Muskegon.