All Aboard the USS Constitution

On America's 250th, a memory of the oldest ship still afloat and the man who got me aboard her

(Author’s note: I wrote the original version of this in 2007, the summer I sailed on Old Ironsides with my dad. He died in 2023. I’m republishing it today, July 4, 2026, on the country’s 250th anniversary.)

My dad gave me the coolest gift I’ve ever gotten, and it didn’t cost him a dime. He was friends with a former captain of the USS Constitution, and that captain handed him two tickets to the ship’s annual Fourth of July cruise around Boston Harbor. Dad knew exactly what kind of nut I am about old ships, and especially Old Ironsides, so he took me instead of anyone else.

We met at the boarding line at the Charlestown Navy Yard around 8:30 in the morning. Everyone in that line, passengers and crew alike, had the same barely-contained excitement, like kids waiting for a ride at a fair, except the ride was the oldest commissioned warship still afloat in the world. Old Ironsides doesn’t sail under her own power anymore, hasn’t for a long time. Tugs would ease her out toward Castle Island in South Boston and back, escorted by half the admirals and ship captains in the Navy, plus a group of immigrants who would become United States citizens in a naturalization ceremony held right there on deck while we were underway.

We had the run of the ship. The crew, dressed in period uniforms, snapped to and looked sharp, and I noticed the ranks now included both men and women serving side by side, a detail that would’ve been unthinkable when the ship first fought the Barbary pirates and the British navy. It struck me, standing on two-hundred-year-old timber, how much had changed and how much hadn’t. The ritual was still the ritual. The pomp still meant something.

I wore my USS Ronald Reagan ballcap that day, a small nod to the fortieth president and to the Navy in general. My dad wore his own Navy hat, commemorating his hitch during the Korean War era. We did the math and figured out it had been more than fifty years since he’d mustered out. More than one young sailor noticed the hat, stopped him, and thanked him for his service. He’d wave it off, the way men of that generation usually do, but I could tell it landed.

The Navy Band played the old standards, including one of those marches you recognize the second you hear it even if you couldn’t have named it a moment before. That’s the trick of those songs. They don’t ask to be remembered. They just are.

What stays with me isn’t really the ship, though the ship is remarkable. It’s the picture of my father and me on her deck on Independence Day, two hats from two different eras of the same Navy, watching new citizens raise their right hands under a flag neither of us had to earn the hard way. Getting handed something like that, whether it’s a country or a family or a faith, and being expected to do something worthy with it, is about as American a feeling as I know. It’s also, not coincidentally, about as Catholic a feeling as I know: you don’t get the gift because you deserve it. You get it, and then you spend the rest of your life trying to be equal to it.

My dad has been gone since 2023, so this Fourth of July, like every one since, I don’t just remember the ship. I remember the man standing next to me on it, the wave of his hand when the young sailors thanked him, fifty-some years after he’d earned the right to be thanked and never much wanted the attention. That’s the other thing about being handed a gift you didn’t earn. Eventually you’re the one giving it, or at least trying to.

Highest honors to our heroes. Including the one who gave me the ticket.