The Navy MSO Association was founded on February 16, 2002 and incorporated in the state of Illinois on May 9, 2002 as a not-for-profit corporation.
However, our roots go back several years earlier. Dick Lewis, back in 1998 became interested in finding out what had happened to his ship, the USS Venture, and from information he gathered, started a web site about the Venture. In March of 1999 Rick Szpyrka and Al Hines contacted Dick as they were also building or had ideas about web sites on each of their own ships. Dick Lewis’s web site expanded in July of 1999 and the 102 MSO web site was formed to display the history of all MSO’s. During this time Dick had the dream of, maybe, someday, being able to actually save one of the ships as a museum or at least displaying some kind of monument to honor these great ships and the men who served on them, for the benefit of all MSO sailors and future 
generations. A letter writing campaign was started to try and convince the U.S. government to put one of the few remaining MSO’s that were in mothballs on donation hold for the eventual preservation of a least one ship.
With that idea in mind Dick attended the Naval Minewarfare Association’s meeting in San Antonio, TX in 1999 to present his idea/dream to the officers of the NMA. On Sept 3, 1999 the NMA accepted Dick’s idea to form a committee and it was presented to the membership in attendance at the reunion. The committee was named the **SAVE AN MSO** committee and at that time we had only three members, Dick Lewis, Rick Szpyrka and Al Hines.
However, in November of 1999, only a couple of months after the formation of the committee, the Navy Department informed us that "regrettably, because of their condition, the Navy does not plan to retain an MSO on donation hold".
Interest in MSO’s continued on the internetwith Rick Szpyrka forming a chat group in July of 2000 and additional web sites were being built by many former MSO sailors. In the very beginning, only one or two web sites could be found about MSO’s, now there are nearly three dozen.
With Rick’s continued efforts searching the internet and his chat group we are able to contact many MSO sailors. Two of the other important prime movers for the formation of the Navy MSO Association are Al Hines and Mike Warren. Al formed the Adroit Association which gave us much encouragement to form our own MSO association and Mike was the final spark, with his persistence, that actually encouraged us to take the final step and form, formally, the NMSOA.
The NMSOA held it’s Kick-Off reunion in conjunction with the USS Guide’s annual reunion at Ft. Mitchell, KY the end of August 2002 and elected it’s first slate of officers.
Previous to our kick-off meeting, we had learned of several MSO’s that were going to be put up for bid in Belgium for sale probably to be scrapped. With that information, Mike Warren, contacted Belgium officials and concurrently formed a subsidiary of the NMSOA, the SAVE AN MSO FOUNDATION, a Non-Profit Corporation chartered in the State of Texas on October 2, 2002. Mike has worked very hard and has reached a verbal agreement for a homeport for one of the potential MSO’s in the Miami Florida area
10/2002
Dick Lewis
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