"Moving the Bee"

"The Seabee symbol is being temporarily dismantled so that it can be refurbished."

"[The Seabees] Construction battalions were born in 1942, when the Navy realized it could no longer use civilian contractors in the war zones of World War II, and the first battalions were formed at the new Navy base in Davisville. Later that year, a Navy lieutenant asked Frank J. Iafrate, a North Providence native with a talent for caricature, to create a logo for the construction battalions. After discarding an idea for a beaver, Iafrate, a civilian file clerk at the time, settled on the bee.

“ 'It works all day; it doesn’t bother you, but if you bother it, it has a way of stinging you,' Iafrate said in a 1998 interview. 'I put a Navy hat on him, gave him a submachine gun to show fighting ability, and some tools in this other arms to show construction ability.'

"Over the years, a couple of hundred thousand Seabees came through Davisville before it was closed in 1994..."

[Link to the article in The Providence Sunday Journal (12/2/2007) is embedded in the title.]

Photo: Brooks Leone and John King move the famed Seabee statue at Quonset Point to a warehouse.