Brooks Leone, left, and John King yesterday move the famed Seabee statue at Quonset Point to a warehouse.

The Providence Journal / John Freidah

NORTH KINGSTOWN

As volunteers prepared to temporarily take down the iconic Fighting Seabee statue, Dick Caito paused to consider what the 3,000-pound multicolored steel bee with machine gun and tools gripped in its six hands meant to him.

Caito, 75, a native of South Kingstown, served in Korea and the Philippines in the early 1950s with the Navy’s 10th Construction Battalion — or Seabees — clearing Japanese ships sunken during World War II.

“As a Seabee, [it’s] next to my wife and kids,” said Caito. “You know, once a Seabee, always a Seabee.”

Yesterday, a strong, frigid wind rattled the trees and flapped the flags at the growing Seabee Museum and Memorial Park on the former Davisville Navy Base. A dozen volunteers and former Navy Seabees worked to remove the statue from its 7-foot-high base so it could be refurbished for the first time since 1999, when it was moved to the museum site from the entrance to the base, where it had stood for more than 40 years.

Local 57 of the Operating Engineers union, out of Providence, volunteered a crane and five apprentices to help move the bee by flatbed truck to a warehouse in West Davisville, about a mile and half away.

Four union apprentices swarmed over the 11-foot-tall statue, attaching supports to cables that hung from the crane, as about a half-dozen former Seabees and museum personnel supervised. Robert Schwab, of North Kingstown, a Seabee veteran of Vietnam who runs the museum store with his wife, Audrey, finally cut the statue free of its base with an acetylene torch at about 10:30 a.m. With no fanfare, the whole process was over in about an hour and a half.

Over the next six months, scaffolding will be built around the statue and workers will sandblast the snarling Seabee and repaint it in nine colors.

“We’ve got stencils and reference photos,” said James Rugh, vice president of the Seabee Museum and Memorial Park, “because when it comes back, we want it to look like this but way better.”

Eventually, the 50-year-old Seabee statue will be the centerpiece of a memorial, encircled by a low wall with plaques commemorating former Seabees — part of a larger, ambitious museum project envisioned by the local chapter of the Seabee Veterans of America, Island X-1 Davisville.

As part of that plan, the museum opened a two-year campaign yesterday to raise $250,000 to build an 80-by-120-foot building that would house a museum and store, which are now in separate buildings on the park’s 6½ acres.

Retired Seabees began their quest for a museum to honor their history in 1999, and about a dozen veterans show up once a week to do whatever is needed, said Don Kurtz, a Navy veteran and museum treasurer. The museum currently overflows a Quonset hut, and many exhibits are kept in storage, Rugh said. A separate building holds a store that sells Seabee merchandise. The other Quonset huts — six in all that were moved to the site from parts of the former Navy base — are used as workshops.

A new, larger museum, Rugh said, will allow the group to charge visitors for the first time, ensuring some revenue to a project that has subsisted mainly on fundraising and grants. The future museum and park would include the new museum building; several exhibits in Quonset huts, including World War II and Vietnam-era replica barracks; and the Chapel in the Pines, which was built by Seabees in the 1960s and hosted numerous Seabee weddings.

“This capital campaign is the future of this museum,” Nicholas Fisch, president-elect of the museum, said in a statement.

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, said Jack Sprengel, a former Seabee who is considered a historian of the outfit. Training is now in Port Hueneme, Calif., and Gulfport, Miss.

But the Seabee insignia is in service around the globe and battalions carry small versions of the statue with them. “That was like the mother bee,” says Rugh of the 11-foot bee in Davisville.

“That’s near and dear to every one of us, every Seabee all around the world,” said Sprengel, who is known as the last Seabee to serve in Davisville and now is director of facilities at Quonset.

“That insignia is known to every Seabee, probably every Marine, that’s ever fought in a war, from World War II to today,” he said. “Seabees are in Iraq. They’re in Afghanistan. They’re in Africa, supporting all military operations. Besides, we think it’s a pretty cool logo.”

The Seabees are looking for volunteers for the museum. To help, call (401) 885-2583. In the winter, the free museum is open 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday, but call ahead to check.

tlaroche@projo.com