Come listen to Steve Minniear speak about sailors, Seabees, and the stories behind all those old buildings you used to see in and around the Interstate 580/680 intersection.
Between 1942 and 1946 over 300,000 sailors lived, worked, trained, and transited through what is now Dublin, California. Camp Parks, Camp Shoemaker and Shoemaker Naval Hospital played an important, but largely lost, role in the US victory in the Pacific during World War II.
Camp Parks Main Gate 1945
Steve Minniear is a resident of Dublin. Soon after he moved to the area over twenty years ago he began to hear vague stories about how there once were Navy bases all along the route he drove to work in Livermore. Meeting a local volunteer who ran a small museum at Camp Parks, he became fascinated with learning more. When the small museum closed down in 2010, he dedicated his free time to collecting, saving and promoting the history that was becoming lost. His book, Dublin and the Tri-Valley: The World War II Years, issued by Arcadia Publishing, is coming out in February 2014.
A recent retiree, Minniear worked in national security. He graduated from Georgetown University and the University of California, Berkeley where he first learned his passion for history.
Steve is Vice President of the Dublin Historical Preservation Association and acts as a docent at the Dublin Heritage Park & Museums. He also presents history lectures for local audiences and assists in the care of Dublin’s Camp Parks collection. He is a member of the City of Dublin Heritage and Cultural Arts Commission.
He hopes that this presentation will bring back to life a forgotten part of the Tri-Valley’s history and act as homage to the many men and women of the Greatest Generation that lived, worked, and sometimes died in the bases near Dublin, Pleasanton, Livermore and San Ramon. He also hopes to spark additional interest in Dublin and the area’s history. He expects to dispel the sometimes heard remark that nothing interesting ever happened in Dublin.
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