Editor's note: Mare Island Naval Shipyard is 15 miles south of Napa, but the military facility has had a profound effect on Napa County and the lives of many residents. Here are the stories of some of the many people with Napa ties who worked on Mare Island before the naval base was closed 10 years ago Saturday.

Jim Davis was a second generation Mare Island worker. His father worked there during World War II as an electrician's helper on the docked ships and went on to be carpenter until he retired in the 1970s.

Davis' family lived in Rodeo and Vallejo. "Most of us kids had no idea where Napa was," he said, but in 1950 they bought a lot on Massa Dr., then a gravel road in far west Napa where a stand of prune and pear trees had to be felled to make way for housing.

Young Jim went to work at Mare Island in 1960 as an apprentice shipwright in Shop 64, where he worked on nuclear subs and went through frequent intense training.

"It was way tougher than high school," he said. "Probably 10 times more homework than I was used to. If you flunked, you were fired."

The biggest events during his tenure were the submarine launchings, which, Davis said, sent a chill up his spine. There were 14 of them from 1960 to 1970, the last one being the USS Drum.

"To be standing within 20 feet of this big sub you had worked on for maybe two years and see it slide by you and successfully hit the water and float -- what a thrill."

"When I started there I was an 18 years old wise-ass punk kid," said Davis, noting he was one of the younger workers among seasoned veterans. "They would set you in your place when necessary. ... I'm sure they helped me become a better person."

Wally Clendening worked at Mare Island first in the 1970s, then came back in 1986, starting a two decade tenure as a pipefitter in the power plant.

Extra help was needed at the dry docks, and he was sent over there with the caveat he could return to his old job if he wanted it back.

Clendening said there was a huge effort to spruce up the base in 1994, when locals began to get nervous about closure rumors. "They thought if they prettied it up, the inspectors would opt to keep it open," he said, "but they saw it as just another dog-and-pony-show."

Two years later, the shipyard closed, and Clendening retired for all of six months.

Soon the Napa resident was back, now an employee of Lennar Mare Island, a major player in the base redevelopment. With Clendening's job important to the stability of the dry dock system, he and his supervisor Jim Bennett continue to see that the system is regularly pumped dry.

The irony, Clendening said, is his belief Lennar "would like to see the drydocks go away." There was talk of filling them with gravel, but concerns about contamination have prevented that. Other uses have included contracting for scrapping old ships such as those in the nearby Benicia "Mothball Fleet."

Clendening said motion picture studios have used them as well, including Warner Brothers in the filming of "Sphere," which stars Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone and Samuel L. Jackson.

Clendening is memorializing his Mare Island days in a book he's currently writing.

Ron Ruggiero began in the apprentice program in the 1960s, working his way up the Mare Island career ladder. He left in 1993, when the handwriting was on the wall that the base would close.

As the youngest shop superintendent at the facility, Ruggiero sat in on top level meetings and helped squire dignitaries about when they made their VIP tours, but he termed the efforts to remain open once the wheels were in motion "an exercise in futility."

He was involved in some classified programs including work on the USS Parche, a nuclear sub that was retrofitted for heavy duty espionage off Russia's east coast. He decided to head north to a base at Puget Sound to put in his final five years, retiring in 1998.

Ruggiero said there were times when Mare Island was just another job, but it was very special because of a lot of good colleagues. "People joke about government employees," he said, "but these were hard workers. I miss the people."

To this day, Ruggiero hosts a twice-annual luncheon of former Mare Island superintendents.

Monroe Katz, now a Napa dentist, was a Mare Island electrician and something of an artist. He described the sounds of the work on nuclear submarines as "blowing, sucking, clanking, banging, buzzing and ringing." Add to that the screaming of a grinder, the hissing of air lines and whining of electric motors. He recalled the hazards of working around frayed metals and sharp implements required for the intricate wiring of the undersea crafts.

Katz said they used a sticky substance to protect wiring from moisture, rotting and rats. When the substance dried and lost its medicinal smell, it was great for sculpting, a passion Katz developed at Mare Island and still enjoys.

He recalled having one of his colleagues pose as he sculpted a likeness crafted from the odd material. His boss came around later, saw it and complimented the piece. "You worked on it only on your breaks, didn't you," he asked, to which Katz replied, "Sure."

At the end of the shift, he caught his subject ripping the artwork apart. "Having fun, Sid? How would you like it if I pulled your face apart?"

"Sorry Monroe," he replied. "I'm afraid I'll get canned if one of the big muck-a-mucks sees it. He'll think I was goofing off on the job."

If you see the name Steve Bianchi etched into the hull plates of a naval vessel such as the battleship USS California, that's because Bianchi was an expert in plate layout, leadership and duplication of the structural parts, according to his granddaughter, Jan Bianchi of Napa.

She said her grandfather started at Mare Island in August 1911, where he was known as "Boy." He was quickly elevated to the post of helper shipfitter, moved on to journeyman, and prior to World War II became leadingman shipfitter.

Lynn Combs' history at Mare Island goes back to her great-grandfather Charles, who worked the railroads from Kansas to California and ended up at Mare Island. Two of his sons worked there as a machinist and pipe-fitter.

Combs went into the apprentice program in 1979 after the gender barriers had broken down somewhat, but some things remained rough for her. "I probably cried more in my first four years as an apprentice than at any time in my life," she recalled. "We were so visible."

She called the closure announcement as, "the ultimate sadness."

Her swan song with the Navy and Mare Island, she said, was "the end of her federal career and our family's tradition."

For Napan Barbara Dujardin, Mare Island was a family affair. Her father, Harold McFarland, went to work there as a rigger in the 1940s, followed by her mother, who because of her diminutive stature had to stand on a box to operate a drill press.

Barbara and her sister Gloria joined their parents in the summer of 1944 as messengers in the Correspondence Building and often commuted to work together.

She said life at the base was very pleasant, despite the wartime atmosphere. There were baseball games and celebrity visits including those by Dick Powell, June Allyson and Gloria DeHaven.

Barbara met her husband Al -- who was en route to Pearl Harbor -- at Mare Island. "We spent my lunch hours each day walking around the island," she said, "talking and sharing time."

There are bittersweet remembrances of 1945, according to Dujardin. On April 12, "one of the girls rushed out with the news that President Roosevelt had died. It was a terrible moment."

That was at least partially offset by the August 14 announcement that the war was over. "It still remains a day I will forever remember," said Dujardin.

Stepping onto Mare Island still conjures up visions for Terry Mulgannon who, at 19 spent the summer of 1971 helping craft parts for a top secret spy ship, the USS Halibut.

Being more a flower child of the 1970s Haight-Ashbury days, Mulgannon found the industrial setting surreal. "It was the first time I'd seen that east coast smoke stack industry kind if setting," he said. "It was an odd environment, with hundreds guys with lunch pails and hard hats."

Mulgannon recalled delivering templates and patterns of pieces to be cut from heavy steel.

Other parts came from different sectors of the yard, but it wasn't for another 30 years that Mulgannon was able to piece together the facts that convinced him this was the Halibut, a nuclear-powered sub designed to carry the Regulus missile.

It became an important part of the U.S. deterrent force in the early years of the Cold War and helped intercept communications from a Soviet base on Vladivostock.

Today. Mulgannon again finds Mare Island surreal, but now because it is a "big, deserted, empty, cavernous place." Since its closure, he has attended several of the larger events held on Mare Island.

Napan Mary Einarsson, whose father, Henry Ferrero, began work at Mare Island in 1916 as a 16 year old, recalls the World War II years. "We fully understood that any bombing that may take place by Japan would be at Mare Island or San Francisco, and the danger was very real that Napa could be a mistaken target. We had a black-out room that we went to during the air raid warnings."

Ferrero, with only an elementary school education at the time, went on to earn three engineering degrees and was instrumental in helping locally built ships on their maiden voyages.

Napan Joan Webster helped to coordinate the recent fundraiser for the famous St. Peter's Chapel on Mare Island. It sits at the end of the famous Officer's Row, a string of Victorians that housed naval officers stationed there. She and her late husband lived in one of the Officer's Row mansions during the 1970s, when he was commanding officer on a Seawolf nuclear submarine.