SS John Ringling
liberty ship of WWII
SS John Ringling was a Liberty ship built in the United States during World War II. She was named after John Ringling, an American entrepreneur who is the best known of the seven Ringling brothers, five of whom merged the Barnum & Bailey Circus with their own Ringling Bros World's Greatest Shows. In addition to owning and managing many of the largest circuses in the United States, he was also a rancher, a real estate developer and art collector.
Construction
John Ringling was laid down on 1 August 1944, under a Maritime Commission (MARCOM) contract, MC hull 2494, by the St. Johns River Shipbuilding Company, Jacksonville, Florida; she was sponsored by Ida Loraina Wihelmina North, the sister of the namesake, and was launched on 10 September 1944.
History
She was allocated to the Luckenbach Steamship Co., Ltd., on 23 September 1944. On 3 September 1948, she was laid up in the National Defense Reserve Fleet, Beaumont, Texas. She was sold for scrapping, 22 February 1972, to Andy Equipment, Inc., for $39,333. She was removed from the fleet, 16 March 1972.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “SS John Ringling” is liberty ship of WWII. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through John, Ringling and liberty, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 16, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q85798783. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1944, 1948 and 1972.
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This entry incorporates text from “SS John Ringling” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.