Here we see a vintage Prohibition-era gathering that shows the old 3,300-ton Arkansas-class monitor-turned submarine tender USS Cheyenne (IX-4) (ex-Wyoming BM-10), inboard at left with the early S-class submarine USS S-12 (SS-117), while outboard at left is the Clemson-class four-piper destroyer USS Dale (DD-290).
U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 55117
The display, at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Pennsylvania, 14 June 1926, was during the National Sesquicentennial (150th) exhibit there. The small boat and Sailor, in the foreground, are on life-saving service to protect exhibit visitors.
All three of these vessels would go on to an extremely mixed bag of service.
The youngest of the trio is the submarine S-12, which joined the fleet scarcely three years before this meeting in Philly. After spending most of her active career in the Panama Canal Zone, she would return to the City of Brotherly Love to be decommissioned in 1936. After a stint on red lead row, she was returned to the fleet on the eve of World War II in 1940 to spend the conflict on patrol in the Carribean and Gulf of Mexico, thoroughly obsolete but good enough for limited service. She was decommissioned 18 May 1945 and sold to the Northern Metals Company of Philadelphia, for junk.
The next youngest of the bunch was Dale, commissioned only six years before this image was taken. She would be decommissioned 1 May 1930, just after her 10th birthday, and sold the following year to a concern that would use her as the banana boat MV Masaya operating for Standard Fruit out of New Orleans. She would go on to be used by the Army in WWII and was sunk off New Guinea in 1943.
As for Wyoming/Cheyenne, the California-built monitor, with her twin 12″/50cal guns and up to 11-inches of armor, had been decommissioned two weeks before the photo was snapped, towed there in January 1926 from Norfolk by the minesweeper USS Owl. She would remain in PNSY until 1937 when she was stricken from the Naval List and sold to the breakers in 1939, her Spanish-American War period steel no doubt being recycled into material to help forge the Arsenal of Democracy.