Leo Greene, Administrative Assistant to the City Manager of Long Beach in 1967, was a passenger aboard the Queen Mary on her last voyage. As a representative of the City of Long Beach, president of the Queen Mary Club and leader of multiple civic organizations, Leo Greene gave over 400 public addresses about the Queen Mary. An excerpt from one of these speeches illustrates his perception of the Queen Mary's uniqueness:

"The ship has a potential life of 300 years. With the passage of every year she becomes more valuable and unique. She is a frozen moment of the luxurious life of the 1930s; she is a living part of the crisis-filled days of World War II; she is a symphony of the marine architect, the artist, the sculptor and the deco-moderne art of the first half of the twentieth century.

She is a moment of history caught as is an insect in amber, perfect and beautiful and complete. We owe it to future generations, those future descendants whom we have deprived of their share of fossil fuels and wealth, the treasure for which we traded their birthright. Leaders may rise and fall, generations may come and go, critics may rage and rail, but none has the right to deprive the future of the treasure we possess: none has the right to decide that what has been expended shall be thrown to the winds, that the Queen Mary shall be destroyed because she is not a profit item.

As well destroy the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, the pyramids and the Sphinx. What is their basic value as scrap? What is their spiritual value? Just so, we must give attention to the true values of the Queen Mary, what she means not only today but tomorrow and tomorrow's tomorrow. The Colossus of Rhodes, one of the wonders of the ancient world, finally ended as scrap carried away on the backs of 900 camels. The world was the loser. Let such a tragedy never be repeated with the Queen Mary!"—Leo Greene