The steamship Red Oak Victory, a vessel out of another time, is back in its home berth in Richmond after a short voyage that gave it new life.

The ship, a veteran of three wars, spent a month at the California Maritime Academy dock in Vallejo so its all volunteer crew could fire up its boilers and raise steam for the first time in 50 years.

“You should have seen it,” said Alan Burns, the Red Oak’s chief docent. “It was very hot and noisy and steamy here in the engine room. It came alive.”

“And it was very cool,” said Fred Klink, the ship’s marketing manager. “You could stand here and feel the power of the engine.”

Getting up steam was the first step in a long process of making the 74-year-old ship operational.

The Red Oak Victory is a survivor, the last ship of the 747 vessels built in Richmond’s Kaiser shipyard during World War II. It has been on display on the Richmond waterfront for 20 years, not far from Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park. The Red Oak has been a static display, like an antique car in a museum or an airplane that doesn’t fly.

“If you are restoring a car, the first step is restore the engine, and that is what we did,” said Johannes Hoech, the director of ship operations.

There are many steps after this — having the ship dry-docked, for example, to make sure the hull is sound, turning over ship’s 6,000-horsepower turbines, dealing with surface rust and repairs, staffing the vessel with a crew certified by the Coast Guard.

“It is like seeing the elephant,” Hoech said, “one part at a time.”

One of the keys, of course, is money. Hoech offered “a ballpark estimate” of $2.5 million to $3 million. The Red Oak Victory and the Richmond Museum of History, the nonprofit that owns the ship, does not have the money. Not yet.

“There is so much goodwill out there,” Hoech said. “So many people want us to sail again.”

The ship has been kept going by charging admission, by donations and grants, by special events, like movie nights and pancake breakfasts.

“When we took the ship up to Vallejo, we didn’t have enough money to bring it back, but people came out of the woodwork to help us,” Hoech said. “Complete strangers.”

The move involved several tugboats and cost about $80,000.

The ship had to be moved from Richmond to Vallejo because the area around its berth is a parking facility for new cars shipped by sea from Asia. Smoke from the Red Oak’s steam engine might have damaged the finish on the brand new cars.

That’s a bit ironic, because the ship was built only a half mile from its berth in the days when the Kaiser organization turned a salt marsh into one of the largest shipbuilding facilities in the world in only a few months. The four Kaiser Richmond shipyards ran 24 hours a day and employed 90,000 people at the peak of operations. Many of the workers were minorities and women, remembered in wartime folklore as “Rosie the Riveter” and “Wendy the Welder.” Nobody worried about smoke and noise in wartime.

The Richmond yards became famous for turning out ships quickly. The first steel for the Red Oak Victory was laid in August 1944, and the ship, complete and ready for sea, sailed out the Golden Gate four months later.

It was an example of a new kind of wartime cargo vessel, a class called Victory Ships, bigger and faster than the older Liberty Ships. “This was state-of-the-art in 1944,” said Gary Piva, one of the deckhands.

“This ship and the shipyard are symbols of what the United States can do when it really wants to,” Burns said. “This is living history.”

The Red Oak Victory sailed as a cargo ship for 24 years, in World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam. It was laid up in 1968 and became a museum ship in 1998.

Several other World War II ships are berthed in San Francisco Bay. Two of them — the Liberty ship Jeremiah O’Brien and the former presidential yacht Potomac — are operational and offer cruises on the bay. Others, such as the submarine Pampanito and the aircraft carrier Hornet, are floating museums.

The O’Brien sailed from San Francisco to France and back to mark the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1944.

The Red Oak, however, has never been operational for 50 years. Nor is the ship pristine; there is a lot of work ahead. But optimism is in the air.

“Will we sail? Hopefully yes,” said Lorraine Regier, who runs the gift shop and cooks in the galley. “Why not? We got the boilers smoking again. Maybe six years or so from now.”

The ship is berthed at the end of Canal Boulevard in Richmond and reopens to the public on Saturday. The next pancake breakfast is on Sept. 9.

Carl Nolte is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. His column appears every Sunday. Email: cnolte@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @carlnoltesf