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S2c Willett S. Jr. Colegrove
By 1930 the family was back in the father’s home state of Michigan and living at Grand Rapids. The father was a stock clerk at a paper company and the mother a homemaker.
They had moved to Seattle by the time the youngest of their four children, Ronald, died at the age of three in 1937.
The 1940 Census showed the family still in the Seattle area. The father worked 36 weeks the year before and earned $1,800 as an assistant to a senior officer in the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Depression-era federal jobs program.
Willett Jr. attended Lincoln High School and completed 10th grade in the spring of 1940. He delivered newspapers the previous year, earning $90 for 40 weeks’ work. He also served in the Civilian Conservation Corps.
The CCC employed young single men to plant trees, build roads and trails and make other improvements to public land, forests and parks. The men lived at camps across the country and were provided a bed and three meals a day. Of their $30 monthly pay, $25 was sent to their families. He served in Co. 2904 at Tiller, Oregon.
Mr. Colegrove enlisted in the Navy on April 23, 1941 and by summer was serving on the U.S.S. Arizona. In July he was treated for fever and swollen and painful joints. His ailments continued until September, when he was sent to the Navy hospital at Mare Island in California with a diagnosis of rheumatic fever.
He returned to Hawaii in late November and on Dec. 5 went back aboard the Arizona. He was a seaman second class when he was killed two days later in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
His younger brother Robert served in the Navy in both World War II and Korea.