SF2c Orville Wilmer Garrett

Orville Wilmer “Bill” Garrett was born March 16, 1917 in Saline County, Missouri about 85 miles east of Kansas City. His father, Marion Garrett, was a farmer. His mother, Fannie Narron Garrett, was a homemaker who died of pneumonia when the boy was two.

He and his youngest sister went to live with their maternal grandparents near Miami, Missouri about 10 miles north. The grandfather died when Bill was nine and the grandmother when he was 15. The children then moved about 10 miles southeast to a farm near Slater, Missouri run  by an older sister and her husband.

His father remained part of his life, though he lived about 10 miles to the southwest in Marshall, Missouri. Marion Garrett had remarried in 1923 to one of his first wife’s sisters and they had nine children.

Bill Garrett enlisted in the Navy on May 9, 1939. He was a shipfitter and petty officer second class on the U.S.S. Arizona when he was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941.

His extended family dedicated a cenotaph in his memory in 2011 at High Hill Cemetery in Saline County. It is next to his mother’s grave.

Sources: The Marshall (Missouri) Republican; The Marshall Democrat-News; cenotaph and grave markers; Navy muster roll. This profile was researched and written on behalf of the U.S.S. Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona.