Alfred Grant Heath was born March 15, 1916 in Spencer in central Wisconsin to Grant Heath, a druggist, and Ella Stoltenow Heath, a homemaker.

The boy was two when his mother died. An aunt and uncle came to live with them. When they moved to Longmont, Colorado in the early 1920s, Alfred went along. He completed 11th grade at Longmont High School.

He returned to Wisconsin some time after 1930 and lived with another aunt and uncle at Stratford, about 12 miles east of Spencer. He worked there as a gas station attendant for one year.

A brief mention in a 1935 news article said he was in the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Depression-era federal jobs program. The CCC, as it was known, employed single men 18 to 25 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 enlisted in the Navy on March 13, 1940 and was a seaman first class on the U.S.S. Arizona when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

In the aftermath of the explosion that sunk the Arizona, he was taken to the Solace, a hospital ship on the north side of Pearl Harbor, but died there on Dec. 10. He is buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in the Punchbowl at Honolulu.

Sources: Marshfield (Wisconsin) News-Herald; Census; burial records; Navy enlistment records and muster roll. This profile was researched and written on behalf of the U.S.S. Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona.