S1c Douglas A. Lock

Farmer Stanley Onease Lock, a retired Navy chief quartermaster, was called back into service in 1940 as a recruiter in Western New York.

The week before Thanksgiving one of the men he enlisted was his son, Douglas, then 17.

Douglas A. Lock was killed little more than a year later in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941. He was a seaman first class on the U.S.S. Arizona

After his son’s death, Stanley Lock hoped to be assigned to a submarine, a warship on which he had 12 years of experience. Probably because of his age — he was born in 1895 — he was kept on recruitment duty in Buffalo.

A story and photo in the Times Herald of Olean, New York, showed Mr. Lock with the $500 war bond he purchased on the first anniversary of Douglas’ death.

Douglas Lock was born Aug. 23, 1923 in Connecticut, likely at Gales Ferry north of New London in southeast corner of the state. When he was born, his father, who’d enlisted in 1913, was still in the Navy. His mother, Eva Stone Lock, was a homemaker.

She died of pneumonia in 1926, and Douglas and his older siblings, Stanley Jr., Paul, and Juanita, went to live at the Indiana Soldiers & Sailors Children’s Home near Knightstown. They stayed there for four years until their father remarried and they moved to Connecticut.

By April 1935 Douglas was in Villenova, New York 40 miles southwest of Buffalo and was still there at the time of the spring 1940 Census. Douglas had completed 8th grade but was no longer enrolled in school. He lived and worked as a hired hand on a farm, earning $240 for 52 weeks of work in 1939. His father, stepmother, and six siblings lived on a farm 5 miles west at Arkwright.

Stanley Lock served in the Navy until January 1946. He died in 1962.

Two other sons also served in World War II. Stanley Jr. was a mechanic in the Army Air Forces and Paul was a submariner in the Navy.

Sources: the Dunkirk (New York) Evening Observer; the Times Herald of Olean, New York; The Star Press of Muncie, Indiana; the Portland (Maine) Press Herald; The Bangor (Maine) Daily News; the Buffalo (New York) Evening News; Census; Navy muster rolls; application for military headstone or marker; Defense Department. This profile was researched and written on behalf of the U.S.S. Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona.