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COX Albert John Judd
Albert John Judd was born Nov. 30, 1919 in Overton County in north-central Tennessee. His father, Dewey Judd, was a laborer at a handle mill and his mother, Edna Clark Judd, a homemaker.
It isn’t clear when the parents divorced, but in 1930 Albert lived at the Tennessee Industrial School near Nashville. A local newspaper article that year described it as “an institution for the care and training of homeless and destitute children,” average age 10½. The approximately 750 students were identified in the Census as inmates, though they were simply poor.
His mother and younger sister were lodgers at a home in Detroit in 1930 and the mother was a “paper girl” at an auto factory. She remarried in August 1933 to a janitor. The mother, sister, and step-father remained in Detroit in 1935 and early 1940.
His father lived in Florida by at least April 1935 and remained there the rest of his life.
It seems likely that Albert reunited with his mother and sister at some point, because he was in Detroit when he enlisted in the Navy on Feb. 9, 1937.
Mr. Judd was a coxswain and petty officer third class on the U.S.S. Arizona when he was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941.
Sources: Census; Navy muster roll; the Nashville (Tennessee) Banner; Michigan marriage license; Defense Department. This profile was researched and written on behalf of the U.S.S. Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona.