A week after he turned 17, Arthur Lee Hickman took a test to join the Navy. The Navy was his path out of Coin in southwest Iowa and what had been a difficult childhood.

He was born Aug. 2, 1920 to Arthur Stanley Hickman, a farmer, and Anna Haynes Hickman, a homemaker. 

That winter his father and an uncle shot and killed a sheriff’s deputy who pursued them after they committed armed robbery of men gathered to play craps. They were sentenced to life in prison, though within the year the uncle escaped and was never heard from again.

The women of Coin, then a town of 600, gathered food for Mrs. Hickman and her five young children. “Mrs. Hickman seems like a very nice woman and the children are nice little tots,” the Page County Democrat said.

The family attended Mr. Hickman’s trial in August 1921, and when it ended three men took to the streets of Atlantic, Iowa, and collected $40 in donations for the mother and children. The Des Moines newspaper described the family as destitute.

At times in the 1920s and into 1934 Page County paid Mrs. Hickman a “widow’s pension” of $1 or $2 a week for each of her children under 16. She also went to work — the 1930 Census described her as a washerwoman in a private home. 

Her husband’s sentence was commuted to 40 years in 1935, and the next year he was paroled. He returned briefly to Coin before leaving for Minnesota.

The oldest daughter, Ethel, graduated from high school in 1932 and moved to Indiana to work. She died of pneumonia in 1937.

The oldest son, Lester, joined the Civilian Conservations Corps, a Depression-era federal jobs program, in 1935. A second son, Howard, joined the Navy in 1939 and served throughout World War II. He later named a son Arthur Lee in honor of his youngest brother.

Arthur Lee Hickman, known as Lee, played football and basketball at Coin High School and graduated in May 1937.

He was one of many who left far southwest Iowa in the depths of the Depression. Coin lost 15 percent of its population in the 1930s.

Mr. Hickman officially enlisted in the Navy on October 19, 1937 in Des Moines and completed his basic training at Great Lakes Naval Training Station in Illinois. Arthur boarded the U.S.S. Arizona for duty on February 26, 1938.  He was 21 years old and a signalman 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.