ENS Carl Alfred Weeden

By the time he graduated in 1934 from Trinidad High School in south-central Colorado, Carl Alfred “Bud” Weeden was nicknamed “admiral.”

Born April 14, 1916 in Trinidad, he became a midshipman at the Naval Academy and was commissioned an ensign on June 6, 1940. The yearbook, The Lucky Bag, said this of Mr. Weeden:

“To trade a trout stream in Colorado for infantry drill in Maryland didn’t seem fair to Carl. Plebe summer swiftly passed, however, after he discovered sailing was a good substitute for his beloved trout fishing. We wonder if he will ever forget the time he left notes for upperclassmen, during his plebe year, to clean their rooms. Ask him the number of midnight duckings he had in cold showers, or the number of letters he wrote to their O.A.O.’s to pay for that mistake. His greatest thrill in three years was finishing his last French exam.” (Note: Perhaps duckings should have been dunkings. O.A.O. apparently was slang for One and Only.)

A month before the attack on Pearl Harbor, he wrote to his sister Bernadine saying he wouldn’t be home for Christmas and probably not for a long time. “Japan seems to be getting on her high horse again, so there won’t be any ships leaving the vicinity of the Hawaiian Islands,” he said.

A destroyer escort, the U.S.S. Weeden, was named in his memory in February 1944. Mr. Weeden’s grandmother, Alice, sponsored the ship at its commissioning in Orange, Texas.
His father, a meat cutter also named Carl, attended. His mother, Margaret, a homemaker, had died in February 1935 of leukemia.

Sources: Kathleen Wood for the Denver Post; Navy press release; mother’s grave marker; the Galveston (Texas) Daily News; the Associated Press; 1940 Naval Academy yearbook, Navy death record. Navy photo. This profile was researched and written on behalf of the U.S.S. Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona.