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S1c Charles Dewitt Byrd
More than 1,000 people attended a ceremony in 1964 to retire the mortgage on the recently remodeled Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 3382 in Kingsport, Tennessee.
A guest of honor at the event was Arthur Byrd, the father of Charles Dewitt Byrd — the 19-year-old for whom the post was named when it was founded in 1945.
Charles was a seaman first class on the U.S.S. Arizona when he was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. He was studying to qualify for a promotion as a shipfitter.
The ceremony also included the presentation of a large portrait of Charles, who attended Dobyns-Bennett High School in Kingsport before he joined the Navy on Oct. 3, 1940.
Mr. Byrd was born Jan. 23, 1922 in Unicoi, a town in northeastern Tennessee, to Arthur, a railroad employee, and Mollie Tipton Byrd, a homemaker. She died in 1962 on the 21st anniversary of her son’s death. It’s not known when the family, including two other sons, moved to Kingsport.