S2c Earl Arthur Reynolds

When the Census was conducted in April 1940, Earl Arthur Reynolds was identified as a sharecropper with no schooling in Silt, Colorado, population 359, along the upper reaches of the Colorado River 75 miles from Utah. 

His father, Charles Waite Reynolds, was a laborer for the Works Progress Administration, a Depression-era federal jobs program. The father listed his 1939 wages as $673 to support a family of six.

Mr. Reynolds was born Oct. 27, 1921, possibly in Hayden, population 455, near Wyoming in northwest Colorado. His parents lived there in 1920 before their marriage later that year and Hayden was where a sister was born less than two years after her brother. 

By 1930 the family lived in Collbran with 341 residents on an offshoot of the Colorado southwest of Silt. The father was a harness maker.

By April 1935 they lived in Rifle, back on the Colorado a bit over 10 miles west of Silt. On Sept. 17, 1940, Earl Arthur enlisted in the Navy. He soon was assigned to the U.S.S. Arizona and was a seaman second class when he was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941.

He was survived by his father, his mother Lucille May Stout Reynolds, three sisters, and a brother.

Sources: Navy muster rolls; US Census, unmarked newspaper clipping about his death. This profile was researched and written on behalf of the U.S.S. Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona.