- Rank: Machine Mate 2nd Class
- Serial No: 268-42-39
- Branch: US Navy
- Home Town: Buffalo, WY
- Date Of Birth: December 4, 1917
- Disposition: Unrecovered
- Family DNA on File: YES
MM2c Elmer Emil Christensen
Elmer Emil Christensen was born Dec. 4, 1917 in Chicago. His mother, Anna Peterson Christensen, was a homemaker and his father, Olaf Christensen, a railroad employee. They were Danish immigrants.
The family, which came to include five sons, moved in 1919 to Buffalo, Wyoming, then a town of about 1,800.
The 1930 Census showed the family living at Ohio Camp, Montana, where the father was a blacksmith for the Ohio Oil Co., but it seems that relocation was brief and that the family returned to Buffalo, the seat of Johnson County.
Elmer Christensen graduated in 1937 from Johnson County High School, where he played football and was a forward on the basketball team. The yearbook said he “is quiet until you get to know him and then he is full of wisecracks and fun.”
He served in the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Depression-era federal jobs program. The CCC, as it was known, employed single men 18 to 25 to plant trees, build roads and trails and make other improvements to public land, forests and parks. The men lived at camps across the country and were provided a bed and three meals a day. Of their $30 monthly pay, $25 was sent to their families. Elmer served in Co. 853 at Dayton, Wyoming.
Mr. Christensen enlisted in the Navy on Nov. 14, 1938, and went aboard the U.S.S. Arizona the next March.
For fun, he played on the football team, which competed against teams from other ships. In a ceremony in January 1940 before the entire crew of the Arizona, Mr. Christensen was among 32 football players, five boxers, and six wrestlers awarded letter sweaters. “The sweaters are of excellent material and workmanship, and have been purchased by Welfare Funds to express the appreciation and esteem in which our athletes are held by the ship’s company,” reported At ‘Em Arizona, the ship’s newsletter, in January 1940. “The recipients will wear them with pride and satisfaction that will increase as the years roll by. If they are careful they may even be able to hand them on to their sons.”
He was a machinist’s mate and petty officer second class when he was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941.
Two of this brothers served in the Navy during the war — Irving A. and Melvin D.