Frank Levar was born July 15, 1902 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Frank Levar and Josephine Tratnik Levar. They were Yugoslavian immigrants.

Young Frank enlisted in the Navy on Dec. 2, 1920 and rose to the job and rank of watertender and chief petty officer on the U.S.S. Arizona by the time he was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941.

He married a Texas woman, Patricia Hendershot, in January 1936 at Seattle, Washington. The battleship was moored at the nearby Puget Sound Navy Yard for nearly three months that winter.

It’s possible that Mr. Levar spent part of his youth in Kemmerer, Wyoming. In 1923, 1927 and 1931 he told the Navy that Kemmerer was both his permanent home and where his father lived. The father was a coal miner there, according to the 1930 Census.

Sources: Kern Valley (California) Sun; U.S. Veterans Administration; Census; Navy enlistment records and muster rolls; Washington marriage license. This profile was researched and written on behalf of the U.S.S. Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona.