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F2c Garris Vada Hodges
Like thousands of other young men throughout the country during the Great Depression, Garris Vada Hodges was poor and had few meaningful prospects for employment in his rural town of Wilson, Texas.
He enlisted in the Navy on Nov. 4, 1940, and was a fireman second class on the U.S.S. Arizona when he was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941.
He had been promoted to that job in August, and in a letter to an aunt and uncle wrote, “I guess you know fifty bucks looks pretty good.” That, he said, was his monthly pay.
Mr. Hodges was born Oct. 14, 1922, in Tahoka, Texas. His father, Benjamin Franklin Hodges, was a farmer and sharecropper, and his mother, Laurine Swann Hodges, a homemaker. The father was injured while serving as a private first class in World War I. The mother died in 1932, a few days after giving birth to another son.
At the time of the spring 1940 Census Garris was living with his aunt and uncle, Pat and Blanche Swann, in Wilson, a town of fewer than 400 people not far from his birthplace.
When he applied to the Navy that fall he wrote that he’d completed 9th grade at Wilson High School.
Both of his younger brothers, Lowell and Billy Joe, also served in the Navy, as did a great-nephew, Mitchell Hodges, and a great niece, Bailey Sharbrough White. She completed her first re-enlistment during Pearl Harbor remembrance ceremonies in December 2007. She is also the keeper of Garris’ Purple Heart.