“My enlistment will terminate November 13, and I’m catching the first boat out for home and will try to reach there by Christmas,” Harold Arthur Schrank wrote to his mother from Hawaii in the fall of 1941.

Schrank, a baker and petty officer first class on the U.S.S. Arizona, had good reason to want to go home to Texas as soon as his Navy enlistment ended. He had a wife, Jewel Hyde Schrank, and a three-month-old daughter he had never met.

But there was no happy homecoming. Schrank was still on the Arizona on Dec. 7, 1941, and died in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

It isn’t clear why Mr. Schrank didn’t get off the ship when his enlistment was up, but the Arizona had been expected to return from Hawaii to San Pedro, Calif., — its home port — before Christmas 1941.

Mr. Schrank was born Jan. 10, 1917 in or near tiny Aleman, Texas to Arthur Paul Schrank, operator of a dry goods store and later a bookkeeper for a flour mill, and Emma Marie Kelm Schrank, a homemaker. He was the second son and followed by a daughter.

The family attended St. John Lutheran Church in nearby Hamilton, population 2,000 and the county seat. Harold graduated from Hamilton High School 1935. He was honored there at a memorial service in February 1942.

It’s not clear when he married, but his wife lived in Temple about 60 miles southeast of Hamilton. Their daughter Jo Lynda was born Sept. 2, 1941.

Sources: The Meridian (Texas) Tribune; Texas birth record; Census; St. John Lutheran Church; Navy enlistment records and muster roll. This profile was researched and written on behalf of the U.S.S. Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona.