Y3c Harold Reuben Givens

Harold Reuben Givens was two years old when his mother, Lollie Cummins Givens, 41, died of pneumonia in January 1923.

His father, Reuben R. Givens, a store manager and later a police judge in Morehouse in southeast Missouri, married Mamie Boaz the next year.

Harold, born Oct. 21, 1920, graduated from the local high school in 1938. He did clerical work for the Farm Security Administration, a federal agency created to help farmers during the Depression.

When he applied to enlist in the Navy in April 1940 he said he was at a Civilian Conservation Corp Camp in Pierce, Idaho. The CCC was a Depression-era federal jobs program for young men. He’d been at Camp Bungalow for five months.

He enlisted in the Navy on April 14, 940 and was a yeoman and petty officer third class on the U.S.S. Arizona when he was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941. He had been a member of the ship’s tennis team.

His father served in the cavalry during the Spanish-American War.

Sources: the Sikeston (Missouri) Standard; the Sikeston Herald; Census; Missouri death certificate; Navy muster rolls; “At ‘Em Arizona,” the ship’s newspaper. This profile was researched and written on behalf of the U.S.S. Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona. Note: Harold’s birth certificate says his mother’s birth last name was Cummings. But her father’s military records and grave marker say Cummins.