S1c Jack C. Ford

On Dec. 8, 1941, the day after Jack C. Ford was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, his only sibling, Alfred James, enlisted in the Navy.

Jim, as he was known, did not know until just before Christmas that Jack, also a Navy man, was killed on the U.S.S. Arizona. He was a seaman first class.

“It is pretty hard to bear,” their mother, Catherine, told the Santa Monica Evening Outlook. “But I’m only one of thousands of mothers who must suffer like this before this war is over and America assured of remaining the land of the free. And after all, I’m a very proud mother. Both of my sons responded with everything they had to serve their country.” She died less than two months later.

Jim, the younger of the  brothers, served until December 1946.

They were the sons of Alfred Ford, a tile setter and later a roofer, and Catherine Crosby Ford, a homemaker and later a maid. Jack was born in Colorado on Nov. 2, 1919, but the family soon moved to California. The sons attended Lincoln Junior High and Santa Monica High School. 

Jack worked as a roofer’s assistant for 15 weeks in 1939, earning $400. He enlisted in the Navy on Oct. 6, 1940, starting as an apprentice seaman earning $21 a month.

On his application, in response to a standard question about any arrest history, he wrote: “not exactly arrested but investigated by juvenile authorities for breaking a window, taking a bottle of milk, taking a dozen donuts.”

Sources: The Santa Monica (California) Evening Outlook; Census; Navy enlistment records and muster rolls; Department of Veterans Affairs Death File. This profile was researched and written on behalf of the U.S.S. Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona.