Jerald Fraser Dullum “was always fooling around at home with electric wires and batteries,” his father recalled years after his son’s death at Pearl Harbor.
Mr. Dullum was an electrician’s mate and petty officer third class when he was killed on the U.S.S. Arizona in the Japanese attack, Dec. 7, 1941.
He was born July 23, 1921, in East Helena, Montana, to Eugene Dullum, a smelter worker, and Eva Fraser Dullum, a homemaker and Canadian immigrant.
He was president of the Epworth League, an association for young Methodists, at his church, East Helena Methodist. He was also a Boy Scout.
Mr. Dullum graduated from Helena High in 1939 and worked at the local smelter before he enlisted in the Navy in February 1940.
The Cory-Dullum Veterans of Foreign Wars post in East Helena was named, in part, in his honor. And his brother Howard “Fritz” named his oldest son Jerald.
A third Dullum brother, Henry, served in an Army tank destroyer battalion during the war and survived.