F2c Kenneth Erven Cooper

Brothers Clarence and Kenneth Cooper were born in Kalispell, Montana. Their mother, Cordelia Terry Cooper, was a homemaker and their father, Ralph Cooper, a laborer. She was a Canadian immigrant.

Clarence Eugene was born June 15, 1918, and Kenneth Erven on Feb. 2, 1920. He signed his middle name Erven, which matches his birth record. Some sources spelled it Irven.

The family moved about 1922 to Casmalia, California, a town in Santa Barbara County too small to be counted separately in the federal Census. The father took a job with the Pan-American Petroleum Co.

He died in 1925, leaving his widow with seven children age nine and younger.

Clarence, Kenneth, and their older brother Raymond graduated in 1933 from the Casmalia grammar school, where they sang and performed in a play during commencement exercises. All then attended Santa Maria Union High School, where Clarence said he completed 11th grade and from which Kenneth said he graduated.

A brief news article in December 1935 said Clarence got a knockout in the first 30 seconds of an amateur fight at Pismo. “Cooper claimed he had never been in a ring before and had not even attended a prize fight.”

Their mother married Frank Firanzi, a Navy veteran and Southern Pacific Railroad employee, in 1936.

Son Clarence married in 1938 and divorced two years later. When he completed his military registration in 1940 he was living in Casmalia and working for an oil refining business. Son Kenneth, meanwhile, was a ranch hand about 100 miles north at Cholame.  In their pre-enlistment physicals both brothers were described as having flat feet, but they obtained waivers. At the time, fallen arches were thought to cause pain when men carried heavy weights or walked long distances. It was a reason the military rejected some applicants.

The brothers enlisted in the Navy together on Nov. 1, 1940, and went aboard the U.S.S. Arizona on Dec. 30.

The battleship spent most of the next six months at Pearl Harbor before visiting its home port at San Pedro, California for two weeks in June 1941. During that time Clarence and Kenneth got leave to travel home. All seven siblings and other relatives and friends held a barbecue reunion at a park. It was the first time they’d been together in two years, and it was to be the last.

Clarence and Kenneth, firemen second class on the Arizona, were killed on Dec. 7 in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Twenty-three pairs of brothers died on the ship.

Brother Raymond Cooper served in the Army from 1944 through 1946.