EM3c Kenneth Leroy Bosley

“An answer for everything, but not always the right answer,” it says next to the high school yearbook photo of Kenneth LeRoy Bosley.

Mr. Bosley graduated in 1939 from Central High in Sioux City, Iowa, where he belonged to a literary club, the Chrestomathian, whose members were known for “the art of public speaking.”

He also played on the club’s basketball team.

By the spring of 1940, Mr. Bosley identified himself as a clerk at a drug store and said he worked just five weeks in 1939 and earned $40. It was that difficulty in finding steady employment that lead many men to enlist in the Navy, as he did on Oct. 15, 1940.

He was an electrician’s mate and petty officer 3rd class when he was killed on the U.S.S. Arizona in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

Mr. Bosley was born Jan. 16, 1922 in Storm Lake, Iowa to Clarence Bosley, a laborer at a wholesale grocer, and Mildred Mill Bosley, a housewife.

His father was an Army veteran of World War I.

Sources: The Sioux City Journal; the Storm Lake Register; VA death file; Census; Iowa birth certificate; Navy muster roll; 1939 Central High of Sioux City yearbook. Naval History and Heritage Command photo. Navy photo. This profile was researched and written on behalf of the U.S.S. Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona.

Note: The USS Arizona Memorial has this crew member home State listed as Missouri. Research shows otherwise.