S1c Louis Edward Cremeens

Louis Edward Cremeens served in both the Army and the Navy.

He was born in Dec. 13, 1917 at Portageville, a town of about 1,000 people in the boot heel of Missouri. His father, Stephen Cremeens, was a laborer at a stove factory, and his mother, Edith Malone Cremeens, a homemaker. 

The marriage, which produced three sons, ended in 1924. The father remarried sometime in the 1930s and had three more children. The family lived in Louisiana and then Arizona. Louis ended his schooling after 8th grade.

A brief April 1939 news article in the Yuma (Arizona) Sun said Louis was an Army private serving at Schofield Barracks north of Pearl Harbor. His name also appears on a 1937 ship manifest showing him in the Army and arriving in Hawaii. He was discharged from the Army in May 1939 but remained in the Army Reserve.

By the spring of 1940 Census, Louis was living with his family in Yuma. He was a laborer for a retail bottling company for 16 weeks in 1939 and earned $160.

Mr. Cremeens enlisted in the Navy on June 6, 1940, as an apprentice seaman earning $21 a month.. He was a seaman first class on the U.S.S. Arizona when he was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

At least one half-brother, Roy, served 26 years in the Air Force.

Sources: the Yuma (Arizona) Sun; The Weekly Record of New Madrid, Missouri; Roy Cremeens obituary; Census; Navy enlistment records and muster roll; Army transport manifest. Ancestry.com photo shared by Brenda Farmer. This profile was researched and written on behalf of the U.S.S. Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona.