QM3c Frank George Brown

Frank George Brown was born Nov. 9, 1922, on his parents’ farm at Keating in  northeast Oregon. His father, Fred Brown, had immigrated from England in 1910. His mother, Grace Humphrey Brown, was an Oregon native.

Frank, the youngest of three children, was 11 when he returned home from a Valentine’s Day school picnic to find his mother dead in the yard. The local newspaper said she was despondent when she shot herself.

Frank ended his schooling after 11th grade at the high school in Baker, Oregon. He worked as an apprentice mechanic at Blue Mountain Salvage in Baker.

He enlisted in the Navy on Dec. 8, 1939, at Portland, Oregon, and went aboard the U.S.S. Arizona the next February. Mr. Brown was a quartermaster and petty officer third class when he was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

His body was recovered and buried in Hawaii for the duration of World War II. He was reburied in 1947 at Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno, California.

Sources: the La Grande (Oregon) Observer; Navy enlistment records and muster rolls; Census; grave marker. This profile was researched and written on behalf of the U.S.S. Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona.