Three men who spent part or all of their boyhoods in the Pine River Valley in southwest Colorado were killed on the U.S.S. Arizona in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Ralph Elmer Fife was born Jan. 23, 1920 in Newton, Kansas to Raymond Fife, a farmer, and Elsie Cain Fife, a homemaker. His mother died when he was five and he moved to the Pine River Valley to live with an aunt and uncle, Alta and Linus Rathjin.

When he applied to the Navy in the summer of 1940 Mr. Fife said he was living with his father in Corona, California. Before that, he wrote, he’d lived in Kansas for six years and then in Colorado for eight. Which means he left Colorado when he was about 14.

He also said he was a high school graduate but he did not name it.

Mr. Fife enlisted in the Navy on July 26, 1940, and was a seaman first class when he was killed on Dec. 7, 1941.

The other two Arizona sailors – Gordon Eugene Berry and Harold Milton Carmack – were 1940 graduates of the valley’s Bayfield High, according to the yearbook and a local newspaper.

Mr. Berry was born on Oct. 9, 1922 in Santa Cruz, New Mexico north of Santa Fe to Clem Berry, a farmer, and Edith Scalf Berry, a homemaker. The father died about 10 years later in Kansas, and the boy moved to Bayfield to live with an older brother, Charles, and his family.

He enlisted on Nov. 7, 1940, and was a fireman second class when he was killed.

Mr. Carmack was born on Jan. 22, 1922 in Bayfield to Oscar Carmack, a farmer, and Lena Darnall Carmack, a homemaker.

He enlisted on Nov. 5, 1940, and, like his classmate, was a fireman second class when he was killed.

The Pine River Valley Heritage Museum has an exhibit honoring the three Arizona sailors and other local men who served in World War II.  And all three men were honored in 1950 when Bayfield Presbyterian church dedicated a new organ in memory of local men killed in World War II.