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PFC Robert Charles Erskine
Both the 1930 and the 1940 Census show the family living in Chicago. The latter said the father was a shoe salesman, the mother a candy saleswoman, and the son a stock clerk at a mail-order business. Robert worked 40 weeks in 1939 and earned $388.
He graduated from C.G. Foreman High School, where the head of the electrical department wrote a letter of recommendation to the Marines. G.L. Stadtler wrote that he employed Robert for four years and “found him to be conscientious, sincere, dependable and honest. Any special consideration you give him will be well repaid.”
Robert enlisted in the Marines on Oct. 7, 1940, and was a private first class on the U.S.S. Arizona when he was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941. His body was one of the few recovered from the ship and is buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu.
He was a member of the ship’s whale boat team, which was runner-up that fall in Pacific fleet competition.
Mr. Erskine’s father was a World War I veteran.