Ralph Dueard Hicks was born April 17, 1915 at Walnut Grove, Missouri. His mother, Nelle Butcher Hicks, was a homemaker and his father, James Hicks, a farmer.

Ralph was six when his father was kicked in the abdomen by a colt and died. His mother remarried another farmer a few years later, but she died a few days after Ralph’s 17th birthday. His older brother Everal became his guardian.

Ralphcompleted at least 11th grade at Walnut Grove and served in the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Depression-era federal jobs program.

The CCC, as it was known, employed single men 18 to 25 to plant trees, build roads and trails and make other improvements to public land, forests and parks. The men lived at camps across the country and were provided a bed and three meals a day. Of their $30 monthly pay, $25 was sent to their families. He was discharged from the CCC on Dec. 31, 1934.

He applied to the Navy the next month and enlisted on Sept. 10, 1935. Mr. Hicks was a painter and petty officer second class on the U.S.S. Arizona when he was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941.

Mr. Hicks’s younger brother, James, an Army sergeant, died in a Japanese POW hell camp in the Philippines on July 30, 1942. His brother Aubrey served in the Marines for 27 years.

Sources: Ventura County (California) Star; Census; Navy muster roll; Missouri death certificate; gravemarkers; headstone application for military veterans; various histories of the 31st Army infantry. Ancestry.com photo. This profile was researched and written on behalf of the U.S.S. Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona.