S2c Robert Beryle Grissinger

Robert Beryle Grissinger was born March 29, 1923 in Carroll County in northwest Illinois to Pauline Asam Grissinger, a homemaker, and Harry Grissinger, a rail mill worker for the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railroad and the leader of a popular dance band.

By the time of the spring 1940 Census the parents had divorced and young Mr. Grissinger lived with his father, step-mother, and a brother in Savanna, a town of nearly 5,000 in  northwest Carroll County near the Mississippi River and Iowa. He had completed one year of high school but was no longer enrolled. As a youth, he was a carrier for the Rockford Morning Star.

Mr. Grissinger enlisted in the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Depression-era federal jobs program, in July 1940.

He enlisted in the Navy on April 18, 1941, and was a seaman second class on the U.S.S. Arizona when he was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941.

Sources: the Thomson (Illinois) Review; The Daily Chronicle of DeKalb, Illinois; the Freeport (Illinois) Journal-Standard; the Morning Star of Rockford, Illinois; Census; Navy muster roll; U.S. Defense Department. This profile was researched and written on behalf of the U.S.S. Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona.