S1c Robert Joseph Dineen

Robert Joseph Dineen loved to play football and would head to a city park in Hornell, NY, on Saturday mornings to join a pickup game of tackle football.

“He had a heart and personality that just spilled out all over,” his football buddy Charles Giallanza recalled many years later.

Mr. Dineen was born in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 3, 1918, the son of John Joseph Dineen and Loretta  Kane Dineen. His mother died of a heart condition just before he turned eight. His father was a lineman for a railroad.

The son lived in Susquehanna till about 1932,  then moved to live with an aunt in Hornell. He completed the 8th grade at the high school in nearby Almond in 1937, then worked as a freight handler at the Erie Freight House in Hornell. He also served in Company K of the 108th Infantry of the New York National Guard from October 1937 to September 1938.

He enlisted in the Navy on April 24, 1940, as an apprentice seaman earning $21 a month. He was a seaman first class on the U.S.S. Arizona when he was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on  Dec. 7, 1941.

An older brother, John, served in the Army during the war and survived.

Sources: the Evening Tribune of Hornell, N.Y.; Census; Navy enlistment records and muster rolls; grave markers; New York National Guard service card; U.S. Headstone application for military veterans. This profile was researched and written on behalf of the U.S.S. Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona.