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S1c Wayland Lemoyne Wait
Wayland Le Moyne Wait was born Oct. 14, 1920 in Rice, Minnesota 70 miles northwest of Minneapolis. His father was Wayland Douglas Rice and his mother Bernice Hershey Rice. He was the only son among four children.
By the time of the 1930 Census the family had moved to Longview, Washington 60 miles south of Olympia where the father worked as a “mixer man” at Longview Fibre Co. Longview’s population was 10,652.
Le Moyne, as he was known, enlisted in the Navy on Nov. 15, 1938. He was a seaman first class on the U.S.S. Arizona when he was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941.
His name is engraved on his parents’ gravesite at Longview Memorial Park. His body was not recovered from the sunken battleship.
Sources: The Daily News of Longville, Washington; Census; Navy muster roll; cenotaph and grave marker. This profile was researched and written on behalf of the U.S.S. Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona.