Last survivor of the USS Arizona passes.

Fair winds and RIP sailor. Say hello to your shipmates for us.

 

Was Mr Holder a survivor of the USS Arizona? I thought that the last USS Arizona had passed away last year. Looking on google, I see references to Mr Holder dying in the state of Arizona, being on Ford Island during the Pearl Harbor attack and later having a distinguished career as a naval aviator in the war.

Might be sloppy journalism on the part of Fox 10 Phoenix?

 

Thankfully, not sloppy journalism. Fox is 10 correctly reported him as the last Pearl Harbor survivor living in Arizona state. The image was concocted by one of those Twits on Twitter, using a video still of him with the FOX 10 logo intact.

 

Hate to be a party pooper casting ice cold water about, but I don't see a Joseph Norman "Jack" Holder amongst my list of 51,000 USN aviators and I note that at least one write up reports he left the Navy in 1948 as an AMM1c. He sported the gold naval aviator's wings in many a photo, but he'd have to be at least an AP1c in order to rightfully do so. Don't begrudge his service for one second, from what I found he was probably a well traveled and surely rightfully decorated combat air crewman, but he did not rate wearing aviators wings from what I see. Air combat crewmen had their own special wings.
I'm always leery of journalist write ups on folks, there is a marked tendency to hear and even note what is said and then, in the breathless excitement of it all, write what they imagined was heard.

In case anyone wants to know, I get a little pissy when someone wears something to which he is not entitled.

You should ask my wife about the time I found myself listening to a gent regaling a bunch of tourist type folks in the snack bar at the Air&Space Museum about his adventures as Jimmie Thach's wingman at Midway . . . even gave his his name . . . oops. She told me to let it go, but I could not. Ran the fellow and his tales right on out of there . . . told him, and those up till then enthralled listening, that he looked awful good for a guy who died in August 1944. He was wearing miniature wings and Navy Cross on his jacket lapel; I told him he need to take them off unless he could prove he was entitled to same other than his faux identity.

She's still embarrassed by my scorn heaped on the gent.

 

Guy must have wet himself when you told him who your dad was!