SMITHLAND, Iowa. — Gaylyn Beckner never knew her uncle Wesley Brown, never was told much about him.
What he was like as a young man, his personality, those details weren't discussed very often. Buckner's mother, Ida Bainbridge, said little about her older brother in their Smithland home.
"I really didn't know anything. My mother didn't really talk about it. It hurt her too much," said Beckner, born in 1945, well after U.S. Navy Fireman 1st Class Wesley J. Brown, of Oto, age 25, was killed on board the battleship USS Oklahoma during the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
In the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, members of another branch of Brown's family tree also felt his loss. Like Beckner, Marilyn Cugnet didn't hear her mother, Fern Knibbs, speak much of her brother's death, which was multiplied later in World War II when a second brother, Max, a Canadian soldier, was killed in Germany.