Most of the time, there is no real logic to what I post here. I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing. Most often, I come across something that excites me to the point of wanting to share it. That’s about it.
Recently, I received about thirty photographs from the daughter of a sailor with whom my dad served aboard the USS YMS-75 in 1945. She sent them to me to scan, which I promptly did, and got them back on their way to her in a just couple of days. Because there were names on the back of some of the photos, I delved back into my searches for the families of YMS-75 sailors so that I could let them know about the photos. I ran out of postcards to send out, so I ordered more, and did a little more searching as I waited their arrival. I sent out another batch when they did.
Then a few days ago I got a request from someone to join the Facebook group I created for families of Zircon sailors. And then another. So, I opened up my spreadsheet with the four hundred-plus names on it, re-organized the data so that the men who were on the ship at the same time as my dad were at the top of the sheet, and I commenced again to search for those for whom I’d not yet located family—it’s a constant loop going from top to bottom and back again.
One of those men was Jack Joseph Edwards.
Interestingly, there were two Jack Edwards who were Zircon sailors—one was Jack Joseph Edwards, and the other was John Robert Edwards, but who went by “Jack.” This has occasionally confused me as I’ve looked at the former’s name in the spreadsheet—I initially think, “I’ve already found him!” only to realize that no, I hadn’t… it was the other Jack Edwards.
So it was in earnest that I began yet another deep dive for Jack Joseph Edwards. I’m not sure why I had given up on him previously. Perhaps Ancestry hadn’t yet acquired access to the documentation it currently has? Perhaps Newspapers.com hadn’t yet added newspapers to its collection that provided me with more useful information this time around? Maybe I’ve become more adept with my searches? Whatever it was, I created an Ancestry profile for Edwards and began connecting dots.
His father, Joseph Roy Edwards, had been—according to his obituary—president and treasurer of the Mutual Milk Company and a past president of the Indiana Milk Foundation, so he seems to have been a bit of a mover and shaker in the Indianapolis area. But according to U.S. Censuses, he was a manager of an athletic club (1920), refrigerator salesman (1930), and lighting assistant, known as a “grip,” at a photographic studio (1940) in California. The rest of the obituary seems to line up, but it’s weird that there’s no other evidence of a career in the milk industry.
His mother, Marcella Smith, graduated Arsenal Technical High School in Indianapolis in 1922, and married Joseph, four years her senior, in April of 1923. Jack was born seven months later on 21 November 1923 in either Indianapolis or Terra Haute, Indiana. (His draft registration card says the latter, but I’m apt to believe it was actually in Indianapolis.)
Joseph and Marcella had two more children together, Betty Jean (1925) and Robert David (1927), but by 1930, they had divorced; Marcella married Wilmer Presley (W. P. or Jeff, as he appears to have been known) Jeffries, and subsequent news references about the children noted that Jeffries was the children’s father, so I suspect it was not an amiable divorce. Joseph would also remarry—Bessie Lorene McCoy Murphy—and have three more children with her… Ronald Roy, Donald Bruce, and Gary Owen.
Jack’s Senior class high school yearbook (1942) from Shortridge High School in Indianapolis indicates that he went to school in California at Fairfax High School in Bakersfield, and at Inglewood High School. I’m guessing that he moved there with his father and his new wife. I was able to find a couple of class photos from Inglewood’s 1939 and 1940 yearbooks (Fairfax didn’t publish individual underclass portraits, so it’s possible he’s in one of the class’s group portraits), so it’s likely the move occurred before 1938 as that is when I think he attended Fairfax. There appears to have been some kind of lag time between his Junior and Senior portraits, which is probably due to the move back to Indiana.
Edwards enlisted in the Navy on 18 June 1942, so he couldn’t have been out of high school very long when he made that decision. Fifteen days before he reported for duty on the Zircon, and while he was still in Navy Radio School at the University of Wisconsin, the Indianapolis Star ran this story about local servicemen.
After reporting to the Receiving Station in Indianapolis, then to the Great Lakes Training Center, and then (as noted in the above news article) to the radio school in Wisconsin, the Zircon was Edwards’ first seaward assignment, and he was received aboard the ship on 24 November 1942, shortly after the ship returned from convoy duty to the naval base in Guantánamo, Cuba. His rating at the time was Seaman, Second Class (S2c).
It looks as though his time aboard was pretty uneventful as his name doesn’t appear on deck logs again until 2 April 1943, when he was transferred to the Brooklyn Naval Hospital for unspecified reasons; he returned on the 10th of May.
A term I’ve only learned since beginning this project is Absent Over Leave (AOL). Before, I’d only been acquainted with Absent Without Leave (AWOL), and while both are similar in that the sailor (in this case) is not where he’s supposed to be at a specific time, the former refers to not being accounted for after having been granted official leave; the latter refers to a situation in which the sailor didn’t have permission to be gone from quarters in the first place.
Anyway, on 29 August 1943, Edwards was two hours and forty minutes late in returning from leave. He quite possibly had a good explanation for his tardiness as I found no subsequent report of punishment having been meted out.
A couple of months later, on 16 October 1943, Jack Joseph Edwards was transferred from the Zircon to the Naval Receiving Station in New York. His rating at the time was Radioman, Third Class (RM3c), so I suspect that prior to his departure, he spent time in somewhat close quarters with my dad, who was a Soundman (sonar). It seems logical to me anyway. I can’t determine where Edwards actually left the ship as several men were transferred that day—to Norfolk, Virginia, Boston, and Miami, Florida—and there’s no way that the Zircon was in all four of those places in the course of ten hours, especially not in the order in which they appear on the deck log.
Jack Joseph Edwards was received on board the USS Ariel (AF-22) on 29 October 1943 for transfer to the USS SC-680, on which he was received on 1 November 1943. On 1 March 1944, he was promoted to Radioman, Second Class (RM2c), but I found no Report of Changes for the SC-680 which referred to him obtaining leave. But surely, he was granted leave at about this time as he married Ruth Heady on 3 March 1944 in Indianapolis. Again, I find it odd that Jack’s biological father is not mentioned in the next day’s article about the wedding, so his parents’ post-divorce relationship must have been pretty bad.
Edwards served aboard the SC-680 until 31 July 1944, when he was transferred for the purpose of attending the Navy Training School in Chicago. The Report of Changes specified “Pre-Radio Materiel.” I’m uncertain as to when he left the Navy, but it was probably within a year.
Jack and Ruth Heady Edwards moved to California, eventually settling in Fresno. They had three children together—Jay, James, and Janice—and would divorce in August of 1970, only to remarry in April of 1976, or so documents available at Ancestry suggest. Ruth died 26 September 1992 and Jack died 10 March 2002.
My Father Served On The USS Zircon (PY-16) 