FOUKE, Ark. - Although local Texarkana, Arkansas, resident Nedra Turney wasn't old enough to remember one of her distant cousins, Memorial Day still holds special meaning to her because of him.
With this year marking the 75th Anniversary of World War II ending - at the cost of more than 406,000 American military service members - Turney's cousin happened to be one of the first servicemen whose life was taken on the first day of the war.
Turney wasn't much more the a year old when her cousin, 22-year-old Hurbert Aaron, was killed while serving in the U.S. Navy aboard the Battleship USS Arizona during the Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941.
"Hubert's mother was my grandmother's sister on my dad's side of the family," Turney said. "I really wasn't old enough to remember Hubert, but I remember the rest of the family speaking well of him while I was growing up."
Born in October of 1919 as the youngest of six kids to Alonzo and Jennie Aaron, Hubert Aaron's family lived in or near the Ferguson Community on a 46-acre farm near both Miller County's Shiloh and Sylverino communities - about seven miles southeast of Texarkana.
Aaron attended both Fouke High School and Arkansas HighbSchool, where he loved to play baseball. However he wasn't able to graduate and eventually joined the Navy at age 21 in October of 1940.
Upon being sworn into military service in Little Rock, Aaron journeyed by passenger train to the West Coast, where he took his basic training in San Diego in the winter of 1940-1941.
He would go on to take his technical training as a Navy Fireman 2nd Class. This classification referred to men who worked down deep in the battleship's engine room and boiler room sections.
There, the men kept the vessel's fuel oil burning to keep the battleship moving forward.
As one of 1,178 sailors and Marines who died aboard that battleship, Hubert Aaron is the very first of the vessel's fatalities to be listed - by virtue of his last name -at the USS Arizona Memorial. This shrine straddles the vessel's sunken hull. That hull continues to serve as permanent underwater mausoleum for Aaron and his fellow servicemen.
Besides Aaron's name being the first listed on the battleship's memorial, it is also the first name to be found on the Texarkana College World War II Memorial, as well as on a more recently constructed veteran memorial near the Fouke School District.
Turney said she got to visit the Arizona Memorial in about 2004.
"It was just unbelievable how young Hubert was back then," Turney said. "Hubert was the age that one of my grandsons is now. Seeing that memorial was very touching and I couldn't keep from crying."