For Memorial Day 1937, the crew of the USS Arizona enjoyed a special meal of roast turkey, fresh asparagus and sage and onion dressing, with cigars to smoke after dessert.
The menu from that holiday dinner, printed on shiny gold paper, is now part of the University of Arizona’s extensive archive of historical items from the sunken battleship.
“Anything that documents the sailors’ life on the Arizona and other ships is a great addition to this collection,” said Trent Purdy, a curator for U of A Libraries’ Special Collections.
Lowell and Wendy Franklin of Green Bay, Wisconsin, hand delivered the menu to the university this week, along with a box filled with other items that Lowell’s father collected while serving on board the Arizona.
Arthur Manning Franklin worked in the ship’s print shop from 1938 until the summer of 1941, so the keepsakes his family is donating to the university include newsletters, notices and awards he printed or received.
There’s a program for the ship’s Christmas services on Dec. 22, 1940, and a flier for a football game between the crews of the USS Arizona and the USS New Mexico on Oct. 7, 1939.
There’s the colorful certificate presented to Franklin and the ship’s other new “shellbacks,” after they crossed the equator for the first time on July 24, 1940.
The plain cardboard box with Franklin’s name on it also contained his black USS Arizona sailor’s hat and several leather-bound scrapbooks filled with photos and newspaper clippings from his time in the Navy.
The items will be unveiled to the public at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday, Feb. 14, during a news conference at the USS Arizona exhibit inside the U of A student union.
The liberty card of Arthur Franklin who served in the Navy and was aboard the U.S.S. Arizona before the attack on Pearl Harbor. The card and many other items will be donated to the University of Arizona’s special collections by Arthur’s son, Lowell and his wife Wendy.
Purdy said he is especially thrilled to get Franklin’s liberty card, sort of a laminated ID with the sailor’s picture on it. He is also excited to have the abbreviation style guide Franklin used to set type in the ship’s print shop.
“We don’t have one of those in the collection. That’s a great addition,” Purdy said.
Navy life
Lowell Franklin said his dad didn’t talk much about his time in the Navy, maybe because of what happened to his ship shortly after he left it.
“That had to be devastating, knowing that you just escaped that by a few months,” Lowell said.
Among his dad’s keepsakes are four slips of paper with dozens of names written on them. Lowell thinks it could be a list of the friends and acquaintances Franklin lost during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
“That’s his handwriting,” Lowell said, pointing at the pages in the reading room at Special Collections on Monday.
Arthur Franklin was born on Dec. 19, 1918, in Farmington, New Mexico, and joined the Navy in Portland, Oregon, in June of 1937, after dropping out of high school and working as a printer.
Franklin completed his military service and left the Arizona in June of 1941, but he changed his mind a few months later. Among the items donated to the university is a letter he wrote trying without success to get reinstated to the Navy and reassigned to the battleship.
Lowell said his dad ended up reenlisting in the Navy and serving out the war in California.
Franklin would go on to a career in the printing and banking businesses. He died in 1971 at the age of 53.
Lowell said he ended up with his father’s box of Navy stuff after his brother died about five years ago. With no kids of their own to hand the keepsakes down to, he and Wendy went looking for someone who might be interested in preserving it.
“We didn’t know exactly what we had. We just knew that it was beyond us,” Wendy said. “It’s already starting, in some ways, to get pretty fragile. It needs preservation more than what we could ever do.”
Wendy Franklin, left, and her husband Lowell, look through a scrapbook of Lowell’s father, Arthur, who served in the Navy and was aboard the U.S.S. Arizona before Pearl Harbor. The couple, from Wisconsin, are donating approximately 200 items to the University of Arizona’s special collections.
They initially considered donating the keepsakes to the Pearl Harbor National Memorial in Hawaii, but they decided that more people might get to see them at a library or museum on the mainland. An internet search led them to the U of A, which has been compiling artifacts associated with the USS Arizona since the late 1940s.
Early on, many of the items in the collection came directly from members of the USS Arizona Reunion Association, who would drop off their old photos and other memorabilia when they came to Tucson for their annual meetings around the time of the Dec. 7 anniversary.
Historic gift
Today, the collection fills about 100 boxes and includes everything from the champagne bottle used to christen the ship to a bell and a rusted girder salvaged from the wreckage. Only the museum at the national memorial in Hawaii has a larger catalog.
“The majority of what we have is photographs, but we’re getting more and more printed and three-dimensional objects,” Purdy said.
Everything in the USS Arizona collection is available for examination by researchers from the university or the general public.
Purdy said the archive grows by three or four new donations each year — usually a scrapbook or a stack of old photos sent to them around Pearl Harbor Day.
It’s rare for them to receive a gift as extensive as the one the Franklins brought them. Purdy estimated that Arthur Franklin’s box of keepsakes could contain as many as 200 individual items, all of which will be cataloged and safely stored at the library.
The Navy hat of Arthur Franklin is one of many items to be donated by his son and daughter-in-law to the University of Arizona’s special collections. Franklin served aboard the U.S.S. Arizona before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
He thanked Lowell and Wendy for the donation during their visit to Special Collections.
“We’re honored that you trust us to preserve this stuff,” he said. “It’s just so wonderful that you guys were actually able to come out. It’s very rare that I get to meet the actual donors and get that personal connection to this history.”
The Franklins first contacted Purdy in December. A month later, they booked a trip from Green Bay to Tucson to deliver the box in person as part of a cross-country tour of bucket-list stops.
“Lowell has some memory issues, so we’re kind of fast-forwarding life,” Wendy explained.
The trip so far has included an Amtrak train ride to Colorado, a driving tour through several western national parks, and a visit with Lowell’s cousin, Mary Grogan, and her family in Tucson.
For Lowell, though, the best part came on Monday, as he stood in the Special Collections reading room, watching Purdy and others pour over his father’s history.
“This is the highlight,” he said.
In honor of the 81th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, take a look at the U.S. Navy's USS Arizona Relics Programs and how the history of the sunken vessel is being preserved. Video courtesy of the U.S. Navy and Petty Officer 2nd Class Evan Diaz.
