Roy L. Steel Jr., USN

Below is a partial letter from Sharon Ward, niece of Roy L. Steel Jr.
This was taken while he was at the Naval Training Station in San Diego. I do not know the company/unit that he was with, so tracing this will be hard I imagine…but I assume that surely the Navy kept a copy of it. What I do know is:
He joined up right after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He went to San Diego to train and from there went to Hawaii and got on the Frisco. Later that year he was killed in Nov (12-13) at the naval battle off Guadalcanal. Maybe Capt. Bennet might remember him if you show him the attached photo. I have heard that my Uncle Roy was very funny and played the mouth harp a lot. Don’t know if he would have had one on the ship or not…but you’d remember seeing someone playing one of those I imagine. I imagine he had a pretty thick southern accent since he was born/raised in Tennessee and he wasn’t very tall. He was 19 years old. Thank you so much for your help. If you could point me in the right direction as to maybe where to look it would really help. There is one of these type photos (the long ones) on ebay right now (along with a bunch of USS San Francisco photos taken by a sailor during WWII) and it drives me crazy knowing my Uncle Roy might be in one of those pics…but the bids are way too high for me. I got to thinking about trying to find a copy of that photo again and this is what sparked me to find the website that eventually led me to you.

Thank you again.
Sharon Ward