https://www.republicaneagle.com/things_to_do/a-sailor-comes-home-duff-gordon-laid-to-rest/article_05e27fa9-8864-5794-a942-077bb8b0d99d.html

A sailor comes home, Duff Gordon laid to rest

Randy Hanson

Published on Apr 7, 2016

Nobody at the memorial service for Chief Petty Officer Duff Gordon ever met him. There was no photo of him to display.

Many -- if not all -- felt a connection to the sailor, nonetheless.

Gordon was laid to rest Wednesday, March 30, in Hudson's Willow River Cemetery more than 74 years after he was killed in the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor.

He was one of 429 sailors who died when the USS Oklahoma battleship was torpedoed and capsized.

Gordon was 52 at the time, one of the oldest aboard the Oklahoma to die.

After a 20-year career in the Navy that started before World War I, Gordon entered the Naval Reserve and was part of the 1940 call-up of all reservists that came in response to the war in Europe and escalating tensions between the United States and Japan.

Veterans, active service members and citizens came to his memorial service at O'Connell Family Funeral Home to pay their respects to a native son who gave his life for his country.

“Duff Gordon is coming home. It feels like he is one of our own,” said Command Master Chief Steve Poellinger, who is stationed at the Minneapolis Navy Reserve Center and also is a Hudson native. Now a River Falls resident, Poellinger will retire this month after 30 years with the Navy.

He read “The Watch,” a poem traditionally recited at sailors' retirements and funerals.

“This sailor stood the watch for more than 20 years, so that all Americans could sleep safely, each and every night; secure because this sailor stood the watch,” Poellinger read. “Today we are here to pay our respects as it is said for the final time, Chief Duff Gordon, you stand relieved … we have the watch.”

An experienced sailor

After listening to an account of his service record, Poellinger said Gordon was one of the saltiest chiefs he had ever heard about.

“This guy has been there, done that, and has the T-shirt,” he said.

Jeffrey S. Williams, an Air Force and Iraq War vet, as well as a military historian, talked about Gordon's service history.

Williams, who is from Maplewood, Minn., requested and received a copy of Gordon's military record when he heard the news that his remains had been identified and would be buried in Hudson.

“If you're a chief petty officer and you're killed in action in 1941, that's not your first enlistment. You had had a career,” Williams related.

Williams rose to give what he called a condensed version of Gordon's 120-page military record during the part of the service when people were invited to reflect upon his life.

Gordon was 24 years, five months old when he enlisted at the Naval Reserve Station in Minneapolis on April 28, 1914. While he was born in Hudson (Nov. 28, 1889) and spent his childhood here, Gordon listed Glenwood, Minn., as his home at the time of his enlistment.

He was five-feet, 10-inches tall, weighed 163 pounds and had blue eyes and brown hair. His occupation was plumber and fitter.

Over the next 20 years, Gordon served on a dozen or more ships, including the USS Florida, USS Montana, USS Newburgh, USS Konabish, USS Reno, USS Blackhawk and USS Nevada.

Gordon received the Yangtze Service Medal for his time on the Chinese river in the late 1920s or early '30s. He was stationed in the Philippines from 1930-33, during which time his wife, Rhoda (also known as Mayme), gave her address as a hotel in Manila.

He had a couple of blemishes on his record, one for returning to base late after a period of leave, and the other for a drunken altercation.

“What junior enlisted person ever had something similar happen to them?” Williams asked. The question produced a round of knowing laughter from the veterans in attendance, including members of Hudson's VFW and American Legion posts, as well as veterans posts from surrounding communities.

“What I saw, by the time he went into the Navy Reserve, was a man who knew his craft, who was professional -- somebody we could all be proud of,” Williams continued. “When he was recalled to active duty, he was the experienced veteran with 20 years of experience. And he paid the ultimate price.”

The DNA match

Seated in the front row, next the military brass, were David Jenson and his wife, Lucy, of Waukesha.

Jenson is the great-nephew of Gordon and the family member who provided the DNA sample that led to identification of Gordon's remains.

“I obviously didn't know him, but I feel like I do, because the DNA was a 99.8 percent match,” Jenson said while lingering at Willow River Cemetery following the committal ceremony.

“I have a weird connection to this place,” he said of Hudson.

Lucy Jenson related that David, the director of engineering for a company, occasionally stopped in Hudson while traveling on business. He would come home and tell her he felt so drawn to Hudson.

He knew that his grandfather and great-grandfather on the Jenson side had lived in Hudson, but his grandfather moved to Montana and that is where Jenson grew up.

It turns out that Jenson's grandmother on his father's side, Olga (Johnson) Jenson, was also from Hudson. And Gordon was Olga's brother.

It took some detective work to figure that out.

Gordon was born Rudolph Johnson. His nickname was Duffy and it is believed that his middle name was Gordon.

The Hudson Star-Observer called him Duffy Gordon Johnson when it reported in its Dec. 25, 1941, edition that he was missing following the attack on Pearl Harbor. He had changed his name to Duff Gordon when he enlisted in the Navy in 1924.

Nancy Hawkinson’s role

Nancy Hawkinson of Hudson, a genealogist and member of the St. Croix County Historical Society, played a key role in connecting the Department of Defense to David Jenson when the military began looking for a relative of Gordon's to provide a DNA sample.

The Defense Department first contacted the historical society about six years.

Hawkinson knew who Gordon was through her genealogical work. They aren't blood relatives, but Gordon's sister was married to Hawkinson's uncle.

Hawkinson also knew about David Jenson and gave the Defense Department his name, birth date and the address of his childhood home.

The military located Jenson in Waukesha.

At the memorial service, Lucy Jenson related how David received a letter from the Defense Department asking for a DNA sample three or four years ago. The military explained that it trying to identify the remains of a sailor.

Jenson, who served in the Navy from 1972-80, was happy to cooperate.

Six to nine months later, he got another letter saying his DNA was an 80-percent match with the unidentified sailor's, and he was asked to provide a second sample.

After another period of six months or so, a letter came saying the second sample was a 99.8-percent match with the unidentified sailor's DNA.

It wasn't until a meeting later with military officials in the Twin Cities that the Jensons learned about Duff Gordon.

Family tree

The name was confusing to them, given that David's ancestors are Jensons and Johnsons.

“That was the hard part,” Jenson said. “When this whole thing started, I had a hard time getting to Gordon from Johnson, because I knew my grandma's maiden name was Johnson.”

While going through his mother's possessions after her death, the family came across a stitching of the Johnson family tree. Next to his grandmother's name was Rudolph Johnson, and in parenthesis below that, “Duff Gordon.”

“That's how we tied it together,” Jenson said.

He has 12 other ancestors buried in Willow River Cemetery and hopes to locate their graves sometime.

“We decided on Hudson because this is where he was born,” Lucy Jenson told the memorial service attendees of the decision to have Gordon's bones buried here. “We have relatives who are up the road a little bit. We felt he should come home.”

Bringing them all home

Rear Adm. Thomas Luscher, deputy chief of the Navy Reserve, traveled from the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., to attend the services for Gordon.

It was different from most times when a flag officer is ordered to meet the remains of a sailor killed in action, Luscher said.

“It seems almost happy. Other death-in-combat funerals aren't, but in this case we're bringing a shipmate home after almost 75 years.”

Luscher continued: “Here's proof that we do not ever give up on bringing home our fallen soldiers, Marines, sailors. And because of new technology, this is the first of many of these ceremonies.”

Cmdr. Daniel Gross, who is attached to Task Force Navy Casualty at Millington, Tenn., traveled to Hawaii and accompanied Gordon's remains back to Hudson.

Gross said the remains of approximately 364 sailors from the USS Oklahoma are still unidentified but the Defense Department plans to bring them all home within the next five years.

Gordon was among the first five sailors identified since the Defense Department in 2015 exhumed the remains buried in 61 caskets in 45 graves at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, located in an extinct volcanic crater often call the punch bowl.

“Chief is the first to actually come back stateside,” Gross said of Gordon.

The memorial service was the third held for one of the recently identified sailors. The first two took place in Hawaii, and the sailors were re-interred at the punch bowl.

“There will be a lot more,” Gross said. “We've got people all over the world around the clock doing excavations, trying to bring remains back of everybody -- from World War II to current day.”

The day before the memorial service for Gordon, another sailor from the USS Oklahoma was identified.

“People may think we have forgot. We haven't,” Gross said.

See more photos in the Thursday, April 7, 2016, print edition of the Hudson Star-Observer.

6081b8c09dd81.image.jpg

60809af7abe32.image.jpg

608749114d00b.image.jpg

608202632e522.image.jpg

608c95ea68360.image.jpg

60809d825c669.image.jpg

6081c50e8c39c.image.jpg