Richard Clifford Holbrook

Grew up in western Washington, in Seattle and Kitsap County. He was “Richd C r 560 Mercer” in the 1918 Seattle directory, and “Richd C mariner” in 1925, when his mother was at the family house at 560 Mercer (directories).

On 28 November 1922, a University of Washington student of twenty, he was shot through the body by a Seattle patrolman who surprised him and three friends in a student lark (newspaper-seattle-star-1922-11-28, newspaper-seattle-times-1922-11-28); he recovered.

Builder and diver. Associate engineer with the U.S. Navy, a civilian post, in the 1940 census; at Pearl Harbor by 1941. His daughter Frances remembers him going down into the harbor for days at a stretch after the attack and coming home black with soot (family memory). A Navy Seabee (construction battalion) veteran, a lieutenant by the family’s account, remembered on Midway and later on Guam; on Guam 1949-51, where the Navy’s Fena dam, the likeliest candidate for the “first dam on Guam” the family credits him with, was completed in 1951; left Guam in December 1951 for the Naval Ammunition Depot at Shumaker, Arkansas, where he was resident officer in charge of construction.

His obituary in the Arkansas Gazette calls him “Capt. Richard Clifford Holbrook, USNR (ret.)”: he had commanded the 130th Seabee Battalion in the Pacific during the Second World War and served as public works officer at the Marine Supply Depot at Albany, Georgia. He died at a hospital at Hot Springs at the beginning of December 1955, aged 53, survived by his wife, his daughters Frances (Mrs. Richard Ellingwood of Spokane) and Harriet of Tacoma, and his brother Phillip of San Francisco; funeral and burial were to be at Tacoma (record). The Times’s full report of the 1922 shooting is also in the archive (newspaper-seattle-times-1922-11-28-student-wounded).

Open questions

• The colonial tree has him a mariner at the family house on Mercer Street in both 1925 and 1926; the directory abstract here has “Richd C mariner” in 1925 only, without an address. Check the 1926 directory.
• His birth, death and marriage records are still to be attached; the colonial tree marks all three documented.
• His grave at Tacoma.