{"id":140426,"date":"2023-04-23T17:59:55","date_gmt":"2023-04-23T21:59:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=140426"},"modified":"2023-04-23T17:59:55","modified_gmt":"2023-04-23T21:59:55","slug":"and-then-there-was-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=140426","title":{"rendered":"And Then There Was One"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Sad news – one of the two remaining USS Arizona survivors from the Pearl Harbor attack, Ken Potts, died Friday at the age of 102.\u00a0 His death leaves only one remaining survivor, Lou Conter, 101, who lives in California.<\/p>\n

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Howard Kenton Potts died Friday at the home in Provo, Utah, that he shared with his wife of 66 years, according to Randy Stratton, whose late father, Donald Stratton, was Potts\u2019 Arizona shipmate and close friend.<\/p>\n

Stratton said Potts \u201chad all his marbles\u201d but lately was having a hard time getting out of bed. When Stratton spoke to Potts on his birthday, April 15, he was happy to have made it to 102.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut he knew that his body was kind of shutting down on him, and he was just hoping that he could get better but (it) turned out not,\u201d Stratton said.<\/p>\n

He was working as a crane operator shuttling supplies to the Arizona the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, when the Pearl Harbor attack happened, according to a 2021 article by the Utah National Guard.<\/p>\n

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Several dozen Arizona survivors have had their ashes interred on the sunken battleship so they could join their shipmates, but Potts didn\u2019t want that, according to Stratton.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe said he got off once, he\u2019s not going to go back on board again,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Stratton said many Arizona survivors shared a similar dry sense of humor. That included his own father, who was severely burned in the attack and also did not want to return to the ship as ashes in an urn.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018I\u2019ve been cremated once. I\u2019m not going to be cremated twice,\u2019\u201d Donald Stratton joked, according to the younger Stratton, before his death in 2020 at age 97.<\/p>\n

Potts is survived by his wife, Doris. Information on other survivors was not immediately available.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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AP<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Those two fellas sound like folks you would like to have known.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Sad news – one of the two remaining USS Arizona survivors from the Pearl Harbor … And Then There Was One<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":668,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[119,217,649],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-140426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navy","category-we-remember","category-wwii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/668"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=140426"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140426\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=140426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=140426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=140426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}