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His questions gave her answers

There was no body at her brother's funeral in the weeks after his death at Pearl Harbor. But an amateur investigator found him.

By NICOLE JOHNSON
Published December 16, 2005

	[Photo provided by Marilyn Woodring]
	Warren Hickok during boot camp in 1941. Months after he finished training, he was shipped off to Hawaii and died at Pearl Harbor.
	[Handout photo]
	A pencil sketch of Warren Hickok's teeth, made in 1940 when he enlisted, helped identify his remains.
	[Times photo: Carrie Pratt]
	Marilyn Woodring shows a photograph to Tim Nicholson, an assistant program manager with Navy Mortuary Affairs, before a meeting with more Navy representatives to talk about her brother who died at Pearl Harbor.

CLEARWATER - It wasn't DNA technology, fancy forensics or some CSI-like technique that ultimately identified Warren Hickok, 64 years after he died in the attack on Pearl Harbor.

It was a pencil sketch of his teeth, made in 1940 when he enlisted in the Navy as a teenager from Kalamazoo, Mich.

Those records lay tucked away in a file cabinet for six decades until an amateur sleuth in Honolulu nudged the Navy to take a closer look.

"Inquisitiveness, it's not work," said Ray Emory, a machine gunner on the USS Savannah during the attacks who later led the effort to identify Hickok. "What bugs me is the government could have been doing this long ago but didn't."

Hickok was just one of the hundreds of unnamed soldiers buried on the island.

This week, military officials confirmed to his last living relative that his body had been identified.

"This has definitely been a surprise after all this time," said Hickok's sister, Marilyn "Kay" Woodring, 80, of Clearwater.

Memories, dulled by the years, recently came back to her with a little more ease.

It seemed odd to have a funeral without a body, thought Woodring, then 16.

On a January morning, dozens poured into the Seventh-day Adventist Church on West North Street in Kalamazoo, paying their respects with peach gladiolas in front of a portrait of Warren in his cracker jack whites.

There was no body, no casket.

On his last morning, as the bombs fell, 18-year-old Warren Hickok, along with 29 other seamen, was ordered from the USS Sicard, a mine-laying ship, to assist a destroyer, the USS Cummings. They were also ordered to help the USS Pennsylvania, located a short distance down the shore.

By 10 a.m., more than 150 vessels and service ships sitting side by side in the harbor were under attack.

In the chaos of Dec. 7, 1941, formalities were abandoned. Instead of the standard body bags, fallen soldiers were wrapped in Navy blankets. Because dog tags weren't yet a military requirement, the identities of many soldiers were lost.

In the end, 2,395 sailors and soldiers were killed or declared missing in action.

"It's unclear on which ship (Hickok) died," said Larry Greer, a spokesman for the Pentagon's POW/MIA office, based in Washington. "There were seamen who were killed on shore, in attacks, or he could have been between ships."

A number of unidentified men, including Hickok, were buried in Nuuanu Cemetery on the island of Oahu. His grave was marked simply, "X2."

In 1946, the Army's graves registration service began to dig up the unknown remains. But the identification effort failed. Dozens of remains were reburied, this time at Punchbowl National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, the cemetery located in the middle of an extinct volcano.

Warren Hickok was reburied June 9, 1949, in an unnamed grave marked E-731.

It was an exotic resting place for a farm boy who had wanted to see the world.

Emory, 84, has worked with the military for the past 14 years to identify soldiers in unnamed graves. Hickok was the third on a list of several hundred to be completed.

Through public documents, dental records and naval burial records, the amateur anthropologist finds the graves and attempts to make matches. He then notifies the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command based in Hawaii.

On June 2 this year, the command unit exhumed Hickok's remains.

Just before Hickok enlisted in the Navy, a dentist had made notations about the surface and all four sides of each of his teeth, including coded marks to indicate abnormalities such as fillings and eruptions.

The records revealed a small gap between Hickok's front two teeth, a handy trick for squirting water, Woodring recalled.

A once-fractured left femur also pointed to Hickok, who had been hit by a car as a young boy.

After the match was made, the Navy then had to find Woodring.

She had eloped in the mid-1940s and left behind little more than high school records in Kalamazoo.

After a newspaper article ran in the Kalamazoo Gazette about Emory's work, a friend of Woodring's called her in Florida.

"They almost didn't find me," she said.

Woodring now spends most of her time tending to peacocks, geese and two aging ponies at her home on four acres in Clearwater, a place reminiscent of the rural surroundings where she grew up. Life has been filled with joys, she says, especially her three children and six grandchildren.

She even made it to Hawaii once, in the 1970s.

"I thought to myself "This is exactly where Warren must have stood,' " she said. "At this late date, memories are nice. You're not sad anymore."

At 10:04 a.m. Thursday morning, Woodring finally had more than memories.

She opened her squeaky screen door and welcomed four Navy officials, one carrying a black folder. Inside, a sheet of paper read "Seaman 2nd Class Warren P. Hickok. 18 years. 74 inches. Blond hair and blue eyes."

After 64 years, Warren was found.

Information from the Kalamazoo Gazette was used in this article. Nicole Johnson can be reached at njohnson@sptimes.com or 727 445-4162.

[Last modified December 16, 2005, 00:55:10]