Pearl Matheney Jr.

Pearl Matheney senior, the man the Jr. refers to, died on 7 January 1945 at Cairo, Illinois. He was sixty-two. His son was seventeen, and enlisted fifteen months later.

He lies at Oak Grove Cemetery, Section 1, Row 8, where his son joined him sixty-three years on.

This rests on a genealogy record that names the same wife the obituary does, Louie Prather, and gives Pearl junior as their son. The 1945 Illinois death certificate would confirm it, and we have not obtained one.

Between Fort Sheridan and the boat he spent 4 months and 24 days in the United States, learning to drive Army trucks and qualifying as a Marksman with the M1 rifle. His discharge lists no service school, so where he was posted is not recorded on any document we have found.

Dale Thompson joined the 736th in December 1946 and stayed about a year, so he and Pearl worked in the same company of roughly three hundred men for most of a year. Late in his life Thompson recorded an interview for the Library of Congress. It is the only description of the place we have from someone who stood in it.

He put the company on the Tsurumi River, between Kawasaki and Yokohama, with a storage yard along the water. The work was rebuilding bulldozers and cranes the Army had hauled back from the islands it had fought over. Japanese civilians worked the shops beside the soldiers, and a former Zero pilot worked in the orderly room.

The company had spent the war on a concrete barge two hundred feet long, fitted with a machine shop, a wood shop, an electric shop and a foundry. The Army towed it behind the invasions, about a hundred and fifty miles back, so the men could make parts nobody could ship them. The barge still sat on the river while Pearl was there, and some of the men slept aboard it.

Thompson learned to drive in Japan and took a Jeep into Yokohama to get his Army licence. Pearl's job was truck driver.

How this connects to Pearl. His discharge names the 736th Engineer Heavy Shop Company as his unit. About eight minutes into the interview Thompson says he served in the 736th Engineer Heavy Shop Company. Their service overlaps from December 1946 into late 1947, in a company of roughly three hundred men. Thompson is describing the place Pearl worked and the work Pearl did there.

He never mentions Pearl by name, and nothing in the interview is a record of Pearl himself. It is one man's memory, recorded many years later, and it describes the company rather than any one soldier in it. The Library's own catalogue entry does not mention the 736th at all, which is why the interview went unnoticed for so long. Thompson names the unit himself, on tape.

You can watch it. The Library of Congress holds the interview free and open to anyone, at the Dale R. Thompson Collection. It runs 37 minutes. The video file itself is here. He talks about Japan and the 736th from about the five-minute mark onward.

Ten days after his discharge, the county recorder, Murray E. Guyer, entered it into the Crawford County record. That county copy is the reason we can read it today. It sat in Illinois, and not in the St. Louis building that burned in 1973.