75 years later, identity confirmed: A Minnesota man's remains from Pearl Harbor are coming home

More than 75 years after his death and nearly two years since his long-unidentified remains were exhumed, a southern Minnesotan who died in the attack on Pearl Harbor will be laid to rest back where his life began.

Glaydon I.C. Iverson, a Navy Fireman Third Class, killed on Dec. 7, 1941, as he served on the USS Oklahoma, will be buried with full military honors next to his parents on Memorial Day weekend in Emmons, population 400.

Multiple torpedo hits from Japanese bombers quickly capsized the battleship Oklahoma, leaving the 24-year-old Iverson and 428 others aboard dead, according to a detailed report on the Iverson case from the Defense Department's POW/MIA Accounting Agency. Only the USS Arizona suffered more deaths.

Roughly two months after the attack, the Iverson family received a telegram from a rear admiral in Washington, D.C., that concluded, "After an exhaustive search it has been found impossible to locate your son Glaydon Ignatius Clement Iverson ... and he has therefore been officially declared to have lost his life in the service of his country."

Navy personnel spent 2½ years during World War II collecting remains from the Oklahoma and had them interred at the Halawa and Nu'uanu cemeteries in Hawaii. Those remains were exhumed, but only 35 identities were confirmed. The others were again buried in Hawaii and classified in 1949 as unidentifiable.

In mid-2015, the Defense Department undertook another exhumation of unidentified remains from the Oklahoma. Iverson's remains were confirmed and revealed to the family in late December by the POW/MIA agency.

Iverson's remains will leave Hawaii under Navy escort for the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport on a commercial flight, most likely a day or two before burial, said Gary Iverson, a nephew whose father was Glaydon Iverson's lone sibling and a WWII veteran wounded in Germany.

Military officials have said the flight's captain will announce Glaydon Iverson's presence to everyone aboard, the plane will stop short of reaching the gate and a brief military ceremony will be held before Iverson's casket is put on a hearse for the final leg of its long trip home, a 105-mile drive to Emmons.

Gary Iverson, who worked in accounting in the Twin Cities until his retirement to New Mexico in 2002, said "it's been surprising, even now" how close he has come to feel to his uncle, a man he never met and only came to know thanks to Pearl Harbor.

"He was never talked about [in the family]," Gary Iverson said Thursday. "It's surprising to me that just talking about him gets me emotional."

What he did glean from family reports: His uncle was a good athlete, was well liked in the community, and, he believes, worked with his dad delivering goods by wagons powered by horses or mules.

In the winter, Gary Iverson continued, the work included pulling "big chunks of ice out of the lake" for the home iceboxes.

Glaydon Iverson enlisted in the Navy on Valentine's Day 1941 and was assigned to naval school in suburban Detroit. He joined the crew of the Oklahoma on Sept. 11, 1941. Exactly a year after his enlistment, the ominous telegram was sent to the family.

Glaydon Iverson will be laid to rest May 27 with his family at Oaklawn Cemetery in Emmons, according to the Mittelstadt Funeral Home in nearby Lake Mills, Iowa.

Formal remembrance of Iverson is scheduled to begin the evening before with a visitation at the funeral home. The memorial service follows the next afternoon at 1:30 at Emmons Lutheran Church, where he was baptized a few weeks after his birth in 1917.

Paul Walsh • 612-673-4482