Family, veterans, active duty military pay tribute to World War II sailor

In 1997, Ryan Albright wrote a letter to his grandma, Frances Nutter, on the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor bombings.
Albright told the story of the letter Saturday at a Mass of Christian burial for Nutter’s older brother, Bernard Doyle, a seaman who died on the USS Oklahoma on Dec. 7, 1941.
“I can’t imagine the heart-wrenching, all-consuming anxiety … trying to go out your routine” while wondering what had happened to a family member stationed at the harbor, Albright said.
Two months after learning Doyle was missing in action, the Navy confirmed, by letter, that he had been killed, Albright said.
But Doyle’s remains were not identified, and his body ended up interred at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, better known as Punchbowl Cemetery, in Honolulu, with dozens of other sailors’ remains. And then, in 2015, military officials decided to begin tracking down the surviving family members of the dead servicemen, matching DNA in bone fragments with living relatives. Through that process, Doyle’s remains were identified this year. Though he grew up in Kansas and Nebraska, his final resting place is in Lake City, next to the burial sites of the majority of his six siblings. Two sisters, Nutter and Patricia Doyle, still live in Lake City.
Read more in the Oct. 17 edition.