Our Arklahoma Heritage: Dan Edward Reagan was the first man from Scott County to die in World War II

Dan Edward Reagan

The USS Oklahoma turned turtle in twelve minutes. Four hundred twenty-nine men went with her into the black water and the burning oil of Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941.

One of them was a twenty-year-old fireman from a vanished Arkansas sawmill town who had already bought the civilian suits he planned to wear home.

Dan Edward Reagan was born January 18, 1921, in Haslam, Shelby County, Texas. His mother, Mattie Adora Bobbie McGlathery Reagan, died when he was six. His father, Houston Moore Reagan Sr., a steady mill hand who worked as a lumber grader and later a planer mill laborer, brought him into the company town of Forester in southeastern Scott County.

There, among the ordered sections known as Green Town and Angel Town, among the company houses, the shared store, the ballpark, and the long shadow of the immense lumber shed, Dan grew up inside a self-contained world built entirely around the forest.

Forester had risen almost overnight in 1930 around the Caddo River Lumber Company’s great mill, then the largest and most productive in Arkansas. It offered its own water system, power plant, free healthcare from a company doctor, a theater, churches, a twenty-eight-room hotel, and the constant rhythm of saws and the scent of fresh-cut timber.

Mule teams still hauled logs in the early years. Crime was rare. Life was ordered by the whistle and the shift.

In that temporary world Houston Reagan raised his son.

On September 9, 1938, at the age of seventeen, Dan walked into the Navy recruiting station in Little Rock and signed his name. The mill town slipped behind him. Two years later, on December 6, 1940, he reported aboard the battleship USS Oklahoma at Pearl Harbor.

As a Fireman First Class he worked the engineering spaces, standing watches below the waterline, tending the machinery that kept the great ship alive.

Discharge was set for January 17, 1942. He had already bought two civilian suits for the day he would step back onto Arkansas soil and return to Forester. In one of those suits he was photographed, a young man already looking toward home.

The torpedoes struck the Oklahoma’s port side in rapid succession. The ship listed hard, then rolled completely over. Men trapped in the engineering spaces had almost no chance. Dan was among the hundreds who never made it out.

Word reached his father in Forester around December 21. Missing, presumed killed.

Houston Reagan never recovered from the loss. He spoke of his son for the rest of his life. A half-brother born only days before the attack, Houston Moore Reagan Jr., grew up listening to those stories of a brother he would never meet.

Dan Edward Reagan was the first man from Scott County to die in World War II. His name would stand at the head of local honor rolls for that reason. For nearly eight decades, his remains rested among the unknowns recovered from the Oklahoma, interred at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. His name was carved on the Courts of the Missing in Honolulu.

Then, in 2019, advanced forensic work and a DNA sample from his half-brother finally gave him back his identity. On April 14, 2020, Fireman First Class Dan Edward Reagan was laid to rest with full military honors at the Arkansas State Veterans Cemetery in North Little Rock.

The suits never hung in a closet in Forester. The mill town itself was dismantled after the timber ran out, its buildings sold or torn down, leaving only ruins, a reunion park, and the quiet memory of those who once lived there.

What remains is the fact that a boy from a temporary Arkansas company town stood at the exact center of one of the most sudden and complete naval disasters in American history, and that it took the better part of a century to bring him home.