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"Tell him that he had a great father" — A Friend Remembers a Sailor Lost on the USS Drexler An affecting handwritten letter, two pages in ink, written in the mid-1960s by Bill Goggin of Redwood City, California, to Florence — the widow of Fire Controlman 3/c Everett Henry Pollard, USNR, who was killed when the destroyer USS Drexler (DD-741) was struck by kamikazes off Okinawa on May 28, 1945 and sank in under a minute, taking 158 of her crew. Twenty years after the sinking, Goggin — recovering from a stroke in a rehabilitation center, with "a lot of time to think" — finally writes the condolence letter he admits he should have sent long before: "I'm ashamed that so many years have passed since Everett's death and I have never written." What follows is a warm, regretful portrait of a lost friend. Goggin and "Snub," as he knew him, were inseparable in their years at "St. Mike's" — "no two guys ever were closer than he and I" — from the day Everett first appeared "in an old bakery wagon with a bony, blind horse to haul my trunk to the station." He closes: "Give my regards to young Ev and tell him that he had a great father. And whatever became of that famous banjo that saw us through college?" Everett Pollard's death aboard the Drexler is documented in the official Massachusetts Navy casualty list of 1946.