Was talking to my Mom last night.  Our conversation drifted to her uncle who had been killed in WW II.  We weren’t really that close to her side of the family, so I don’t think I ever knew much about him.  His name was Roy Charles MacPherson and was her father’s brother.  He was in the Merchant Marines in WW II on a ship named the Dorchester.  It was torpedoed of Greenland on Feb 3, 1943 and 675 of the over 900 men on board died, mostly of hypothermia in the North Sea.

Reading up on all of this I came across one interesting bit.  The American writer Jack Kerouac was on the Dorchester and left just before the last voyage. I wonder he he and Roy ever met.

The American writer Jack Kerouac served on Dorchester, where he befriended an African-American cook named “Old Glory,” who died when the ship sank after the torpedo attack. Kerouac would have also been on the ship during the attack, but for a telegram he received from coach Lou Little, asking him to return to Columbia University to play football.^[23]