US Navy Lt. John Walter Reeves III was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey on December 1, 1917, the son of Admiral John Walter "Blackjack" Reeves Jr. (1888-1967) and Dorothy H. (1981-1962). Ironically, his father was the hard charging Navy Admiral who had a definite connection with Pensacola, Florida. Blackjack graduated from Annapolis in 1911 and entered naval aviation here in 1936 at the age of 48-years old. He was the former captain of the famous carrier USS Wasp (CV-7) and became a task force commander that was comprised of Pensacola's USS Lexington plus the carriers Enterprise, Princeton, and San Jacinto. His final assignment with the Navy was as Chief of Naval Air Training Command at Naval Air Station in Pensacola. Upon his retirement from the military in May 1950, he was promoted to the rank to a four-star Admiral. He would pass away in 1967 and joined Dorothy in Barrancas National Cemetery.
His son, Lt. John W. Reeves III, would follow in his father’s footsteps and attended the military academy where he graduated in 1941. His class was the first of the wartime-accelerated classes, thus his graduation in February 1941 rather than June. During his training as a naval aviator, young John met and married a young woman by the name of Kathryn Frances Hendrix Allen (1919-2012), a graduate of the Pensacola High School Class of 1941. She was the daughter of a local locomotive engineer John Richard Hendrix (1875-1928) and Laura Elizabeth Walthall (1879-1964). She had been married previously to William F. Allen of Cantonment on November 28, 1940. The young couple was married on October 12, 1943 just days before John had to report in to NAS in Melbourne, Florida. There, he went into gunnery training for carrier-based fighter pilots. Sadly, during WWII the base would lose 63 pilots and crew due to aerial accidents. Seventeen days after her wedding, Kathryn was notified that her husband had become one of them. His remains were shipped to his hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey and buried there.
After the war, Kathryn would reside at 1417 East Jackson Street and marry Horace Jack Whitman in 1960. She would pass away in 2012 and was buried in the Eastern Gate Memorial Gardens in Pensacola.
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