The 151 names enshrined in the monument are located at the corner of Torrance Boulevard and Maple Avenue, adjacent to Torrance City Hall.
Five new names of men who lost their lives during World War II that were added to the wall last year will be highlighted at the Torrance Historical Society’s Names on the Wall Remembrance ceremony at 2 p.m. on Memorial Day, Monday, May 27.
About half of the names on the monument are World War II veterans, Torrance Historical Society volunteer Dennis Piotrowski said, along with one from World War I. The other half are honored for their service in Korea, Vietnam and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There’s also only one woman on the wall, Tony (Pearl) Roomsburg, Piotrowski said, a Private in the Women’s Army Corps who was travelling on an Army transport plane that went missing and disappeared off the coast of Africa in May 1945.
Piotrowski, along with Torrance Historical Society board member Kurt Weideman and other volunteers, continued researching who they can add to the “Names on the Wall Project,” an effort to share the stories of Torrance residents who have died during their military service.
The project, for which the memorial wall was built in 2003, was initiated by Jerry Ronan, a past Torrance Historical Society Board Member, Torrance teacher and late World War II veteran who died in 2021, along with many other volunteers. Piotrowski and Weidman found Monday’s new honorees in the past two years.
As for the five latest veterans on the list, Piotrowski, who is a librarian in the Palos Verdes Library District, said he and Weideman uncovered the stories of the handful of Torrance men killed in action from a 1946 article in the Torrance Herald. The Herald was published from 1914 to 1969, according to the city’s website.
“It was staying up late at night, going through the primary source records from the National Archives, from Fold3 (military records,) from ancestry, from the Torrance Library’s historic newspaper database,” Piotrowski said. “We came across about five other names from World War II, who were inadvertently overlooked.”
These are the Torrance World War II Veterans who will be officially recognized on the memorial wall Monday:
Thomas Beecham, a resident of Torrance’s Walteria neighborhood, who was on board the submarine USS Argonaut when it was attacked and sunk, all hands lost, on January 10, 1943.
James D. Sanders, also from Walteria, enlisted and died at 17 years old when the escort aircraft carrier USS Liscome Bay was torpedoed and sunk in November 1943.
Russell Browning, a Merchant Mariner who was aboard the SS Azalea City when it was torpedoed and sunk by a German U Boat in February 1942.
Kristi Palica, a local baseball player and Army infantryman who was killed on Luzon Island in the Philippines by an artillery blast injury in May 1945.
John Wolverton, a Naval aviator whose plane went missing on May 15, 1943 while on a routine search mission from Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.
The historical society is about halfway through its work to finish compiling all of the 151 biographies on the wall, Piotrowski said, as well as fix a few misspelled names.