It was Sunday morning, March 30, 1947, when the body of British Naval officer William J. Coffee was found floating in Bayou Chico at the foot of J Street near today’s Corinne Jones Resource Center.
Coffee was a recipient of the Order of the British Empire for his efforts to help save his ship after it was torpedoed by a German submarine on Oct. 26, 1941, during World War II.
Yet he ended up in an unmarked grave in Pensacola, though for years his family had thought he had died, and was buried, in Texas. It was only recently Coffee’s grandson, along with the grandson’s wife, found out that Coffee’s 54 years of life came to end in a foreign, far away city he didn’t know…