Grayson County TXGenWeb

April 28, 1940

J.J. Newberry Co. was located at 330 West Main Street.
Three years previous to the employee photograph above, work uniforms were ditched and the ladies looked much more stylish in the dresses and shoes. Vivian Kelley is the woman directly behind the Brilliantine sign.
The man on the right is very likely the store manager, Raymond Irwin Koppang. He and his wife lived in a little one-story frame house at 822 W. Chestnut. Ray was born in North Dakota in 1910. He married Lucille Jameson in Sioux Falls, South Dakota in 1933. It's not known at this time how he came to work for Newberry's nor to manage the store. He would have been 30 years old when the above photograph was taken.
Ray joined the Navy a couple of years later to serve in World War II. He was Lieutenant aboard the USS Indianapolis, when it sailed from San Francisco on July 16, 1945, carrying enriched uranium and other components to the South Pacific island of Tinian. The cargo would be used to assemble the atomic bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima the following month.
Four days after dropping the materials off at Tinian, the Indianapolis was struck by two Japanese torpedoes on July 30; she sank twelve minutes later. About a quarter of the crew of 1,200 went down with the ship; most of the rest perished over the course of the next 3-1/2 days from exposure, dehydration, and shark attacks. The sailors remaining in the water were finally spotted by Navy search planes on August 2. Only 316 survived.
Raymond Koppang's death is listed in military records as July 30, 1945.