Lawrence St. Clair Myers

Commander Lawrence St. Clair Myers, U.S. Navy (Ret.), died peacefully in his sleep on April 4, 2017 at Sterling Estates in East Cobb, GA. He was 96 years old. Born on July 22, 1920 in Fresno, California, the son of Lawrence Darius Myers and Ruby (St. Clair) Myers, he spent his early years clerking in his father’s businesses, delivering newspapers in high school and studying shorthand and typing. He attended college for one year before gaining employment as a stenographer in a San Jose, California business office. In 1940 he qualified to become a stenographer in the Navy Department in Washington, D.C. but immediately enlisted in the U.S. Navy after Pearl Harbor as a Yeoman, 2nd Class, based in the 12th Naval District Intelligence Office in San Francisco. Transferred to the Navy Japanese Language School at the University of Colorado in Boulder in December 1942, he pursued an intensive course in the Japanese language before receiving his commission as an ensign in June 1943 and graduating with the other “Boulder Boys” in March 1944. The father of six children through his marriage in 1947 to Sara Jane “Sally” Trask, a native of Mexico, Oxford, Maine and a Captain in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, Myers launched his long and distinguished career as a naval officer and code breaker with his assignment in 1944 to the Navy Security Group (Op-20G) in Washington, D.C., formed to break Japanese Navy codes and read encoded messages. His team succeeded in thwarting the rescue of Japanese military elites by their government. Thus began his twenty-three-year-long mission as a Navy cryptologist in the top secret field of signals intelligence. During the Korean War in 1950 he learned to read Chinese messages in two weeks of self-study and later became fluent in Russian. After retiring from the Navy in 1966 in the rank of Commander, he served for fourteen years as a Chinese cryptolinguist for the National Security Agency until his retirement in 1982. His wife Sally died tragically in an automobile accident in 1981.

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