Sixty-six years ago this month, a U.S. submarine went down in the cold Bering Sea, killing all 70 men aboard, including a young father from West Homestead.

Jack Edwin Pancoast's wife, Julia, would have been sent the same telegram as all the other families, the same regrets from the U.S. Navy.

" . . . The Department appreciates your anxiety but details are not now available. . . "

The Grunion remains on the U.S. Navy's books as missing, cause unknown. But six years ago, the three sons of the lost Grunion Capt. Mannert L. "Jim'' Abele -- Bruce, Brad and John -- got a lead on the lost sub's location from a Japanese naval historian they'd tracked down via the Internet.

So in the summer of 2006, a crab boat they'd hired out of Seattle made the 2,000-mile journey to the Bering Sea and on Aug. 15, the sonar device that it was towing signaled an image that appeared to be a submarine, 3,000 feet below the surface. The following summer, the same lucky crab boat carried a high-definition video camera to bring long-sought resolution to the Abele brothers:

The Grunion had been found.

Now the extended family of the men who went down with that boat on July 30, 1942, are on a mission of their own: have a story doing honor to the men in each of the hometown newspapers that never got to tell much of their story back in the day.

Elk County native Carmine Anthony Parziale was a torpedoman's mate third class on the vessel.

His niece, Mary Bentz, who grew up in Brockway but now lives in Bethesda, Md., e-mailed me about Mr. Pancoast, a motor machinist's mate about whom little else is known.

He was four months shy of his 24th birthday when he died. His wife, Julia, was a Filipino native and they had a son, Jack Pancoast Jr. There is a record of the sailor's widow and son getting on a ship from Manila to the United States on July 24, 1945. The boy was then 3 years old, so he must have been a newborn when his father was killed.

What became of them is not known. Mr. Pancoast's much younger stepbrother, Bob Knight, lives in Baldwin Borough. He understands that his stepbrother's widow and son moved back to the Phillipines, but had no more information.

If anyone does know more about Jack Edwin Pancoast or his survivors, they should contact Ms. Bentz at ca.par@hotmail.com or 240-447-4189.

I asked Ms. Bentz why these men were so important to her. Her uncle, the aforementioned Carmine Parziale, and the others died two years before she was born.

"The family never forgot him,'' she said. "Every time the family got together, whenever one of them was around, they always talked about Carmine. Carmine was a musician. So, to me, he was just somebody who lived very far away

"It really hit me when I finally grew up and realized what terrible pain my family must have suffered not knowing where Carmine was.''

She says about a half-dozen men from the Grunion still have not had their obituaries.

"An obituary makes it real . . . This name of Jack Edwin Pancoast being printed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where he lived, we're now making it real and so now he can rest in peace."

The last radio message from the Grunion came on July 30, 1942, describing heavy enemy activity around the harbor of the Aleutian Island of Kiska, then held by the Japanese. Earlier that month, the Grunion had sunk two Japanese submarine chasers and damaged a third in the area.

Bruce Abele, 78, oldest son of the submarine commander, was 12 when his father died. Consultations with Japanese historians in recent years have led him and others to believe the sub's demise came during a confrontation with a Japanese cargo ship, the Kanu Maru, which was firing 3-inch shells.

The hours of video show no sign of shell penetration on the sub, however, so the precise cause of its demise remains a guess.

A memorial service for the Grunion is planned for Oct. 10-12 at the USS Cod, now docked on Lake Erie in Cleveland. The same class submarine as the Grunion, the Cod is a museum ship dedicated to the more than 3,900 submariners who have died in service to the U.S. Navy.

The five Pennsylvanians who went down with the Grunion are, in addition to Mr. Pancoast and Mr. Parziale, Seaman First Class Albert Ullman, Executive Officer Millener Weaver Thomas and Electrician's Mate Second Class Raymond Eugene Webster, all of Philadelphia.