Sacramento-area centenarian is one of around 5,000 WWII veterans in California
Serving in the United States Navy during World War II, Santos Jimenez used to get scared when sirens would go off.
This, Jimenez said during an interview in Arbuckle days after his 100th birthday on Oct. 11, was “because I knew what was coming.”
Jimenez, who joined the Navy shortly after his 18th birthday, largely served on PC-616, a patrol craft boat that chased submarines. It was his job to close up rooms on the ship when Japanese units approached. He also served as a spotter for potential attackers.
Part of a rapidly-shrinking group, Jimenez is one of just 5,094 living World War II veterans in California as of this year, per The National WWII Museum in New Orleans.
With the youngest adults who could serve in World War II now 98, there are fewer and fewer people who can provide firsthand accounts of the conflict. Yet, as Jimenez’s tale shows, this shrinking group has stories to share.
Getting the stories
Santos Jimenez’s sons George Jimenez and Joel Jimenez — who were present, along with George Jimenez’s wife Debbie Jimenez, while their father was interviewed by The Sacramento Bee — didn’t hear him talk much about his experiences serving in World War II while they were growing up.
“He never really said much about it until later on in his years,” said George Jimenez, who earned two Purple Hearts serving in the Vietnam War in the early 1970s.
Joel Jimenez said cousins who live in Sacramento have been able to get more out of his father in recent years.
The delay in these stories surfacing isn’t unusual, for multiple reasons. Cory Graff, curator and restoration manager for The National WWII Museum said that service in that conflict had been ordinary. “You weren’t off bragging about it,” Graff said. “You just had done your job and kind of shrugged and moved on with your life.”
Beyond this, Sacramento State history professor Mona Siegel said that with traumatic wars, veterans return with internalized experiences and a desire to return to regular life. It can be difficult for veterans who’ve been traumatized to find the right language to express what happened to them.
“It happened after World War I, it happened after World War II as well,” Siegel said. “It often took 20, 30 years before we started seeing an outpouring of memoirs and literature and writing coming from veterans. And it often took that amount of time for veterans to even open up to those who are closest to them.”
Even then, getting the stories of the rank-and-file soldiers can be a challenge. Eric Rauchway, a history professor at UC Davis said that accounts of World War II can focus on recycling already-known stories from newspapers. But there’s a lot to be gained from listening to first-hand recollections.
“Talking to folks who were not necessarily at the center of the action ... is always illuminating,” Rauchway said. “You never can tell what folks will remember.”
Graff said it’s compelling to hear stories from WWII because they reveal the fortitude and character of the Americans involved. “They were ordinary men and women that history put in extraordinary situations, like the largest conflict the world has ever known,” Graff said.
Born in Santa Rosa, Texas, Santos Jimenez wound up with a third-grade education. “The time was too bad and I don’t have clothes, nice clothes to go like the rest of it,” Santos Jimenez said. “So I told my dad, ‘Dad, (I’m) gonna quit school.’ So I quit school.”
Santos Jimenez registered for military service on his 18th birthday, Oct. 11, 1943, listing his employer as Guy Riley, a local farmer. Naval induction came a few months later on Jan. 8, 1944. Military records show Santos Jimenez joined the PC-616 on June 1 of that year as a Seaman Second Class. He was eventually promoted to Seaman First Class.
In some respects, life on the ship could be uneventful, with Santos Jimenez saying, “We (were) pretty close most of the time, but we never did get attacked.” He said he participated in the invasion of Iwo Jima, but his memories of the event are unclear.
Santos Jimenez would also help his PC-616 shipmates sweep mines from the water, with officialmilitaryribbons.com noting that the ship did this in September 1945 in the Pacific Ocean, with the war in that theater having ended the previous month.
George Jimenez said that, just as he would experience serving in the military, his father enjoyed the camaraderie there. “This was a totally whole different experience for him,” George Jimenez said. ‘But he did it, he did a good job with it and so I think he enjoyed what he was doing during that time.”
A varied post-war life
Santos Jimenez received an honorable discharge from the Navy in January 1946, marrying on Dec. 26, 1948 to the former Felicitas Silguero. They would be married for nearly 70 years until Felicitas Jimenez’s death at 90 in January 2018.
The family first moved to the Sacramento-area in the early 1950s. Felicitas Jimenez’s obituary said she’d lived in Arbuckle, a small farming community about 45 minutes north of Sacramento, since approximately 1954.
In the early years that the family lived in the Sacramento region, Santos Jimenez went back and forth between Texas. “He just kind of wanted to do stuff on his own,” George Jimenez said. “He didn’t want to be told what to do and whatnot.”
The 1950 U.S. census showed Santos Jimenez was enrolled in vocational school, with George Jimenez saying his father used the GI Bill to study welding. Welding was far from Santos Jimenez’s only work, though. At different points, he ran a store, worked briefly for Campbell’s Soup and did labor contracting with teams of braceros, Mexican laborers admitted to the U.S. especially for seasonal contract labor in agriculture.
“He’s done everything,” said his daughter-in-law, Debbie Jimenez. “I think he’s accomplished a lot for a third-grade education,” she also said.
Asked what he was most proud of in life, Santos Jimenez said it was his work.
Forging his own path in life might have helped keep Santos Jimenez young. “He’s a very strong man, he’s a hard worker,” said his niece, Sandra Carrol, who lives in Porterville. “He doesn’t look his age. When he was 80, he looked like he was 60.”
Carrol added that her uncle drove a motorcycle when he was in his 80s.
The National WWII Museum notes on its website that there were 45,418 living American WWII veterans as of this year out of the 16.4 million Americans who served in the war. Around half of the living American veterans are expected to die in the next two years.
“It’s only at the moment when the last veteran of a war dies that we lose tangible personal connection to that event and to the extraordinary meaning that it had in people’s individual lives as well as lives of nations,” Siegel said.
Santos Jimenez remains in good physical shape, with Debbie Jimenez noting that her father-in-law would likely be going for a walk after the interview. A photo from his recent 100th birthday celebration showed him dancing with one of his granddaughters.
Asked what it felt like to be 100, Santos Jimenez said he felt good.
“To tell you the truth, I feel mostly the same,” he said. “Because I’m not suffering anything. I’m in good shape.”
This story was originally published October 26, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
