ST. LOUIS -- Billy Ray Ball was a short, slim 19-year-old with thick glasses and a talent for the slide trombone in a family of musicians when he left the small farming community of Matthews to enlist in 1941.
He was sent to the humid rainforests of a country 8,000 miles away that he knew little or nothing about.
Pfc. Ball died as a prisoner of war in the Philippines in 1942, the second member of his family killed during World War II and whose body could not be returned. Cousin James Ball was entombed on a battleship at Pearl Harbor just months earlier.
The Secretary of War did not receive formal confirmation of Ball's death until 1943, nearly a year after he was buried in a mass grave with five other Americans who perished the same day.
A family celebrates
Five generations of a family Ball never got to meet gathered Friday to celebrate his homecoming after more than 75 years.
The funeral service held at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery wasn't about sadness, according to his niece, Carolyn Duncan, who led a 15-year mission to bring Ball home.
It was about joy, as well as closure for Duncan's mother and Ball's twin sister, Millie Harrison of Poplar Bluff.
"I'm glad mom was there,"