Mount Union borough

Mike Dimoff Sr. of Mount Union

Mike E. Dimoff Sr. was born in Mount Union on June 5, 1924, the son of Elia and Angelina Dimoff. His obituary gives the outline of his life. Three other records name a Mike Dimoff of Mount Union in connection with the town's history. We take those records to be about the same man, because they give the same name, the same town and the same interest in local history, but none gives his full name.

In World War II, the obituary says, he served in the Navy as a gunner's mate on the "USS Huston CL-81." The Navy's own history of CL-81 spells the ship Houston. She was commissioned on December 20, 1943, and sailed for the Pacific the next April. During the carrier force's strikes on Formosa in October 1944, a torpedo hit her engine room on the 14th, and on the 16th, with a fleet tug towing her, another hit her stern. She stayed afloat and moved slowly toward Ulithi. The obituary does not say when he was aboard, and we have not seen the Navy muster rolls that would, so we cannot say he was on the ship that week.

The obituary says he worked as vice president and general manager of Saxe's Corporation, and that he had been a member and chief of the fire department at Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. He was a charter member of the Blue Juniata VFW post and of the Mount Union Historical Society and a past commander of the Simpson Hunt American Legion post, and at Mount Union First United Methodist Church he served on the board of trustees and as a historian.

In 1976 the Bicentennial Committee published Reflections: Mount Union Area, and the National Register nomination for the Mount Union Historic District lists a Mike Dimoff as one of the two editors of that book. The Historic American Buildings Survey report on the refractory company towns of south-central Pennsylvania lists an interview with Mike Dimoff at Mount Union on March 29, 1989. In 1995 Timber Transfer, the magazine of the Friends of the East Broad Top, ran a two-part interview with Mike Dimoff titled Remembering the EBT in Mount Union.

He died on September 20, 2019, at 95, and is buried in Mount Union Cemetery.

Checked against the record. His birth, death, Navy rating, ship and memberships come from his obituary as posted in full on his Find a Grave memorial. We could not open the funeral home's own copy, so the obituary rests on that one posting. The ship's commissioning and dates and the two torpedo hits come from the Naval History and Heritage Command. The bibliography entry for the 1976 book, the 1989 survey interview list and the 1995 magazine contents pages give the name only as Mike Dimoff, with no Sr. or middle initial, so linking them to this man is our reading, based on the name, the town and his work with the historical society. Still open: whether he was aboard the ship during either attack. The obituary gives no dates, and the Navy muster rolls were not open to us. We did not read the 1976 book itself, the 1995 interviews, or whatever he said in 1989. A 1976 newspaper report said to describe his help choosing Bicentennial marker sites has not been read, so it is left out.

Sources

Checked 2026-11-01 · Primary sources and the Pennsylvania Newspaper Archive

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