The Hardwick family moved to Atlanta, Georgia when he was still a child and his father renamed him "Herbert Lewis Hardwick." Tragedy struck the family when his father and the rest of the crew of the USS Cyclops disappeared during World War I. The loss of the ship and 306 crew and passengers without a trace sometime after March 4, 1918, remains the single largest loss of life in U.S. Naval history not directly involving combat. The cause of the ship's loss is unknown. Hardwick was only four years old.
