A Day of Infamy

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The Pearl Harbor visitors center has a map of the world inlaid into the sidewalk. Its big enough to walk around, yet small enough to absorb.

When we visited a few years ago, I watched my father stand somewhere in the middle of the Coral Sea, while another, older Japanese man straddled the Philippines.

The map makes a not-so-subtle point: Hawaii is right in between Japan and the U.S. It makes it clear why the war started here.

You could tell they were both veterans. It’s one of the things you don’t anticipate that there are so many veterans visiting the memorial. And from both sides.

They aren’t hard to spot because of the age, demeanor and dress. My father wore a cap with the name of the destroyer he served on, the USS Watts.

When we boarded the small boat that ferries visitors to the USS Arizona memorial, the sailors saluted my father. He thanked them and noted their Navy uniforms had changed since he wore one. They laughed.

I’d seen pictures of the iconic memorial many times but had always assumed it was a portal to some larger museum. I didn’t realize it’s just one room, open to the air, that sits atop the battleship.

It was designed by Alfred Preis, an Austrian Jew who fled the Nazis. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he was put in an internment camp for German Americans. His design, initially criticized, is now the most visited site in Hawaii.

From the memorial you can see a thin, translucent slick of oil on the water. It’s been seeping out of the wreck for 79 years. Everyone notices it. It has the weird effect of connecting you to the past. The Park Service estimates that it could leak for another 500 years.

There were 1,177 sailors from the Arizona killed during the attack. Of the 335 who survived, more than 40 have chosen to return and be interred on the wreck.

At the time of the attack my father was a sophomore at Columbia High School in South Orange, New Jersey.

On the morning of Dec 7th, a friend, Frank Baldwin, called to offer him two tickets to a concert at Frank Dailey’s Meadowbrook, a club in Cedar Grove. Gene Krupa’s orchestra was playing. Dad invited Betty Griffinger, a girl who lived across the street.

Part way through the concert the announcer interrupted with an announcement: “The Empire of Japan has attacked the U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands,” my father recalls him saying.

With that, the band struck up the national anthem and everyone left.

The next day, the entire student body was summoned to the auditorium. A radio was placed on stage. They listened to President Roosevelt address the nation live.

You can look up Roosevelt’s drafts of the speech. In the first copy, FDR describes Dec. 7th as a “a date which will live in world history.”

Then he crossed it out and scribbled: “infamy.”

It’s amazing how changing one word can be so evocative and powerful.

Life changed immediately. Dad said that the houses at the shore put up heavy drapes to block out light and cars painted the top half of their headlights so they wouldn’t be seen by U-boats off the coast.

When he told me that, it seemed crazy and overly dramatic.

But many years later, we had a neighbor three doors down who had been on a German U-boat during the war. He said they patrolled the coast off New Jersey.

It’s strange and unsettling how people can go to war, viscerally hate their enemy, and then find themselves living down the street a few decades later.

So much of life is timing and luck.

The seniors who graduated from Columbia High School in 1942 went right into the military. Two of the members of the class of ’43 who my father knew, Bob Vogel and Fred Lang, were killed in the Battle of the Bulge.

My dad entered the service two years later, just missing combat.

He does remember how food and gas were rationed. How his mother couldn’t get chocolate chips to make cookies. How his family was allocated three gallons of gas a week. How you no longer just drove around, you went to specific places.

My father studied at Cornell for two semesters until he was 18 and could enlist. When he went to the recruiting office in Newark, he discovered he was color blind. The chief petty officer helped him memorize the chart so he could pass the test. He signed up for the Navy.

Dad was sent to learn to operate and maintain radios. He was in Monterrey California when the U.S. dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. He said they couldn’t believe one bomb destroyed a whole city. It was amazing to them.

A year later, in August 1946, my father was discharged from the Navy. You couldn’t call home easily so without alerting his family he took a train from Los Angeles to Newark and then another to Allenhurst, at the Jersey shore.

He carried a big seabag with all his belongings and walked the mile to the beach club where he knew his parents would be on an August afternoon. When he arrived, his father was in the middle of a shuffleboard tournament.

Pearl Harbor would continue to play a role in my father’s life.

On the same day, twenty-two years after the attack, he proposed to my mother.

He said he choose Dec. 7 to make it easier to remember.

After all, not every date lives in infamy.

BRIEF OBSERVATIONS:

ANALYZING TEXT: JA Baker. who wrote The Peregrine in 1967, went to extraordinary efforts to analyze his prose, counting the verbs, similes and metaphors, along with the stressed and unstressed syllables. Imagine what he could have down today with AI and computer programming. 

LEE MILLER IN THE BATH: Lee Miller was a famous fashion and war photographer. Ironically, her most famous photo wasn’t one she took. It was one in which she was the subject. In the final days of WWII, as the Third Reich crumbled, she posed in Hitler's bathtub. She arranged the scene with her boots and photograph of Hitler and a statue of a naked woman to add drama. Knowing the context makes it strangely evocative.

PEOPLE ARE SO CREATIVE: The artist Ruby Silvious who paints scenes on tea bags reminds us that artists can use all kinds of mediums to express themselves.   

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: From the Tripitaka Koreana - a series of more than 80,000 wood blocks -- comes a timely reminder for the digital era that it's not just about gathering data but also storing and preserving it for the future.  The Tripitaka Koreana has preserved history for eight centuries.

COME SIT BY MY GRAVE: Former New York Mayor Ed Koch wanted to be buried in Manhattan, so he arranged to be laid to rest in the only active cemetery on the island. It’s at Trinity Church in Hamilton Heights. He took the unusual step of adding a bench so people could come and sit. It’s a quiet place and I've visited a number of times. I’ve never seen anyone else.