In late summer of 1941, my mother and I set off on a journey from upstate New York to Honolulu, Hawaii. I was four months old and my parents’ first-born. She was twenty-seven years old, recently released from a tuberculosis sanitarium,and set on getting us close as she could to my father in his first assignment as a new Navy chaplain, aboard the USS Curtiss at Pearl Harbor. She had gone to the town library to look for Hawaii in an atlas; she had no idea where it was….
Read it all from the latest Anglican Digest (pages 19-20).
At a luncheon many years ago, I met a rather elegant woman in her early seventies. For some reason, our conversation tripped over the fact that she had been on Ford Island on 7 December 1941. Her husband was a naval officer. She was no more than 200 yards from Battleship Row. A front row seat on history.