80th Anniversary

Today is the 80th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It was on a Sunday; I was eight years old and was with my parents coming out of a restaurant after church, and we heard a newsboy shouting the headlines. I don't have any memory of the immediate reaction of my parents to this event. But I do know that my father might have decided in his mind at that time that he needed to serve his country, because not long after this event he made the decision to go into the service as an Army chaplain, which he did in 1942. He started making inquiries in June of 1942 and reported for duty at Chaplain's School at Harvard on Sept. 21, 1942. He was 46 years old. He was under no obligation to go into the army. My mother was understandably upset by his decision. We had just moved from Minneapolis to Texarkana, Arkansas the summer of 1941, so we had been there only six months when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and we ended up being in Texarkana only a year. We had just bought a very nice home in Minneapolis the year before moving to Texarkana! I suspect mother had not been happy with that move. It had not been a necessary move. I think she hated moving, and would have loved settling into her new home. The move to Texarkana seems to have been motivated by a desire by my dad for a new challenge, and perhaps a bit of homesickness on his part for the South, where he had grown up. My mother would not have shared that homesickness. I, on the other hand, was excited by the move to Arkansas. I was perhaps not all that happy in Minneapolis in terms of my social life. Moving to Arkansas was an adventure. We got to make a long train ride. As it worked out, I was really happy in Texarkana. I had probably the best circle of childhood friends there that I had at any time. So I would probably have liked to stay in Texarkana. When I learned that my father was going into the army, and that would require that we leave Texarkana and go back to Minneapolis where we owned a home, I probably was not all that happy. But I also had sort of an almost philosophical attitude toward moving. I think I enjoyed change, and I saw moving as a kind of adventure, even though in this case we were going back to a place that was familiar to me. I have no real memory of how I felt about my dad being absent. I think I was affected by war propaganda, and I was sort of proud to have my father in the service. I still had my older brother with me as well as my mother, so it probably didn't seem like that big a hardship. And paradoxically, this period of my life actually afforded me a greater freedom than I might've otherwise had. I was allowed to do a lot of things that I'm not sure my father would have approved of if he had been at home. For example, I had the freedom to go virtually any place on my bike in Minneapolis, and I did. And then when my brother went into the service in 1944, I became the man of the family, so to speak, and I actually took care of my mother when she would be sick. It was really only later that I realized what I lost not having my father home during those important pre-adolescent years. So anyway, we mark an anniversary today of an event which had a real impact on my life, for better or for worse.

A U.S. battleship sinking in the attack on Pearl Harbor

Dad in his new uniform, Stewart, and me, taken in Texarkana, 1942

Mother and dad in Texarkana, taken about the same time as the one above

Me and my bike in front of our house in Minneapolis