Remembering Pearl Harbor and my December reading list

The fire is burning and I sit in the recliner, trying to decide if I’m going to finish another memoir post or just take a nap. Instead, I surf through my favorite blogs and while reading Randall’s, am reminded that today is Pearl Harbor Day.

When I was back in North Carolina last month, I spent some time talking to my aunt (my mother’s older sister) and discovered new tidbits about my mother’s family. Aunt B told they learned about Pearl Harbor walking to church. They lived in rural Moore County and attended a Baptist church about a half mile from their home. They must have been going to an evening services. One of the houses they passed had a radio on and called them over to tell them that the American fleet had been attacked in Hawaii. My grandfather had recently completed training to become a welder and few weeks later, during their Christmas vacation, the family packed up and moved to Wilmington. There, my granddaddy went to work in the shipyard, building Liberty Ships. My grandmother worked in the cafeteria at the Wilmington Dry Docks, while my great-grandma took care of the kids (there were three of them) and also cooked for her family and a couple more families from Moore Country who’d moved with them to Wilmington. Gradually, as those families found a place to live and moved out, new families from Moore County, who were moving to Wilmington for the war jobs, would share their house. With all the adults working, they were able to save enough money to buy my granddaddy’s farm.

My favorite story about learning that Pearl Harbor had been attacked came from a man I knew in Utah. John was an eighteen year old sailor that fateful December morning. He was in the Philippines, assigned to a submarine tender. Although John didn’t like to talk much about his experiences in the war, he loved telling the story of how he learned that we were in war. Early that Sunday morning he was drunk and in a Manila Gin Mill. All of a sudden, the lights came up and there were Shore Patrol and Military Police, with their clubs swinging, waking up soldiers and sailors and ordering them to report immediately to their duty station. It was a hell-of-a-way to begin a war. There was a mechanical problem with John’s ship and they didn’t think it could run the blockade, so they kept them in the Philippines. The ship was made to look like it had been scuttled, but they keep the machine shop running, making tank parts for the army fighting on Bataan. After running out of materials, the sailors died their uniforms and were given a rifle. One Marine was placed with each group of sailors, who were sent to do rear guard duty. Before the surrender of Bataan, John and the rest of the sailors were transferred to Corregidor where they held out till they ran out of ammunition. Afterwards, they were Japanese POWs and forced to labor in coal mines under inhumane conditions. The mine John worked for was own by a company still in business (I think it was Hitachi). Needless to say, John did his best never to buy anything made in Japan. He died about a year before I left Utah.

On the economic front, our bookstore is closing. Seldom does a town of our size have a good bookstore, but for the past four years we’ve been blessed. The owner is a reader and has always had an interesting collection from which to choose. It’s going to be sad to see him go. I spent an hour in his store on Friday (his collection is over half way gone), and found four books I wanted (with a 40% discount, my wants go up). The book I am most excited about and put down all other books in order to read is William Zinsser’s Spring Training. Zinsser is the author of the classic, On Writing Well. I was pleasantly surprised to find that he’d written a book about baseball. I was even more pleasantly surprised to find out that it was about the Pittsburgh Pirates. And I was ecstatic to learn that it was about the 1988 Pirates in spring training! I was at Three Rivers Stadium for the Pirates' opening game that year. Now, how good is that! By the way, I have been reading way to many serious books lately (maybe I’ll get around to writing some reviews), but I've decided that for December I will mainly books that bring joy or make me laugh. When I work out, I’m listening to Skin Tight by Carl Hiaasen on my ipod. As for books you can hold, after I finish Spring Training, I plan to jump into Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.