The Pecan Park Eagle

On December 7, 1941, my parents and I lived in this little house in Beeville, Texas.

I have always been blessed/cursed with a long and vivid memory. When I was almost one year old, my ten-year old uncle had climbed a tree and lost his footing. His neck lodged in a tree fork and he had started wailing in strangulation for help. I can still hear those mournful sounds to this day. It all took place in the back yard on a visit to my grandma’s house in San Antonio in late 1938.

Then I remember my dad ripping off his shoes and racing toward and up the tree. He pulled Uncle Albert free and carried him  back down to the ground. I remember Uncle Albert choking, clearing his throat, and crying, and everybody gathered around as dad took care of him, talking him out of his fear, reassuring him that things were OK.

Then it all goes blank. That’s all I ever remembered of the near family tragedy, but the sights and sounds of the small part I do recall are as vivid as if they had happened yesterday. That being said, here is all I remember of Sunday, December 7, 1941, the day the Imperial Navy of the Empire of Japan launched that devastating surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

It was a warm winter afternoon in Beeville, Texas, the town where I was born and probably would have grown up, had it not been for World War II. My dad was a 31-year old Dodge-Plymouth dealer in Beeville back then. My mom was a stay-at-home housewife who was only days away from giving birth to my little brother John. Life was good. And all in Beeville, as per usual, was deadly quiet. The little town fifty miles north of Corpus Christi back then sure was, and largely still is, a good place to get caught up on your sleep.

It was early afternoon as I prepared my daily resistance to a nap, but mom and dad seemed a little distracted that Sunday from making the usual big deal of it. They huddled in the living room, almost leaning into the console radio and into the flow of non-stop anxious words that came pouring forth in ways that were most unfamiliar to me. Most of the time, the radio played at night, when mom and dad listened to their shows.

This was different. Mom and dad had worried looks on their faces. I started to worry too. I just didn’t know what to worry about and mom and dad were too busy listening to even notice what was going on with me. They just told me to be quiet and go play. And as I went out the screen door to throw a ball around by myself, the telephone rang. It would continue to ring for the rest of the day. And this was at a time when the phone was mainly used to communicate important messages. People in Beeville didn’t visit over the phone in 1938. If you wanted to socialize with somebody in 1938, you drove to that other person’s house and knocked on their door or just caught them outside sitting on their porch as a sign they were open to visitation.

Sunday, December 7, 1941 in Beeville, Texas was not about visiting. It was all business. I had no concept for what it was back then. I just knew that it was out of the ordinary and a little scary. As aunts and uncles called, came, and went, many of them began to express angry tones and some of the women shed tears. I started hearing phrases, first from the radio and then from family and neighbors. Names like “Pearl Harbor” and phrases like “Japanese attack” began to enlarge into memories. President Roosevelt spoke late in the day over the radio. Everyone seemed comforted by the fact he did and determined to do something.

Determined to do what? And about what? The whole thing made no sense to me.

It made no sense until I finally heard the radio announcer say that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had killed maybe thousands of Americans and destroyed most of the ships in our Navy. Now the reverse sense kicked in. We were supposed to pay them back by killing a bunch of their people in return.

I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but Pearl Harbor meant that America had now been pulled into the world’s true first world war on both its two greatest oceans and nothing would ever again be the same. WWII meant that they stopped making cars and that dad was now flat-out of the new car business. Dad was not eligible for the draft due to his multiple dependents, but he learned welding as a defense factory skill and moved the family to Houston to take work at Brown’s Shipyard.

Dad didn’t know it, but he was delivering me to my true hometown when he moved us here from Beeville. The physical move took place on my 5th birthday, December 31, 1942. And the whole thing had been set in motion by the events at Pearl Harbor, a little more than a year earlier on December 7, 1941.

Remember Pearl Harbor? How I could I forget?