大象传媒

One of the things that we all will always recall is that place we found ourselves in when some bit of tragic or awe-striking news reached our ears. For my father such a moment came when he was nearly 13 years old on a Sunday in December of 1941.

After Church he had ridden seven miles from grandma's house in Danville over to Harper in the neighbor's Model A ford. He and his brother, my uncle Thornton, were going to watch a Marx Brother's matinee that afternoon. (I believe it was 'Duck Soup' but it may have been 'Horsefeathers'). The dark days of the depression and the dustbowl were giving way - and for the two youngsters from Danville the troubles of the world seemed a million miles away.

They were about half-way through the movie when suddenly the door to the theater burst open and a rather large lady burst in and and hurriedly plopped down in the seat next to my father. She was flustered and, he would recall later, even in the dark of the theater her face looked red and flushed. She grabbed his arm and squeezed it as she told him, 'The Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor!' Of course my father had no idea where or what Pearl Harbor was - that would all come later - but he remembered that moment in later years as the end to one existence and the beginning of another.

Though his older brothers, Karlton and Thornton, would serve in the war, my father missed it by a year but was called up for Korea. He would later in the effort deliver telegrams by bicycle for Western Union, a task about which he never spoke in great detail, given the nature of most telegrams at that time.

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