The Fromson File

REMEMBERING PEARL HARBOR Sixty-two years may seem like an eternity to most people. To those of us of the Pearl Harbor generation who remember December 7, 1941, and can recall its impact, it was our 9/11 without television. I was leaving the Pantages Theater in Hollywood with my father that afternoon, having watched an Abbott and Costello comedy when we were confronted on the curb by news vendors holding up copies of the Los Angeles Times whose front page headline told us the alarming news. “JAPS BOMB PEARL HARBOR,” the bold-faced type screamed. Not many Americans knew where Pearl Harbor was that day. As the hours passed, the news from that distant Hawaiian outpost seemed ominous, but even more so the following day when the first photos of the U.S. Pacific Fleet laying in ruins were published by the Times and newspapers across the country. As if to punctuate our feelings, FDR, our president went before the U.S. Congress and in a speech we only could hear on radio, declared that “December 7, 1941 is a day that will live in infamy.” Then he asked the Congress to declare war on Japan, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy as well. The nation rallied to the cause, because every American realized that what had happened truly was an immediate threat to the national security of the United States. There was nothing phony about it like the presidential response to 9/11. From a personal standpoint, it was the prelude and then the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor that I remember most vividly. On the Sunday before, November 30, what might be called a supermarket of its time, a block away from where I lived, burned to the ground. Among its hardest hit businesses was the fruit and vegetable stands operated by Japanese and Japanese Americans. The flames did not subside for seven hours and as these vendors sat on the curbside, smouldering ashes all around them, through the eyes of an 11-year-old, their devastation was obvious. Few Americans had ever heard of fire insurance in those days and these people were faced with having their life savings wiped out. But from around the neighborhood, people streamed out of their apartment buildings, carrying food, clothing and money to offer to these victims and others in the market who had been familiar everyday faces to shoppers from six or seven blocks away. But a week later, the mood changed perceptively and neither the Japanese or Nisei, the Japanese Americans, were seen anywhere near their devastated property. The personal aftermath for me did not occur for another three months. At the time, I was a seventh grader at Virgil Junior High School, directly across from the burned out marketplace at the intersection of First and Vermont. It was a day in March, 1942, when three uniformed policemen, accompanied by a civilian, came into our social studies classroom. The civilian whispered something in our teacher’s ear, and then he called out the names of four students, all Japanese Americans. One was George Takahashi, one of my closest friends at the school. They were then taken out of the classroom in tears, destined with their families no doubt for one of the relocation camps in the desolate parts of California or the Rocky Mountains. I never saw George again, but I have wondered about him all these years. Is he dead or alive? How did he survive the camp experience? Our teacher asked each of us to write a composition about that moment in our young lives. In my inexact way, I compared the hateful snickering of other kids in school about the “dirty Japs” in our midst to the anti-Semitic taunts I had heard earlier in the Bronx neighborhood where I spent the first decade of my life. The teacher thought well enough of my essay that she had it published in the school newspaper, the Virgil Voice. It my first by-line ever, but reason enough for me to remember Pearl Harbor so clearly.