Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day

Our next door neighbor (when I was growing up); Oscar, is the guy who actually taught me to throw a baseball. He was old. Well, probably not old from where I'm sitting now, but when you're five years old everyone is pretty much old. There were a lot of WWII vets in our neighborhood, and also in our family that I was raised around. I guess my own time in the military was probably most due the sense of duty I felt towards these folks, that sense of service was just always around me in some form. Oscar wasn't one of those guys though, he was just the old neighbor. I wish I could remember his wife's name, but for the life of me I can't. She was such a nice lady.

They mostly kept to themselves. They had a basic little 2 bedroom house that they kept very nice. It had a nicely finished single car garage with a red rug and a big screen fixture covering the opening when the garage door was up to keep the mosquitoes out. Nobody in our neighborhood really had air conditioning except maybe a window banger every third house or so, and it was in the garage with a big fan, or nice cool basement that provided a little refuge from the heat. In the summer, Oscar and his wife would sit in their finished garage drinking lemonade, watching baseball on the little black and white television on the workbench, and watching the cars go by. He taught me about how cars worked, and sometimes I would help out when he worked on their car by fetching a certain wrench, or maybe "supervising" a little while he did the real work.

He was always a real calm guy. Warm and friendly, and always made time for me even at points when it might have been a little inconvenient for his schedule. They would sometimes come watch me in the cub scout pack in the parade in town on holidays. My favorite memory of him when I was around 10 and he came to my little league game. I played for the Clippers because I wasn't good enough to play on a "major league" team. He was there when I hit my first "home run", even if a trip around the bases was due much more to the three errors our opponents made, than the measly single I had hit. But it put a run on the board and I was proud, and he was there to see it.

We moved when I was 14 and life got busier and I never saw or heard from Oscar again. I suppose it was up to me to keep in touch. (Well, it was.) Such is life. You know how sometimes a person from your distant past pops into your head? A couple weeks ago, this guy popped into my head for the first time in decades. But the memories were all very vivid. I decided to google his name, and discovered that he died just a few months after we moved away. A little more searching and I was looking at microfiche of our town's newspaper from Nov. 19, 1941. There was a section of the paper asking the readers to write letters for Christmas, to lift the spirits of the kids from town who were serving away from home. And there was Oscar's brother's name! Roland - Private; Army - ADA, with a Ft Kamehameha address. Roland lived across town a little ways from us, but I had only met him once or twice. They had both lived in town there most all their lives.

The very next name I saw - I knew. It was Oscar.

Fireman 1st Class: USS Vestal: Pearl Harbor Hawaii.

The Vestal was blown up three weeks later, and many of the Air Defense positions on the island were quickly wiped out as well.

Both Oscar and his brother had survived.