Pearl Harbor Day and Brother Samuel’s Birthday
Posted by Pete | Posted in News | Posted on 08-12-2011
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Seventy years ago today is a date that is very alive in my heart. We were having Sunday dinner at Granddaddy Bonner’s house and the radio was playing in the living room. From the kitchen all my folks heard the broadcast of Pearl Harbor being bombed. Everyone was upset and all talking at once about what this meant. I did not have a clue, but I was to learn later as my Uncles, one by one left for the conflict, including my Brother Sam. We were celebrating his birthday. Toward the end of the war, at 17 years old, he joined the Navy and was on his way overseas when the war ended. That day was a sad time, but a time for the awaking of a great nation. Giving rise to one of the most powerful nations and military forces on earth. A nation instrumental in keeping peace and fighting for peace all over the world, until this very day. Our future as a world power seems a little uncertain at this point, but World Powers, “don’t ever count us out”. We will do what we have to do. That is the resolve of the American People……WE WILL UNITE WHENEVER NEEDED…. Brother Sam has passed on but I honor him and give thanks to God for giving me Sam as a brother. He was the greatest……I still miss him…Pete Hester
Happy Birthday, Sam! Although there are no birthdays in Heaven, your’s is a time of remembrance of a great cousin who was willing to sacrifice himself at such a young age in the Great War that the rest of us might live in freedom. Although I was too young to remember the “Day that will live in infamy”, we all remember that day now and all of those who did what they had to do in a very difficult time.
Thanks Pete for putting a human touch on the events of that day. This is a “touch” that is very important in putting a human grounding in the historical event that most of us remember now mostly only as history. As I remember where I was when JFK was shot in Dallas and where I was when RFK was shot in LA as well as where I was when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot in Memphis, I have often wondered how those people who had vivid recollections of there own whereabouts on the “Day that will live in infamy” were able to handle and understand their memory as time passed.
On what would have been his 2011 birthday, I must share my first memory of Sam. My first memory of him was in seeing this picture of this guy in his “sailor boy” uniform on a visit to my Aunt Oteria’s house as a very little kid and wondering who this guy was and what kind of “strange” garment he was wearing. As I grew older, I gradually put the uniform, Sam, and the War in perspective; and I gradually came to an understanding of what the uniform meant in the lives of the young men and women who volunteered to serve. That was a gradual development in my understanding and education, but that first sight of Sam’s picture was a strange and confusing experience for a little kid.