RSS Feed
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
WWII gam is the first of its kind on island
"It was a real shock," said Grimes, a Nantucket native who lived on Vesper Lane when Pearl Harbor was attacked. "I was playing basketball with Charlie Fisher, who runs the lumber yard now, and my mother comes running out saying the Japanese had just bombed the ships at Pearl Harbor." Months later, Grimes found himself on a Navy amphibian gunboat, running suicide attacks in Okinawa for 70 days and eventually working with occupied forces to clean up Japan after the war. Doug Burch was playing Monopoly on the living room floor with his brother while the radio played when the announcer broke in with news of the attack. Burch graduated from high school in June; three weeks later, he enlisted in the Navy, where he served on a destroyer escort all through Guam, Okinawa, Korea and China. "All of us at that point in time were pretty gung ho," Burch said. "We wanted to get in there and get even with those guys." "Most of the guys I chummed around with felt the same way," agreed Bill Grieder, who served in the Army Air Corps and ended up working on the construction of the atomic bomb without even knowing it. During the Pearl Harbor attack, Grieder worked as a commercial swordfisherman. He remembered seeing Navy ships patrolling the waters immediately afterwards to confirm the identities of all fishing vessels off the coast. Peter Wilson first learned of the attacks walking from the living room to the sunroom of his parents' home. "And I just froze," he said. Colorblind, Wilson was not able to enlist, but he was drafted as a student at Syracuse University. He served with the Army's newly established Amphibious Engineers and assisted in air traffic maintenance all through Manila, New Guinea and, eventually, Japan. All told, Wilson spent 20 months in the Pacific. "I was playing around the yard, and my mother came out and told me, and she was crying, because she knew I'd have to go to war," remembered Charlie Pearl of that day in 1941. He enlisted in the U.S. Air Force the December after his graduation from high school, and saw action on bombing runs over Germany. But not everyone waited until graduation. Native Dick Kotalac was not even 17 when the Pearl Harbor attack occurred. When Nantucket High School dropped its athletic programs to cut back on transportation costs during rationing, Kotalac, like many of the older boys on the NHS football team, tried to enlist. Still a minor, he even went to Boston to procure a forged birth certificate, but the Armed Forces wouldn't take him until he was legally 18 - and they took him quickly. Kotalac never got a chance to finish high school because he went off to serve in Japan with the occupying forces after major fighting ceased. (Three years ago, Kotalac was one of several Nantucket veterans to receive honorary diplomas from Nantucket High School for this reason.) This WWII oral history event will be the first of its kind on Nantucket, and according to Nantucket Historical Association interpretation coordinator Sarah Bishop, it couldn't wait another year. "It's becoming well established among historical organizations around the country that we really are beginning to lose members of the Greatest Generation," Bishop said. "This is an incredibly important demographic." Modeled after the informal gab sessions held between the decks of passing whale ships, the gam is a tool the NHA has been using more frequently as of late to bring together members of the community whose paths may not otherwise cross. "It's getting back to personal interaction - relying on oral traditions and passing stories along from person to person. It's getting back to human contact," Bishop said of the gam. "We want to make sure that the community realizes that there's a whole lot more to the NHA than the Whaling Museum. This is a community forum in a sense, because we present the history and culture of the island from its origins until now." The event will also draw on the talent of musicians Gerald Mack, Robert Lehman, Diane Lehman and Patty O'Connor Kepenash, who will play a series of songs popular during World War II. Director of the Nantucket Community Music Center/ Nantucket School of Music, Mack is something of an authority on popular, mid-20th century military songs. He conducted the Fort Dix Soldiers' Chorus while he was stationed out of Fort Dix during the Korean War. If you were around then, you might have even seen him on TV's "The Kate Smith Show." (Mack also conducted "A Time to Remember" - a show dedicated to WWII-era big band jazz - on Nantucket five years ago.) Mack said music is like a silent partner in the gam. For the event, he picked songs that best typified different areas of a typical soldier's life and organized them accordingly into themes: "Behind Front Lines," "On the Home Front," "Songs of Separation" and "Tomorrow, When the World is Free" for example. The latter section will include songs like "When the Lights Go on Again All Over the World." Given the success of the exhibit of WWII service members' portraits, which went up last summer, the NHA knew the demand for WWII history was strong here. This event will be the first of its kind for the NHA, which will be videotaping the event to store in its oral history archives. For the men who went to serve, the Pearl Harbor attack was not just a national tragedy, but the day they knew their lives would change, and a significant part of their fates had been cast. To be able to share such a notable moment with a half dozen of their peers means having the opportunity to share the tremendous strangeness of war - of seeing beheaded soldiers one day, and then helping a young mother deliver a child the next, as was Wilson's experience in the Philippines. "It was a remarkable moment, because here you had life in the middle of all this death," he said, with an expression of youthful awe still legible in his older face. It was the same look that came over Pearl when he said, "When you're over in Germany, and they're shooting at you, every moment is a defining moment." What these men experienced was a lifetime of defining moments, crammed into a few years' time. In many ways, being able to share this means as much to the veterans as it means to the community, if not more. "There are so many unsung heroes from that time in history," Bishop said. "By sharing their stories, as well as their songs, we hope to show our appreciation of their sacrifices and those of all veterans." I
SONGS AND STORIES: AN EVENING OF REMEMBRANCE |
for larger version       Ads have a Patent Pending. Click Here for More Information |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
)