Friday, December 7, 2007

Pearl Harbor Remembered

On this day, 66 years ago, my parents were children growing up in Hawaii. My mom was only 2 years old, but my dad was 9 years old and remembers very well what he saw on that Sunday morning.

Dad's father, my late grandfather, worked in the pineapple fields everyday he could as he had 7 children to support. They were not well off and lived in a tiny house in Kahuku on the island of Oahu.

On that Sunday morning my grandfather had gone to work, like any other morning, while it was dark out. My dad said that when they found out that Pearl Harbor was being bombed, my grandfather came home from work and they painted all the glass windows on their house black. My father still remembers hearing the Japanese fighters overhead and hearing them sputtering in the distance as they ran out of gas over the ocean.

Before the Pearl Harbor Memorial Visitor Center section was renovated, I worked at one of the small stands selling pennies to the tourists. We'd put a penny through the flattening machine and it would flatten the penny while inscribing the USS Arizona Memorial on the other side of the flattened penny. I had learned a little bit of Japanese because a majority of the tourists that came to visit the USS Arizona Memorial were from Japan.

Pearl Harbor Remembered
http://my.execpc.com/~dschaaf/mainmenu.html

Lovena
East Coast Tropics
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Took a ride down to Boston today. Followed hula Nancy to pick up Al at his place in the North End and then we headed over to the Boston Flower Exchange. There were many wholesale vendors some of which sold Ti leaf bunches, Monstera leafs, Bird of Paradise, Protea, various orchids, bamboo and ferns. I bought a bunch of ti leafs and Nancy bought some palms, ti leaf and tropical sprays for decorating the pa`ina at her place.

Lovena
EastCoastTropics

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