Pearl Harbor Survivors, Las Vegas Sun, May 24, 2001

Home front: Pearl Harbor’ stokes residents’ memories of attack Lisa Ferguson Thursday, May 24, 2001 | 9:04 a.m. They can still see billows of black smoke smothering the sky. They still hear the "tat-tat-tat" of bullets blasting in the distance. They still feel the fear of the day that would live in infamy. But they weren't aboard the ships that made tragic world history on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, in Hawaii's Pearl Harbor. They were in their homes. Some were headed to church. Others cowered in fields as Japanese fighter planes screamed across the heavens during the invasion of the harbor on the island of Oahu. That was nearly six decades ago. But the memories remain, and have been stirred by the opening of the big-budget blockbuster "Pearl Harbor" this Memorial Day weekend. The movie tells the story of the attack, which thrust the United States into World War II, in the same fictionalized romance-meets-disaster vein as 1997's "Titanic." It stars Ben Affleck and Kate Beckinsale. The Sun asked former Hawaii residents who now call Southern Nevada home, as well as a pair of authors of books on the subject, to recall the attack that killed more than 2,400 American servicemen and women, and 68 civilians. Their vantage point away from the fiery harbor and on the streets where they lived is one not often taught in classrooms or featured prominently in history books. They were children at the time none older than 12. They remember toting government-issued gas masks made for adults to school when classes resumed months after the invasion; and how an islandwide blackout forced them into darkness. Supplies, they recall, were short and demand was high, and their parents had to pay for items with U.S. dollars stamped "Hawaii." Most disturbing of all, they say, was how fear and discrimination against Hawaiians of Japanese descent ran rampant. Island perspectives Although she was only 4 years old at the time, Malia Razalan Blume remembers well that Sunday morning in the Palama District, just a few miles from Pearl Harbor. She was headed to church with her mother. "But then we heard all of these noises -- airplanes and stuff ... We never made it to mass," says the 63-year-old Blume, who lives in east Las Vegas with her husband, Joseph, a retired Air Force technical sergeant. "We heard sirens all over the place and I was wondering what it was, and my mother said, 'Oh, Pearl Harbor is being attacked. We have to go home and stay in our house.' So we turned around and we went to the house and we stayed in the house. "We heard all of this bombing. I never actually saw the attack, but we heard the news on the radio and we knew what was going on at the time. I was so little, I didn't know what was happening," Blume says. "And it was kind of miserable there for a while ... Through the years I know that we had to stay indoors, we always had to put the (window) shades down in the house ... And we (couldn't) go outside." She remembers adults would tell her, " 'Pull the shade down, turn the light off -- it's blackout time,' and the block warden would come around and if they saw the lights, they'd be knocking on the door and telling us to turn off the lights. There was nothing else to do in the dark." Blume grew up on Oahu, and the mother of four spent 15 years working in the accounting department for a wholesale merchandise company before moving to Las Vegas in 1979. A member of the Las Vegas Hawaiian Civic Club, she also participates in monthly Wahine (women's) luncheons separate from the club. She had a business selling Hawaiian clothing, but closed it in the early '90s. She's now a part-time soft-count clerk at the Western. The war years, she recalls, weren't all bad -- at least not for her family. Blume's parents -- her mother was a dressmaker; her father was a tailor who, during the war, worked for the U.S. Engineering Department at Red Hill overlooking Pearl Harbor -- worked overtime at their jobs throughout the war, and the money provided financial stability for the family. "Everybody had jobs and they all worked overtime ... By 1946 I knew (my mother) had enough money that we could buy our own house and have a car. And my father was making good money, too." Storied romance "I looked out the window and I could see the brown (Japanese) bomber with the red dot on the fuselage -- the red circle -- and I saw little puffs of smoke, like anti-aircraft shells bursting around it." That was the view that then-7-year-old Clifford Lee had from his family's Honolulu home. The Las Vegas doctor (an allergist) says he lived on a busy street that led to Pearl Harbor, which was five or six miles away. "You could hear the sirens, all the ambulances, fire trucks and police cars all heading towards Pearl Harbor direction." He remembers his aunt, who also lived on his family's property, telling him to "stay at home, not to go outside ... When you're a kid, you really don't know what's going on." He remembers his gas mask "was just like part of your clothing. Everyday you carried your gas mask on a strap around your shoulder." At school he participated in gas mask and air raid practices. Meanwhile, two islands away on Maui, the young girl who would years later become Lee's wife was experiencing the war largely through news reports and rumors. Rozita Villanueva (now Lee) was also 7 years old and lived with her family on a sugar-cane plantation. She recalls (mostly through tales from her parents and others) that the people of Maui had been on alert. "There was apparently some talk about what was going to be happening," she says, "and we (were told) to save all of our aluminum pots and our toothpaste tubes and put it all together, and when the bombing came we were scared stiff." Rozita Lee, who created, owns and emcees the twice-weekly "Hawaiian Hot Luau" show at the Imperial Palace, says her family lived very near the ocean, and for a while there were plans to evacuate the area. "I think a few days after the bombing, we were told that there were (Japanese) submarines (stationed) right off the beach, so we all got scared and I think that's when we mobilized and moved, but luckily nothing happened." She attended a school that was situated "right on the beach. The teachers were very wary, in case of landings, so they watched very closely." Rozita Lee and her family and other workers/residents of the plantation -- most of whom were from the Philippines -- gathered in a meeting hall. The plantation also had residents (who lived in "camps") from Portugal, Hawaii and Japan. "And so a lot of the people became suspect of the Japanese who were living in our camps. Of course, we know now that was not good, but when you're in that situation and you know that your enemies are the Japanese, of course you have big question marks and suspicions and what have you." She remembers how children were mean to the Japanese residents, "because we only heard from our elders, (about) their hate. Hate is not from within you, it's learned, so the adults were very angry." The Lees, who became childhood friends, married in 1979, the same year they moved to Las Vegas. The 66-year-olds are charter members of the Hawaiian Civic Club. Rozita Lee says she's not certain why filmmakers have brought Pearl Harbor to the big screen. She's also not sure whether she'll see the movie. "Why are they trying to revive all of those feelings that so many people experienced? Yes, it's part of our memory, but why bring it up in such a big way? I'm just wondering whether they have the true story ... The trailers don't tell you anything, they just show the hype." Back at the beach It was just about breakfast time at the exclusive Kamehameha School in Honolulu where 12-year-old Bill Wright was a boarding student with other children of Hawaiian ancestry. "That's when all of the shebang started going," he recalls. "The black smoke, we didn't know what it was, but we discovered later, of course, that it was anti-aircraft fire." An unexploded shell fell near the school grounds, he says. "That's when we were told to come indoors. Still, we didn't know what was going on until three planes went over our school as we were sitting on the rooftop watching all of these planes and all the carnage that was going on." He had a view of Pearl Harbor and Hickam Field from the school, and still has visions of the destroyer USS Helm "zigzagging and bombs dropping nearby." Throughout the night, "even though the Japanese had not attacked and were not attacking, gunfire was going on like crazy. Everybody was trigger-happy, and you could see the tracer bullets. They were shooting at anything and everybody, even though the attack was finished by nine o'clock. But everybody was scared." Wright recalls that "rumors were running rampant about paratroopers poisoning the water supply, which was not true." Wright's parents lived on Waikiki Beach. Soon after the attack, he remembers, the Army laid barbed wire in the sand of what are today's popular beach spots. Also, a small channel ran in front of his family's home, and steel pilings were erected there to keep boats from coming ashore. In Wright's front yard, the Army had set up a machine gun and stationed two servicemen to man it on 12-hour shifts. "I remember we used to invite the guys over to come in and have breakfast with us. To them it was easy duty because they were with a family." During the war years there was hoarding of products, especially rice, says Wright, who worked at a service station that sold another precious commodity -- gasoline. "There were things we would do just to get extra gasoline. Some people would actually run their cars on kerosene. They smoked like crazy, but they ran." Wright, also a member of the Las Vegas Hawaiian Civic Club, is a retired technical writer who moved to Las Vegas near UNLV a dozen years ago. He says that for the most part, Oahu residents were "on pins and needles. It's hard to describe. You can tell it, but it's hard unless you were there to know what to feel." Uncharted waters Lawrence R. Rodriggs, of Newark, Calif., authored and self-published the 1991 book "We Remember Pearl Harbor: The Civilian Side of the Pearl Harbor Story" (Communications Concepts). A third-generation Hawaiian, he was 9 years old and living with his family in the Malulani Heights area of Oahu when Pearl Harbor was bombed. "It didn't dawn on me until many years later that there was a civilian side to the Pearl Harbor story that I felt hadn't been written," Rodriggs says. That, coupled with his memories and his civilian father's involvement in the attack (he worked as an ambulance driver), prompted him to pen the book. "A lot of people don't know that we all had to become registered; we all had to have our currency turned in." All U.S. dollars were burned and residents were reissued "occupation dollars" stamped "Hawaii," he explains, so that if the island were to become occupied, enemy soldiers would not have U.S. currency. All mail was censored to eliminate references to climate and geographic locations, and radio stations were silenced so the Japanese couldn't home in on the frequencies. "So we would listen to the police calls on the radio and heard every rumor about paratroopers landing ... so we were sure we were being invaded," Rodriggs says. He also recalls an "accident of war" that claimed the life of a 60-year-old civilian volunteer who guarding a water tower one dark night. "He and another volunteer -- a civil-defense person -- crossed signals, I guess, and one killed the other," Rodriggs explains. "They found out later (the men) were neighbors." A former public relations/advertising man, Rodriggs talks to grade school students about the attack. He tells them "that we had to get up at two o'clock in the morning and run into our bomb shelter underground in the side yard and wait for the all-clear, sometimes waiting all night, and how spooky it was." The 68-year-old Rodriggs will spend Memorial Day signing copies of his book at the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor. He doesn't take issue with Hollywood putting the attack on the big screen. "You know, so many of our young people today ... right or wrong, they learn history through the movies, and if somebody next year is going to say, 'I remember what December 7, 1941, is all about because I saw a Disney movie in which Ben Affleck was the hero,' to me, that's fine." Ground zero You couldn't get much closer to the fighting than where Dorinda Makanaonaliani Stagner Nicholson and her family were on Dec. 7 -- on the Pearl City Peninsula in the middle of Pearl Harbor. In 1993 the Kansas City psychotherapist authored "Pearl Harbor Child: A Child's View of Pearl Harbor from Attack to Peace" (Woodson House Publishing). Only 6 years old during the attack, Nicholson says, "I don't remember at what point I understood the seriousness of what was going on, but we did watch (the Japanese planes); they were barely above our house because the harbor was just a few blocks away." Bullets gashed the civilian family's home, recalls the 65-year-old Nicholson, but most of the damage was in the nearby harbor. Following a second attack that day, Nicholson's parents -- her mother was a hula teacher who also worked for Pan American Airways; her father was a postal worker -- ushered her and her younger brother into nearby sugar-cane fields where the family hid with others. After the war ended, the military forced the family out of its home. "They came in and condemned it and said, 'You civilians can't live in the middle of the largest military base in the world, and you need to get out of here.' So they took our houses away," and charged the family rent while it looked for another place to live. Nicholson, who will speak at this year's 60th anniversary events at Pearl Harbor, is pleased that the story of the attack is coming to theaters. "I think we need to be reminded of our history," she says. "It certainly takes an anniversary, and then many times it takes Hollywood to help us with that." archive