80 Years Later
My memory of December 7, 1941 is fixed forever in my mind, a series of black-and-white stills as clear to me today 80 years later as they are meaningful. I was in Cleveland, Ohio, in front of Saint May’s church that Sunday morning, toward the rear of the restless line of all-white-clad kids—the girls in dresses and sheer veils, the boys twitching and uncomfortable in shirts, ties, and the strange white knickers. It was the day of our First Communion, the second sacrament Catholics were supposed to receive in their structured religious journey through life. We were about to receive Christ into our own body for the first time!
A quartet of nuns, dressed in black and white, tried to keep order in the fidgeting file of eight-year-olds with a gentle push here, a hushed rebuke there. To little avail. Sprits were soaring.
But not for all I soon noticed. The nuns did not seem to share in the festive feelings such an occasion usually brought. Instead they went about their herding with few words and nervous frowns as though their minds were elsewhere. Why? Something was not right.
I don’t remember a thing of my actual First Eucharist, and at the end of Mass I hurried home and confronted my father with the question, “What’s wrong?”
The tall, stern, and stoic man never shielded any of his four children from life’s harsh realities. “The Japanese have bombed Hawaii,” he said matter-of-factly. “We’re going to war.”
And so we did. It was a war I followed closely as a boy by newspaper and radio and maps my father gave me right up to its bitter close. I shared the world’s joy over its end, personally thankful I did not have to fight in the great slaughter. Peace at last!
A decade after that First Communion Sunday morning—1951—I enlisted in the United States Air Force at age 18. Korea beckoned. Life goes on.