Pearl Harbor Still a Day for the Ages, but a Memory Almost Gone
By ADAM NAGOURNEYPublished: December 6, 2011
NEW YORK TIMES
HONOLULU — For more than half a century, members of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association gathered here every Dec. 7 to commemorate the attack by the Japanese that drew the United States into World War II. Others stayed closer to home for more intimate regional chapter ceremonies, sharing memories of a day they still remember in searing detail.
But no more. The 70th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack will be the last one marked by the survivors’ association. With a concession to the reality of time — of age, of deteriorating health and death — the association will disband on Dec. 31.
“We had no choice,” said William H. Eckel, 89, who was once the director of the Fourth Division of the survivors’ association, interviewed by telephone from Texas. “Wives and family members have been trying to keep it operating, but they just can’t do it. People are winding up in nursing homes and intensive care places.”
Harry R. Kerr, the director of the Southeast chapter, said there weren’t enough survivors left to keep the organization running. “We just ran out of gas, that’s what it amounted to,” he said from his home in Atlanta, after deciding not to come this year. “We felt we ran a good course for 70 years. Fought a good fight. We have no place to recruit people anymore: Dec. 7 only happened on one day in 1941.”
The fact that this moment was inevitable has made this no less a difficult year for the survivors, some of whom are concerned that the event that defined their lives will soon be just another chapter in a history book, with no one left to go to schools and Rotary Club luncheons to offer a firsthand testimony of that day. As it is, speaking engagements by survivors like Mr. Kerr — who said he would miss church services on Sunday to commemorate the attack — can be discouraging affairs.
“I was talking in a school two years ago, and I was being introduced by a male teacher, and he said, ‘Mr. Kerr will be talking about Pearl Harbor,’ ” said Mr. Kerr. “And one of these little girls said, ‘Pearl Harbor? Who is she?’
“Can you imagine?” he said.
The formal announcement of the disbanding will come in the ceremony that will begin here at 7:40 a.m. on Wednesday, with a moment of silence at 7:55 a.m. (12:55 p.m. Eastern time), 70 years to the minute from when the Japanese attack began. Nearly 3,000 people are expected to attend the commemoration at the Pearl Harbor Visitor Center, overlooking the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial.
William H. Muehleib, the national president of the association, made it here from his home in Virginia Beach for the ceremony and the announcement. He said he hoped many other survivors would come as well, but, he said, those who came, came on their own.
No group meetings or social events are on the schedule. “The Pearl Harbor Survivors Association doesn’t have anything planned,” he said.
The association was founded in 1958 with a roster of 28,000, all members of the military who had been on the island of Oahu the morning of the attack. It was granted a Congressional charter in October 1985. Mr. Muehleib said membership had fallen to 2,700 as of Sept. 1; though he said that given the continuing death toll and the declining health of men who are all around 90 years old or older, that figure exaggerates the actual strength of the organization, which is why the board voted to close down.
“With the advanced age and ill health of our membership and the declining numbers of members, it was obvious that we could not continue the requirements that corporate 501C lays on our membership and on our board,” Mr. Muehleib said, referring to the group’s tax-exempt, nonprofit status. In other words, there were just not survivors to continue to fill the positions of president, vice president, treasurer and secretary.
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Ian Lovett contributed reporting from Los Angeles.
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