Rotarians collect tales from Dec. 7
| • | Drama paints vivid picture of people changed forever |
| • | Remembering Pearl Harbor: Prelude to War |
By Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writer
A famous photo snapped six decades ago and a stone's throw from where the Honolulu Rotary Club meets each week depicts the sands of Waikiki Beach adorned with barbed wire.
At 76, Stanley Snodgrass has his own memory files of World War II, but looking out over this setting so routinely, while lunching with club members at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, convinced him the club has something worthy to contribute to the annals of Dec. 7.
Stanley Snodgrass was a teen excited by sense of the new and foreign.
"Lest We Forget: Rotarians Remember" is a compilation of some two dozen essays by club members about where they were on that historic day.
The book, to be printed by Trade Publishing sometime after the first of the year, will be sold as a fund-raiser for Rotary Foundation (call 922-5526 for ordering information).
It includes Snodgrass' own recollections, of course, as a 16-year-old shooting billiards in Custer, S.D.
"We didn't even know where Pearl Harbor was," he said. "But it exacerbated the feeling of excitement for a 16-year-old. It was something new, something foreign, everything a boy ever dreams of."
Rod West, a retired physician and fellow club member, probably could have given that teenager a reality check. He had just been called up from the Navy Reserve and was on duty at Ford Island in time for the second wave of the attack.
In 1992 West wrote his own book on the civilian response to the war, but this essay offers a rare, firsthand military view of what it was like treating casualties during the hours of horror.
Rod West wrote about how Navy Reservists treated the wounded.
"The whole atmosphere was smoky, and there was a deafening roar of secondary batteries and clattering of machine guns," West wrote.
"As we passed the Nevada and looked further across the channel, a slight wave of nausea passed over me, for there in front of us was the keel of the USS Oklahoma pointing skyward ... it was not until then that we realized the size of the blow with which Japan had struck."
West has confronted these memories before, but Snodgrass found that other essayists had to be persuaded to revisit painful memories of the war.
"It's just in the last few years that some people have said, 'OK, we'll talk,' " he said.
