NORMAN CORWIN (Peace On Earth)

Norman Lewis Corwin (May 3, 1910 – October 18, 2011)

Above all, my true “Radio Hero” was a man who lived and wrote during the 1930s and 1940s: what is now called, “The Golden Age of Radio.” Norman Corwin’s work is too prodigious, perceptive, personal and profound for me to even begin to list his “audiography,” let alone his work in other media. If you think it all began with Allen Freed and the rest of the Rock’n’Roll/Top Forty stations and deejays then you might want to learn more about the father of the “Theater Of The Mind” and most things good in radio, at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Corwin

Post-World War II American radio, as with cars then “Made In The USA,” began with extensions of what was produced in our country until 1941.

Then there was a hodgepodge “on the air” of everything from farm reports to the Metropolitan Opera’s live concert broadcasts. The style and substance of pre-TV radio emerged from war’s cocoon and began to fly as new innovators gave new ideas a try.

But even by 1965, when Bill Drake and Gene Chenault gained control of RKO Radio’s Los Angeles outlet, which we co-conspirators renamed 93/KHJ Boss Radio. Before the format switch (and the wakeup Robert W. Morgan Show) the morning program offering was a “bed in breakfast” program featuring Steve Allen and wife Jayne Meadows. The couple discussed the day’s events while snuggled in their Beverly Hills bed, sipping orange juice and nibbling bagels while Bill Mouzis handled the “remote” engineering chores back to the main studios and on to the transmitter and towers at Fairfax Avenue and the Santa Monica Freeway.

This affair was followed by the “Radio” Michael Jackson announcing from our fortress at 5515 Melrose Avenue in Hollywood, just down the street from KNX Radio, at CBS Square. (Mr. Corwin started at the CBS Radio Network in 1938, when I was one-year-old and crawling around Waikiki Beach on Oahu, which had two stations, one of which was KGMB, the local CBS affiliate.) That is where Corwin’s masterwork, On a Note of Triumph, was commissioned by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to celebrate the victory of the Allies over Madness. Broadcast live around the world on VE Day, May 8, 1945. This program, in my blatant opinion, is the greatest long-form radio production ever made.

Later in 1972, while living in La Jolla, California and working at KGB-AM-FM, I began reading Corwin’s fantastic array of books about all manner of things, mostly veering to the socio-political. This was way back in the old days before email. So I wrote him a fan letter. Thus began an exchange via US mail between the master and myself, both who toiled in LA radio, albeit decades apart.

Norman Corwin was unaware of the 48-hour History of Rock and Roll, the KHJ original (and only cool) version, narrated perfectly by Morgan: the best announcer with whom I ever worked, besides all his other talents. I wrote Corwin about how disappointed I was that when my program finished and there were zero phone calls to the station about the epic event, neither good nor bad. Full specifics about the program are at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Rock_and_Roll,

I thought we had created a monster flop and had wasted two days of valuable airtime chronicling a subject that had been around for all of thirteen years (if one considers Bill Haley’s “Rock Around The Clock” as the first hit music of the “rock” genre; a major hit that exploded “rock” into global consciousness). This twelve-bar-blues-based song peaked at the #1 spot in the US and UK.

Returning to work the following Monday, February 24, 1969, I realized that in spite of my paranoid and insecure state of mind that praise for the HRR was pouring in, mostly in the form of those things called telegrams. Ratings revealed that one out of three Southern California radios were tuned to the production on which we had worked for months. (For the rest of the story of this program see: http://woodygoulart.com/wg/rock-and-roll-radio-history/people/jacobs-and-drake-on-the-record/history/

The outpouring of praise locally and nationally was rewarding to all of us. It is not every local radio show that is requested for inclusion by the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institute. I wrote Mr. Corwin about that roller coaster climax to that project. In his return letter, Corwin told of finishing up his postwar tribute—which featured everyone in Hollywood fighting for even the smallest part and included FDR himself live from Washington—and staring at the studio “hotline” phone, which remanded deathly silent at the broadcast’s conclusion. Not a single ring. The genius writer, thinking he had launched his own bomb, went to a Gower Street bar and drank away his disappointment. Until the following day when acclaim for his artistic and patriotic effort showered him to his dying days.

Since it is “The Season” and the world goes through its beleaguered changes, I feel it my duty to place electronically the following words from Norman Corwin’s piece de resistance, the crown jewel of his unsurpassed body of work, On a Note of Triumph.

Today his words ring true to life as they appear on your computer monitor (or by whatever means you see this).

Mele Kalikimaka & Hauoli Makahiki Hou!

Lord God of trajectory and blast

Whose terrible sword has laid open the serpent
So it withers in the sun for the just to see,
Sheathe now the swift avenging blade with the names of nations writ on it,
And assist in the preparation of the ploughshare.

Lord God of fresh bread and tranquil mornings,
Who walks in the circuit of heaven among the worthy,
Deliver notice to the fallen young men
That tokens of orange juice and a whole egg appear now before the hungry children;

That night again falls cooling on the earth as quietly as when it leaves your hand;

That Freedom has withstood the tyrant like a Malta in a hostile sea,
And that the soul of man is surely a Sevastopol which goes down hard and leaps from ruin quickly.

Lord God of the topcoat and the living wage
Who has furred the fox against the time of winter
And stored provender of bees in summer's brightest places,
Do bring sweet influences to bear upon the assembly line:
Accept the smoke of the milltown among the accredited clouds of the sky:
Fend from the wind with a house and hedge, him whom you made in your image,
And permit him to pick of the tree and the flock
That he may eat today without fear of tomorrow
And clothe himself with dignity in December.

Lord God of test-tube and blueprint
Who jointed molecules of dust and shook them till their name was Adam,
Who taught worms and stars how they could live together,
Appear now among the parliaments of conquerors and give instruction to their schemes:
Measure out new liberties so none shall suffer for his father's color or the credo of his choice:
Post proofs that brotherhood is not so wild a dream as those who profit by postponing it pretend:
Sit at the treaty table and convoy the hopes of the little peoples through expected straits,
And press into the final seal a sign that peace will come for longer than posterities can see ahead,
That man unto his fellow man shall be a friend forever.

SILENCE THESE RAMS

The Spag Wad

I was actually paid to watch football games back in the mid-1950s as the “technician” twisting “pots” for the four Honolulu Interscholastic League tilts played each weekend in the “Termite Palace” on South King Street and broadcast on KGU (NBC affiliate and “The Voice of Hawaii.”) Several years later in 1957 I would introduce Elvis Presley in his first island concert only on the field not high up in the rickety press box with Gene Good calling the plays and the Reverend Chuck Halter handling the stats and Capt. “Corky” Donahue of the HPD doing the color.

It is night’s like this that make me wonder why I have spent thousands of man hours pulling for this coalition of creeps. And I know I am not alone in my helpless rage.

The current empty-headed head coach of the St. Louis Rams—my first ex-wife calls him “Spag Wad”—hit bottom on national television tonight, December 12, 2011, bringing more momentum to the movement to see the fakir bounced out and away from the team (and the city, state and planet as far as possible as far as I care. And I’ve been observing this football team for forty-seven seasons and never missed a game one way or another and that’s not RJ hyperbole but rather a certifiable fact. Take 47 seasons at an average of 15 games including playoffs and that is at least 705 Rams games plus “exhibitions,” long called that since ATM (After The Merger)—a bit of statistical laziness that keeps people from knowing that Deacon Jones of the LA Rams Fearsome Foursome not only invented the sack in tribute to the raging warriors who ravaged all in their way, he who regularly got to the passer faster and meaner than anyone who ever played defensive end in the NFL including Reggie White, Bruce Smith, Mean Joe Greene. All those overpaid, babied chest thumpers of today who bleat when they beat some kid who couldn’t keep #75 in the blue-and-white from mashing the opposing quarterback into the turf of South Central Los Angeles and the LA Memorial Coliseum and everything in his way before his bust came to rest in Canton. But enough of real men and pre-digitized football.)

Tonight was one of the most inept Monday Night Football games ever “played” and shown for pubic consumption. A certain deranged demographic known as Rams Nation knowingly avoided dining during the massacre of their heroes, though I’ll bet Mitt Romney $10000 that the team’s performance did induce some vomiting and smashing of things lying around and officially licensed by the NFL with their horny, once Ram-ugh logo.

I have seen almost every important MNF game from the night they first signed on ABC-TV. Football went from Pop Warner to Marshall McLuhan. Tonight’s teams went into the fray with losing records and no chance of playing into the postseason--when the NFL rules the minds and wrenches the guts of most American males as well as women and foreigners.

And now the headline on the computer monitor display reads, “Seahawks stifle struggling Rams for home victory.” I have not written (only mumbled about and kvetched to select friends) about this team since they totally blew it in Seattle last year. Okay, maybe some snide asides but after the Greed Strike there was Hope for This Year. The recently concluded 30-13 beating was a thumping not accurately reflecting the ineptitude and confusion of the once-mighty Rams team. The loss must have least bothered the head coach whose mind dwells in a reptilian domain that relates to no one else’s reality while he is unable to relate anything to the media that isn’t straight out of “How To Point The Finger.” Or “Coaching For Dummiers.”

Everyone who has ever aspired to write for the entertainment and enlightenment of others somewhere secretly wants to be a sportswriter. Or at least they did in the horse and buggy days of the sports writing giants going back to Grantland Rice and Damon Runyon and those men spying from high in press boxes wearing fedoras while smoking Camel cigarettes and banging out the action and their opinions of same on a manual typewriter as pro football climbed up the ladder, weaving itself into the heart and soul of this county. Up rose pro football. Past Roller Derby and “professional” wrestling. Then beyond boxing. Dug in deeper than car racing and the ballet that is the NBA when well done. And finally topping baseball as the All-American game itself. And Dan Jenkins’ “Semi-Tough: A Novel,” a dreamy 1972 science-friction vision of US football imagining the game evolving and exploding into a media monster with print still feeding the globule village scores and stories to those masses who now have levitated this rugby and cannibal–inspired sport all to a patriotic orgasmic frenzy as the Super Bowl became the most important day in the Union while exponentially expanding technology probes the pores of sweat dripping down a tackle’s massive nose in highly defined live megapixels-by-da-million or whatever display the game is playing on—certainly one that would prove the grit and guts of what we dying farts call Old School. Oh but if we could see Sweetness in widescreen and Jimmy Brown defying hi-def or witness Bob Waterfield hit the “Coffin Corner” on every punt. Football before Velcro and polyethylene. No. We fall on our officially licensed NFL prayer rugs and bow in the direction of Lambeau or Soldier’s Field and chant some strange shit even too bizarre for the History Channel.

I figure the super bowl game with the roman numerals is the closest we come together as a nation—this country in its years as an Obama nation. Every Super Sunday I’ve always wanted to through a rock through the window of Tiffany’s on Kalakaua Avenue in Waikiki during a tight game while the entire island stay frozen watching TV especially if it involves the 49ers or Raiders or the Cowboys and the Steelers.

Taking the long view of this band of gypsies known as the NFL Rams has tested my patience beyond limits I didn’t know existed. (Only bet money on them but once and the loser. Mitch Fisher duly send a ten-dollar check to the rabbi up in Nuuanu. Having lived in Hong Kong for a year in 1964 I was forced to learn the real world’s “football” on Redifussion. That was the name for the telly in the Kowloon flat I spent my year out of the country pending trial sentencing and incarceration for possession of marihuana (sic.) It was grass (“reefer”) so weak that it required a pillow case full of Mexican weed with twigs the size of KFC bones to get a feeble hit in 1959 the year all manner of life-changing events happened personally for me including being present at the birth of the State of Hawaii and sampling all manner of people places and events. The Feds decided to make my scandalous behavior and example. It sure stopped millions of people from smoking pot. And I learned to watch other aspects of “soccer” that apply to our less subtle homeland game.

A dozen years later I received a pardon from President Jimmy Carter, which certifies that I am neither a drug smuggler nor a crazed maniac. And I could vote and own a gun again. One year later I was hooked. Insatiably hung up on the Rams for whom there is no expletive strong enough about now to describe my feelings about this alleged “team.”

Throughout my days I have spent hours out of my mind blown on all sorts of substances short of shooting myself up and I cannot think of any mind-altering stuff that would cause the coaching staff of the Rams tonight to (and “think” is not an available word when referring to these posturing okole) assume that doing something other than handing the ball to Mr. Rams Steven Jackson #39 after seven attempts to score within spitting distance of the goal line Pigskin Paul Allen’s Seahawk Playpen. I even got to see the ol’ KGB Chicken shtick now in its fortieth year of descenadancy from the artistry in (a hot stinking suit) of San Diego Sate’s Ted Giannoulas who made the fowl thing famous.

But of course I have run out of pre-Ram game drills for myself. The first one to topple is: “Fuck ‘em. Why should I was another second of my life and breathe caring about a bunch of people in a town that I wanted out of during the one day I was there in the 70s hustling CRUISIN’ albums?” Vinyl almost melted in the summer heat like it would collapse the arch. Passed through in 1997 to visit the then-state-of-the-art Rams facility and went along for the ride to the Miracle Season of the Greatest Show on Earth.

December 2011 in freezing Northwest. They score a touchdown. That is better than their last visit to the Land Of Costco when their no-brainer trust flew away having maneuvered the squad to scoring two field goals and blowing a fantastic chance to host a first round playoff game while winning the division Reduced tonight to a puddle of hopelessness. The crew is ready willing and able throwing them into the fray while above decks the baffled commanders display a lack of intelligence that would be dismissed in Pop Warner league battles. And probably result in the schmuck being punched out by an enraged father who cain’t take another second—another three-an-out while this tyrannical little man steers the ship into an iceberg or in the case of today’s misplayed waste of talent.

The only bigger dimwit who is the owner of the team. He is so out of touch he makes Mitt Romney look like Mother Teresa. He is the One Percent of the One Percent and doesn’t give a flying fuck about the paying customers. Let alone those of us who believe a group of mean trying to win a boy’s game and in so doing offering up an opiate for the otherwise miserable Monday night masses.

I will paste blow the section about the Rams owner and his concern or lack of it for his toy or however he regards this once proud NFL franchise that is a few weeks older than me. What who those would take the name of mighty Fordham’s Rams and enter the league for the 1937 having no imagined or foreseen any of this forgettable unit and its lack of coaching intelligence not just “inspiration.” The thing about “My way is the highway” people is that they too eventually get kicked out the back door. And they’re enough of those at Rams Park so this fool can exit having made off with three bad seasons and a lack of human understanding.

Last game last year in Seattle this pompous mini-person fired the Rams longtime equipment manager and my friend Todd Hewitt. Thus started the post-Hewitt era begun by Todd’s father in 1967 and making them the family with the longest service to a franchise with a sub-simian putz making Todd the fall guy for a game in which the idiot coach was able to generate two field goals and end last year’s season on the infamous day he showed Todd Hewitt the door.

I mean it would be easy to try and put things into football perspective not too mentioned what has transpired on the planet in the past seventy-four ears. In a long and boring story too often told be me the roots of my Rams addiction run deeper than when I first became a season ticket holder in 1965. A pair of tickets became six seats in the LA Memorial Coliseum when I was the only department head at RKO General’s KHJ Radio and Channel Nine in Hollywood. No one wanted the seats. The team that once was the toast of Gridiron USA had slumped in the mid-60s. And who cared the way drug sex and rock and roll were breaking out and away from the Ike years and before the Nixonian nightmare began and ended.

Caring less about who can read this I type on. There is a sort of democratic satisfaction in calling the owner of the St. Louis Rams and their head coach assholes and idiots. What can they do? Sue me for my signed Maxie Baughan card or Marshall Faulk cleats?

The most applicable point made be the Heirs of Cossell was when Super Bowl winning coach cum commentator Jon Gruden proclaimed: “The Rams could play a doubleheader and still not score a touchdown.”

This team would be better off with Herman Cain as its owner and Newt Gingrich the head coach. Let Sarah Palin take over the cheerleaders. It is difficult when those girls can kick higher than the boys on the field for whom they are paid to cheer.

The head coach of the St. Louis Rams—my first ex-wife calls him “Spag Wad”—hit bottom on national television last night December 13, 20011, bringing more to the movement to see him bounced out and away from the team. Tonight was one of the most inept Monday Night Football games ever played and I have seen most all of them. Both teams went in with losing records and no chance of playing into the postseason when the NFL rules the minds and wrenches the guts of most American males as well as women and foreigners. And the headline reads, “Seahawks stifle struggling Rams for home victory.” The 30-13 beating was a thumping not accurately reflecting the ineptitude and confusion of the once-proud Rams team.

Everyone who has ever aspired to write for the entertainment and enlightenment of others somewhere secretly wants to be a sportswriter. Or at least they did in the horse and buggy days of the Sportswriting Giants going back to Grantland Rice and Damon Runyon and men spying from high in press boxes wearing fedoras and banging out the action and their opinions of same on a manual typewriter as pro football climbed up the ladder and weaving itself into the heart and soul of this county. Up from war and depression arose pro football. Higher past dance marathons and Roller Derby and “professional” wrestling. Then beyond boxing. And finally topping baseball as the All-American game itself. And Dan Jenkins’ “Semi-Tough: A Novel” a dreamy science-friction vision of US football brought the game into evolving and exploding into a media with print the globule village feeding the scores and stories to those masses who now have levitated it all to a patriotic orgasmic frenzy as the Super Bowl became the most important day in the union while technology exponentially expanding peek into to the pores of sweat dripping down a defensive lineman’s massive nose in highly defined live only whatever display the game is playing on. It is the closest we come together as a country I figure.

Taking the long view of this band of gypsies known as the NFL Rams has tested my patience beyond limits I didn’t know existed. Having lived in Hong Kong for a year in 1964 I was forced to learn the real world’s “football” on Redifussion. That was the name for the telly in the Kowloon flat I spent my year out of the country pending trial sentencing and incarceration for possession of marihuana (sic). It was grass (“reefer”) so weak that it required a pillow case full of Mexican weed with twigs the size of KFC bones to get a feeble hit in 1959 the year all manner of life-changing events happened personally for me including being present at the birth of the state of Hawaii and sampling all manner of people places and events. The Feds decided to make my scandalous behavior and example. It sure stopped millions of people from smoking pot.

A dozen years later I received a pardon from President Jimmy Carter, which certifies that I am neither a drug smuggler nor a crazed maniac. And I could vote and own a gun again. One year later I was hooked. Insatiably hung up on the Rams for whom there is no expletive strong enough about now to describe my feelings about this alleged “team.”

Throughout my days I have spent hours out of my mind blown on all sorts of substances short of shooting myself up and I cannot think of any mind-altering stuff that would cause the coaching staff of the Rams tonight to (and “think” is not an available word when referring to these posturing okole) assume that doing something other than handing the ball to Mr. Rams Steven Jackson #39 after seven attempts to score within spitting distance of the goal line Pigskin Paul Allen’s Seahawks Playpen. I even got to see the ol’ KGB Chicken shtick now in its fortieth year of descendancy from the artistry in (a hot stinking suit) of San Diego Sate’s Ted Giannoulas who made the fowl thing famous.

But of course I have run out of pre-Ram game drills for myself. The first one to topple is: “Fuck ‘em. Why should I was another second of my life and breathe caring about a bunch of people in a town that I wanted out of during the one day I was there in the 70s hustling CRUISIN’ albums?” Vinyl almost melted in the summer heat like it would collapse the arch. Passed through in 1997 to visit the then-state-of-the-art Rams facility and went along for the ride to the Miracle Season of the Greatest Show on Earth.

December 2011. They score a touchdown. That is better than their last visit to the Land Of Costco when their no-brainer trust flew away having maneuvered the squad to scoring two field goals and blowing a fantastic chance to host a first round playoff game while winning the division Reduced tonight to a puddle of hopelessness. The crew is ready willing and able throwing them into the fray while above decks the baffled commanders display a lack of intelligence that would be dismissed in Pop Warner league battles. And probably result in the schmuck being punched out by an enraged father who cain’t take another second—another three-an-out while this tyrannical little man steers the ship into an iceberg or in the case of today’s misplayed waste of talent.

The only bigger dimwit who is the owner of the team. He is so out of touch he makes Mitt Romney look like Mother Teresa. He is the One Percent of the One Percent and doesn’t give a flying fuck about the paying customers. Let alone those of us who believe a group of mean trying to win a boy’s game and in so doing offering up an opiate for the otherwise miserable Monday night masses.

I will paste blow the section about the Rams owner and his concern or lack of it for his toy or however he regards this once proud NFL franchise that is a few weeks older than me. What who those would take the name of mighty Fordham’s Rams and enter the league for the 1937 having no imagined or foreseen any of this forgettable unit and its lack of coaching intelligence not just “inspiration.” The thing about “My way is the highway” people is that they too eventually get kicked out the back door. And they’re enough of those at Rams Park so this fool can exit having made off with three bad seasons and a lack of human understanding. And a wad of money lest he becomes unemployed and unwanted never to be seen again.

Last game last year in Seattle this pompous mini-person fired the Rams longtime equipment manager and my friend Todd Hewitt. Thus started the post-Hewitt era begun by Todd’s father in 1967 and making them the family with the longest service to a franchise with a sub-simian putz making Todd the fall guy for a game in which the idiot coach was able to generate two field goals and end last year’s season on the infamous day he showed Todd Hewitt the door.

I mean it would be easy to try and put things into football perspective not too mentioned what has transpired on the planet in the past seventy-four ears. In a long and boring story too often told be me the roots of my Rams addiction run deeper than when I first became a season ticket holder in 1965. A pair of tickets became six seats in the LA Memorial Coliseum when I was the only department head at RKO General’s KHJ Radio and Channel Nine in Hollywood. No one wanted the seats. The team that once was the toast of Gridiron USA had slumped in the mid-60s. And who cared the way drug sex and rock and roll were breaking out and away from the Ike years and before the Nixonian nightmare began and ended.

Caring less about who can read this I type on. There is a sort of democratic satisfaction in calling the owner of the St. Louis Rams and their head coach assholes and idiots. What can they do? Sue me? Take my signed Maxie Baughan #55 cards or the custom Nikes that Marshall Faulk wore against Dallas in 2003 and hand-signed with a silver Sharpie?

The most applicable point made be the Heirs of Cosell was when Super Bowl winning coach Jon Gruden proclaimed: “The Rams could play a doubleheader and still not score a touchdown.”

The Team would be better off with Herman Cain as its owner and Newt Gingrich the head coach. Let Sarah Palin take over the cheerleaders. It is difficult when those girls can kick higher than the boys on the field for whom they are paid to cheer.

As with all things the buck stops at the top. The St. Louis Rams are owned by the most craven multimillionaire putz in pro sports. That is not just opinion of the raging citizens who should Occupy the Arch in protest until he dumps the useless pretentious inept faux Little Caesar whose makes me puke at the mere mention of his name. The Mussolini of the NFL. Go away. Vanish. And never appear anywhere again you lolo mea hoʻoulu pilikia.

If I were still "on the air" I would "spin" for you "This Could Be The Last Time" by The Rolling Stones. But the brains behind this Blogger software are as mooshy as the above-pictured horrid little man. So sing it to yourself. Or start something on Facebook to humiliate the owner of the sinking, stinking St. Louis Rams.

For Mitch Fisher who died today with the Patriots leading the division.

That leaves me, the last of the boys from Row 117. "I've got the key right here."

HEADLINE OF THE CENTURY

Add for December, 2012: This is the link to PEACEFUL ARIZONA, which was written by Gordon Freitas in the the 1970s: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qTF7KTo0sIhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qTF7KTo0sI

FOR MP3 OF STUDIO ORIGINAL FOR AIRPLAY CONTACT: rj@hawaii.rr.com

Take a listen, please. For full story of the KKUA HOME GROWN album series see:http://archives.starbulletin.com/97/12/01/features/story1.html

Headline of the Century

by Ron Jacobs

In the mid-1930s, Ellen Carroll came on vacation to the Territory of Hawaii from San Francisco. One night, dancing under the stars at the Moana Hotel’s famous banyan tree, the pretty young woman with the bright red hair met my uncle, the tan, suave Samuel E. Jacobs, who had arrived in Honolulu in the early 1930s from New York City to seek adventure and fortune.

“Al Kealoha Perry and His Singing Surfriders were playing. You could hear the ocean. Uncle Sam cut in, we began dancing and it was love at first sight,” remembers my Aunt Ellen, “What a romantic setting!” My parents, who arrived in Honolulu two years later, witnessed the wedding of Sam and Ellen at Judge F. M. Brooks’ house in Nuuanu Valley on March 3, 1939.

My favorite aunt and uncle were avid golfers. Sam was a charter member of the Toastmasters Club and the Aloha Temple of the Shriners. He also belonged to the Honolulu Police Reserve and worked undercover with Army Intelligence to trap the infamous Otto Kuen, a German who spied for the Japanese, flashing signals from his home on Windward Oahu to Admiral Nagumos’s fleet.

In the winter of 1941, Sam Jacobs was selling Cadillacs, La Salles, and Pontiacs for Schuman Carriage. Ellen worked for Riley H. Allen, longtime editor of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

I recently asked my Aunt Ellen, now 76, widowed and living in Hollywoood, Florida, to share her memories of that day.

Dear Ron,

The following are some anecdotes that I remember from December 7, 1941.

Your Uncle Sam and I were living in a rented guest house at 274-B Lewers Street in Waikiki. That Sunday morning I was pouring a waffle when Web Edwards (“Hawaii Calls” radio announcer) issued an announcement with the memorable words, “This is the real McCoy.” Ben Glazer and Harold Davis—“selectees”—whom Uncle Sam and I met at the Jewish Community Center—were in the backyard with Uncle Sam and our springer spaniel puppy, Jakey.

The three of them had planned to go to town and clear a plot of land on which Uncle Sam was planning to open a used-car lot, down on Kapiolani (now the site of the Blaisdell Center). He had talked the Ward sisters into letting him have the area—something which no one else had been able to do.

In any event, they had this planned for after breakfast, which we never had. The radio also said that all servicemen were to report to their posts and that meant Harold and Ben. I remember saying goodbye to them and they scrambled back to Fort DeRussy on Ala Moana.

Then the radio told us to crawl under the bed, which we did, along with Jakey. I guess we were under the bed about 20 minutes when we looked at each other and said, “this is silly” and decided to get busy. I called Riley H. Allen, editor of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, for whom I worked as executive secretary. He was the boss and very much in charge. I enjoyed working for the Starbull and everyone connected with the paper. Back in those days we seemed to have a special camaraderie. Mr. Allen said he didn’t need me, but called back in a half-hour or so and said I had better come down to the paper.

I remember that we drove down Kapiolani Boulevard and then cut over to Ala Moana at the Honolulu Advertiser—don’t ask me why. All I know is we missed the Japanese planes which supposedly bombed the waterfront and we finally got to the Starbull at 125 Merchant Street, downtown. Uncle Sam took me inside, made sure I was safe, and then took off for Schuman Carriage on Beretania Street, which had some broken windows and, we later learned, a death.

Shortly after I got to the Starbull we had an air raid and Riley Allen, Paul McIree (the paper’s treasurer) and yours truly got under the lithograph tables, which they had decided was the safest place to be in case we were bombed. The all-clear sounded and we headed back upstairs. There were all sorts of rumors that had to be checked out. The big one was the destruction of the Japanese Sunday School class at McCully and King Streets. It was caused by falling U.S. Navy anti-aircraft shells. That was awful. Part of the ferocity of the attack was due to the fact that we were “on maneuvers” and had nothing but dummy ammunition. There was immediate censorship. I did what I was told to do until closing.

The 50 years since that day have become blurred details of the excitement, fear and activity. Betty McDonald, our society editor, insisted that Uncle Sam and I stay at her house together with Helen Smith and her husband, Don, a free-lance photographer. The McDonalds lived up against the mountains out at Black Point and figured we would be safer there than at Waikiki.

Sam and I went home, left Jakey with lots of food and water, and then drove out to Betty and Mac’s with our headlights covered with the blue paper they gave us at the Bulletin.

Dinner that night was soft-boiled eggs and toast. We were all fearful and bewildered. It was dark. I can remember getting dinner by flashlight. All the wahines slept together on the living room couch, which opened up. The men were protecting us and had worked out shifts between them. (Don, when it was his turn, paced the “widows walk” with a bottle in one hand and a gun in the pocket of his robe.

I laugh now, but at the time it was serious and we were plenty scared.)

Sunday evening, December 7. All night long we could hear the movement of troops and ammo. In addition, from our location up against the mountain we saw what we took to be Japanese planes returning Sunday night. ‘Thank God,’ we thought. They didn’t bomb us, but flew in quietly and secretly. They exited the same way. We actually saw the planes from the “widow’s walk.” I remember going out there and keeping very quiet—we were scared even more deeply, if such could be possible.

It was terrible trying to wrestle with the unknown while we were really in the dark in more ways than one. There is so much you know and so much you don’t. Don’t ask me why but the Army’s censorship bureau was in charge and all I know is that, at the time, nothing was said other than there were “sporadic raids.”

We later learned that a friend, Eddie Harris, had been talking on the phone during an attack, with one hand holding the phone and the other hand in his pocket, when an unexploded anti-aircraft shell hit his shirt. A fragment struck his hand that was in his pocket, leaving him not only with a constant memory of the day, December 7, 1941, but with his masculinity intact.

On Monday, we all headed for the paper as usual. Uncle Sam and I stopped at the house, checked on Jakey and then went on to work. I distributed gas masks until nearly 5 o’clock and remember wishing I could go home at 4 like everyone else.

They put barbed wire on the beaches because we didn’t know whether or not the Japanese would return. One night somebody got a finger stuck on a machine gun. What an eerie sound, especially in the middle of the night with it being so black and everyone under curfew.

The war sure played havoc with all of our plans and wishes for the future. Pearl Harbor taught us one thing though; and that is we must plan for the future. No one but the Good Lord has the final say and it is going to be done His way, come hell or high water. Looking back, in spite of the ruthlessness of the assault, we were able to organize and ultimately win the war.

I hope this letter helps you to remember Pearl Harbor.

Love and aloha,

Aunt Ellen

© 1991, 2011 Ron Jacobs (Originally published in HAWAII MAGAZINE, December 1991.)

December 7, 2012

We, who were here on the most infamous day of the Twentieth Century,

REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR