Quiet disbelief: Fox Valley memories of Pearl Harbor attack still vivid

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FILE - In this Dec. 7, 1941 file photo provided by the U.S. Navy, a Navy launch pulls up to the blazing USS West Virginia to rescue a sailor during the attack on Pearl Harbor. An excavation crew recently made a startling discovery at the bottom of Pearl Harbor when it unearthed a skull that archeologists suspect is from a Japanese pilot who died in the historic attack. Archaeologist Jeff Fong of the Naval Facilities Engineering Command Pacific described the discovery to The Associated Press and the efforts under way to identify the skull. He said the early analysis has made him "75 percent sure" that the skull belongs to a Japanese pilot. (AP Photo/U.S. Navy, file)

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Seventy years is a lifetime.

It is also the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack on this country that we here in the Fox Valley will commemorate this week.

Dec. 7, 1941, announced Franklin Delano Roosevelt the following day, is “a date which will live in infamy.”

Indeed it has. And it went on to define those who remember it, though a lifetime ago.

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Jeanette Buck, mother of retired Elgin police Lt. David Buck, was an 18-year-old New Orleans girl working for Bell Telephone that Sunday when suddenly, the circuits on the long-distance board started “lighting up like a Christmas tree.”

“We all looked at each other,” she still recalls vividly. “No one knew what was going on.”

Buck and her fellow employees didn’t know it at the time, but Pearl Harbor had just been attacked, and all across the nation, frantic connections were being attempted.

She finished her shift at 2 p.m., but as soon as she got home, Buck was called back to work. And well into the night, she and other Bell operators felt their “adrenalin pumping” as they tried to manually keep all circuits plugged.

“It got very competitive,” she says of the other operators around the country competing for only a certain number of available circuits.

In her three decades working for the telephone company,” Buck, now 88 and living in Michigan, says, “I never saw anything even close to that sort of overload.”

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Eugene Westerman of South Elgin was just 10 years old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He remembers being at his grandmother’s home in Elgin, listening to the Jack Benny program, when FDR announced the attack.

The adults wondered where Pearl Harbor was located.

“I, for one,” he says, “had no idea what they were talking about.”

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Vera Utterback of Bartlett was a 24-year-old woman living in Chicago and remembers the sad feeling that permeated the air that fateful Sunday.

She was moving from one apartment to another that day and would find out later that Richard Eulbert, a family friend from her Iowa hometown, had been aboard the USS Arizona, one of the 1,100 killed on that ship.

“I think about it every year ... . Richard and all those who drowned,” she says. “It does not seem possible it could be 70 years ago.”

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Lillian Beggs was three years younger and a freshman at Yorkville High when her family went home from church with friends to share a meal together that Sunday. After eating, she recalls, the young people went for a walk. That’s when someone came running outside to tell them President Roosevelt had just declared war on Japan.

“The word ‘war,’” she says, “was too scary and sorrowful to receive.”

Suddenly, all the talk was of young men leaving to protect the country. Many were drafted right out of high school.

Beggs herself worked after school in a defense factory. She also wrote “lots of letters” and went to the train depot to wave goodbye to the local boys and men going off to war.

Three words sum up her feelings about this remarkable time in American history;

“It was sad.”

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Meanwhile, in California, Don Lange was in a photo studio, having his picture taken in his Army uniform, when a fellow soldier came running in and announced they had to return immediately to the base because Pearl Harbor had just been bombed.

According to Lange’s daughter, Linda Mack of Yorkville, he turned to the photographer and told him he’d have to trust him to get those pictures sent to his mother. Lange then wrote down his mom’s name and Aurora address, and headed back to base.

“He had no idea what would happen next,” Mack says, “or if he’d ever get home.”

Fortunately, Lange remained in California and never had to leave the states or face battle. He was a cook and ran the kitchens, says his daughter, and always “felt blessed” because each time he was sent somewhere else to cook, the unit he left behind seemed to get shipped off to fight.

“He joked sometimes that his job was to keep the guys well-fed before they headed off to war,” Mack says.

Don Lange died in April of 2008. And now his children — including Mack, Donna Ellison and Steve Lange — look at his photo taken on that day and realize how blessed they are to have three generations of memories, and to be able to carry on the family name.

“Other families, including some of his friends, fought and died for our country and didn’t get that opportunity,” Mack says. “We should never forget any of our military who have honored their country with their service.”

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Almeda Nipper of Lisle was 12 years old, and her school had just started a club called The Girl Reserves. As the newly elected president, she was invited to downtown Akron, Ohio, for an assembly of all officers.

“It was a beautiful service in a church,” she recalls. “We were all given candles to carry and were installed with beautiful organ music playing. It was such a contrast to what we came out into.”

The streets were crawling with newsboys calling out “Extra! Extra! Pearl Harbor Bombed!!”

When Nipper got on the bus to go home, “I wondered if a bomb could come through the bus roof.”

At home, her mother had made homemade baked beans and ham.

“As we sat eating,” she clearly recalls the president’s address to a frightened nation.

Dec. 7, 1941, is “a date which will live in infamy.”

And the memories will remain forever clear to those who heard his words.