Contributed by Jim Morrison '43
It was a gray, chilly Sunday in Watertown on December 7, 1941. Yet for boys at The Taft School the day was full of promise. Christmas vacation was just twelve days away.
Flip Weyerhauser and I had just turned seventeen. He and his kid brother George and the rest the pack from the Pacific coast had train tickets for the four-day journey home.
Some slow eaters at Sunday dinner were still taking seconds, as the school's maids stood by waiting to tidy up tables before retreating to their dorm above the school laundry in what is now Congdon House.The hockey pond had yet to freeze over. If you happened to look north you'd see a gaggle of seniors heading for the grey Senior house to have a smoke and a few hands of bridge. Ringing out of the lower-school common room would probably come the sweet bleat of Glenn Miller's trombone braying Chattanooga Choo Choo.
Then something happened that is as clear to me today as it was that Sunday seventy years ago. I was halfway up the stairs of HDT and looked up to see my classmate, Jim Emison on the landing staring down with an expression of anxiety and perplexity.
"Hey, Moe. Did you hear…? Japanese planes just bombed Pearl Harbor."
"So?…. Where's that?""Hawaii" he said…waiting to see how long it would take to sink in.
It didn't.
He had to explain. That Pearl Harbor being in Hawaii, and part of the USA, that, therefore that we, Jim Emison and I were, both of us at war; at war with the Empire of Japan.
We hurried up to the second floor to the apartment of math teacher Ed Douglas. A dozen upper middlers hovering beside a radio alive with static pouring forth hysteria, reporting from New York, San Francisco, and Honolulu.
Reports of sightings of Japanese submarines off the coast of San Diego; of Japanese diplomats burning papers behind their embassy in Washington.
Away from radios, boys in groups of two and threes would wander in and out of rooms, wondering. A passing master would be asked to explain the moment, and of course he could not.
The basement of HDT had two pay phones, with a long line of boys waiting turns to call home. As the day wore on parents who lived nearby would come to spend an hour or so with their sons in quiet conversation and then depart. As I remember, Woolly Bermingham's mom drove up from Rye in her '39 Ford wood-side station wagon and took him and his brother, Ted, down to Sullivan's drug store for chocolate malt, before embracing him and heading home.
As it did every Sunday evening, the bell rang for vespers. The organ strains of a Bach cantata echoed through hallways as boys filed into Bingham Auditorium. They saw a grave Paul Cruikshank seated on the high back chair on stage and Horace D. Taft, soon to turn eighty, on the opposite side, solemn, and somber in his wing collar and black 4 button suit.
Mr. Cruikshank spoke words of reassurance, explaining that the best way to serve the nation was to keep up with studies. He urged us to write home often and then sat down. Silence. A long pause as all eyes turned towards the founder.
Mr. Taft rose, moved slowly to the rostrum and paused, looking out over upturned faces and began. He spoke in the quaint cadences of another century and referred to the wars he'd lived through, including the Civil War. He asked us to be brave, he read from scripture, and he led the assembly in the Lord's Prayer and we filed out in silence.
I sat at Jocko Reardon's table that Sunday night. Reardon, a fabulous history teacher, wore a pince-nez, which he always pinched and reset just before making a pronouncement. He wryly tried to assure us that the war would end quickly, that we'd be victorious, and that he doubted that any of us would see action.
The next morning, news quietly spread that two or three seniors had run away during the night to enlist.
At eleven o'clock the school assembled again in Bingham to hear President Roosevelt address the Congress and the nation.
His voice rang out:
"… a day that will live in infamy!"
The seniors who walked out of the auditorium that day had begun to come to terms with an uncertain future. With what someone else said was: " a dim light of hope and the gloomy shadow of despair."
They could not know on that day the names that would change their lives and their world. Names like Normandy, and Hiroshima.