Pearl Harbor Day

I was almost six years old, my father had just turned 32.  It was mid-afternoon on an early December day, 1941, cool but no snow yet.  An annual fall practice in those days, I was helping my father to rake up the last of the leaves that had fallen for two months into our yard from our neighbor's huge maple trees.  We raked the leaves, all dead and brown now, towards the street curb, then over the curb and into the street, where they lay in a huge pile.  Then he set them on fire, part of the fall ritual; everyone did it, there were a lot of trees on our block in Oakmont (now renamed Havertown), a Philadelphia suburb.

The smell of those burning dead leaves is something I will never forget, though I have not sensed it for at least fifty years now.  An earthy smell.  (Coincidently, somewhat like the air in LA today with the brush fires northwest of us.)

A neighbor ran out of his house and shouted something about "being attacked by the Japanese".   I am sure we must have gone into the house and turned on the radio (no TV yet) to get the news.  It could have been this broadcast by one Robert Eisenbach on NBC.  (His daughter, Barbara Heitz, a distant relative of Nadine, lives in Los Angeles.)

http://www.otr.com/ra/PH/first_bulletin_red.mp3

The next day, FDR went to a rousing ovation by the Congress and declared war on the Empire of Japan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK8gYGg0dkE

My father's father, Felix Colla, died on New Years Day, 1942.  A few months later, my father finally got one doctor to pass him on a physical so he could enlist as a Navy officer.  (Apparently he had flat feet, and several doctors had said "no".)  He was gone most of the time for the next 3+ years.