Pearl Harbor Day

Growing up, I heard first-hand accounts from parents, grandparents, relatives and their contemporaries about how they heard about the bombing at Pearl Harbor by the Japanese on a December 7, 1941. My parents were kids; my grandparents, who remembered WWI, carefully navigating their way out of the Great Depression that devastated a generation. My mother-in-law remembers because it meant the Americans would soon be there to help defend Australia against the Japanese. (See the recent film "Australia.")

Everyone remembered most clearly the speech by President Roosevelt "...a day that shall live in infamy..."

But will it?

I thought about that today. And I wondered: Were there significant dates in past centuries on which later generations listened to stories about where people were during previous wars? Perhaps about Lexington and Concord, or the burning of Atlanta? Perhaps, to those eye witnesses, those events were as infamous as Pearl Harbor.

The existence of mass media will keep events like the sinking of the Lusitania, or Pearl Harbor or 9/11 vivid in the memory of history. But I just wonder what it was like to sit and listen to those events recounted.