A Reluctant "Hero"
My dad lived to tell us stories from his past--some true, some not so true. Sometimes we weren’t sure.
The story he told us most often seemed the most questionable, but he rehearsed it with us more than once while I was growing up,
Here’s the abbreviated version.
He attended college at Williamette University in Salem, Oregon where he played offensive tackle in the varsity football team. That part was believable because dad, at 6’1, 285 lbs, was a formidable physical specimen.
And he was athletic and competitive. Even as teenagers we had a hard time beating him in ping pong and pool, and his left handed basketball shooting made him a fearless competitor in basketball.
He attended college in 1940-42 and as the story went his football team traveled to Hawaii to play the University of Hawaii on December 6, 1941.
“In the first game of the Shrine Bowl on Dec. 6 Willamette lost a 20-6 contest against the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. The next morning, the Willamette contingent was preparing for a tour of the island when Japanese forces bombed Pearl Harbor. That led to the United States' Involvement in World War II.”
“The players were issued rifles and assigned to guard duty for 10 days at Punahou School in Honolulu. Their coach, Roy "Spec" Keene, negotiated passage home on a luxury ocean liner-turned hospital ship in exchange for watching over wounded servicemen returning to the mainland.”
These Internet entries detail the actual events that dad always told with a reluctant smile. His version was a bit more colorful and his specific apocryphal recollection was that he accidentally fell asleep and misfired his rifle on watch. That part would always make us laugh.
He said it almost ignited a war because there was a justifiable fear that the Japanese would invade the island. This part of the story to this day remains unverifiable. We believed it was his way of creatively illustrating the genuine fear he experienced in those scary days, having never even held a gun before, much less fired one. Dad passed away in 1988 with his version of events still in tact.
My dad would ultimately leave college and sign up for the Navy where he served his country for three years as a chief petty office.
Memorial Day reminded me of this story, steeped in my dad’s collection of personal anecdotes, some believable, some not. This one qualified for a long time as simply, “story telling”.
Until we read the real story.
At best, dad, by his own admission, was a reluctant hero. Whether he misfired his rifle and created additional chaos on that fateful day we will never know.