Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941.
What a day it was, the day Japan bombed the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor and catapulted a reluctant America into the belly of World War II.
The day that jerked the nation out of the Depression, and shifted the course of world war in Europe and Asia.
The day that burned images and emotion into the memories of any American old enough to remember that day.
What a day it still is, nearly seven decades later.
It changed history in ways that are evident today.
America's entry into the war and the atomic bombs that vaporized Hiroshima and Nagasaki almost four years later altered everything -- lives, society, world views, the balance of power.
Most of all, it changed the way we thought about war and peace, because we now realized we had the power to destroy ourselves.
But all that was impossible to see that Sunday morning. Dec. 7, 1941.
Jack Hood, a retired educator who lives in Traverse City, was 16 years old and headed with his parents to church in his Minnesota farm town when he heard the news.
The son of a church member was stationed in Pearl Harbor.
"It was like they had bombed my home town," Hood said.
Jim Palmer, a retired Grand Traverse sheriff's detective, was a toddler. He remembers the men in his family disappearing and an all-pervading sadness two years later after his uncle, a pilot, died in France.
"It's still so crystal clear, like yesterday," he said. "It's one of those moments that you never forget where you were or what you were doing, like John F. Kennedy's assassination or 9-11."
The Homefront
The men of Traverse City, like everywhere else, went to war. Pearl Harbor emptied the American homefront of its sons, brothers, husbands, uncles and neighbors both old and young enough to fight. The draft age was 18-44.
Railroad platforms became scenes of heart-rending hugs and teary-eyed farewells. Draft boards cranked up. Local defense councils called for volunteers to oversee local air-raid alert systems, blackouts and "sky-watching" programs. They organized shoreline patrols, fire and rescue training, emergency medical services and recycling of fats, metal, rubber and other items for the war effort.
Detroit quit producing cars for personal use within weeks after war was declared and switched to military production. Federal rationing of tires, gasoline, coffee, sugar and meat began.
"Things in Traverse City shifted gears almost right away," the late Les Biederman wrote in his 1982 autobiography "Happy Days."
The attack quickly underlined the differences between newspapers and Traverse City's first commercial radio station, WTCM, launched by Biederman on Jan. 8, 1941.
On that Sunday afternoon eleven months later, Biederman got a call from the Associated Press to watch his wire report.
"I zipped down to the office and the story started coming in," he wrote. "Pearl Harbor was still under attack by the Japanese. I went on the air to announce that a United States base had been attacked and that all our lives, mine, the people of Traverse City and the radio station itself would be changed."
The Record-Eagle didn't publish on Sundays, but its staff worked on an extra edition that hit the streets at 6:30 a.m. Monday. WTCM let listeners know that was going to happen on Sunday, a report that earned the fledgling radio station a special thanks from a daily newspaper that was itself descended from pioneer weeklies.
The Dec. 8 headlines condensed the story of that day and broadly hinted at times to come:
"War Declared After FDR Address; Fighting Flares all Across Pacific"
"Casualties May Be Above 3,000"
"Stay Alert But Avoid Panic is Defense Advice"
The paper listed the names of all Traverse City men known to be stationed somewhere in the Pacific. On Dec. 9, the Record-Eagle's front page showed Roger Vanderley, manager of Valley Roofing, burning a pile of small calendars he had just purchased for 10 cents each and was ready to mail out, until he discovered a "Made in Japan" tag on them.
"That's all I want to know," he said as he watched his bonfire.
On Thursday, Dec. 11, readers learned that Army and Navy recruiting officers were working overtime, and published the names of all the men who had enlisted. The paper also carried news of Germany's surprise declaration of war on America.
Traverse City recruiters didn't waste time. Within the first three days of the attack, Army recruiters had sent 12 men for training, and eight more were scheduled to leave the following Monday. The Navy recruiter, meanwhile, had sent 10 men to Detroit. Several others were scheduled to leave in the following weeks.
"A Mother Gives Up Four Sons" was the headline on a Dec. 12 front-page Record-Eagle photo. It showed Mrs. W. J. Horniman and four of her six sons -- Neil, 22, Bruce, 21, Max, 28, Keith, 18 -- at the local Navy recruiting office. Her oldest son was a Detroit police officer and her youngest was 14 and still living at home in Petoskey.
"I think it is their duty and they should have enlisted before," Mrs. Horniman, a former Traverse City resident, told the Record-Eagle. Two of the sons enlisted as mechanics, one wanted to become a career officer and another was a radio "ham."
All but Mrs. Horniman's youngest survived the war.
Aviation machinist's mate C3 Keith Horniman was one of 10 men lost at sea Oct. 20, 1943, when their PB2Y-3 seaplane was forced to land in the Caribbean Sea about 10 p.m. the night before in a storm off the Honduran coast. It taxied all night in the open sea. The 12 men aboard attempted a takeoff at 1:30 p.m., but waves grabbed a wing and flipped the plane on its back. It broke in two immediately and sank, survivors said.
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