Monday, December 7th is Pearl Harbor Day.
There will be two remembrance ceremonies, at the Veterans’ Hall Downtown Fresno, and at the Clovis Memorial Veterans Hall.
That’s where Patti Cline’s 96-year old father Ed Daldron will be….reluctantly.
She didn’t even know her dad served until her mother told her one day.
Cline says her dad still doesn’t like to talk much about it.
She wrote a memoir, an except of which is posted below:
PEARL HARBOR
This is a photo of my father on the 70th anniversary. (Above) He is holding a photo of himself when he was at Pearl Harbor.
My dad turned 96 on July 6, 2015…
Below is MY memory, and some of my parent’s stories.
When I was in the fourth grade I came home from school and like religious clock work my mother asked me what I had learned in school that day.. I told her that we learned about the heroes of Pearl Harbor. All about the hideous Japanese surprise attack, all the men that died, on the Arizona, and all the surviving men who heroically did everything they could to help and rescue the injured and trapped men. I remember this day very clearly, the teacher’s passionate message and my mother’s reaction. So as I’m gushing all about what I had learned and all about the wonderful heroes of that day, my mother calmly says, “Would you like to meet one of those heroes?” Amazed and surprised that my mother actually knows a Pearl Harbor survivor, I say, “YES!!” She told me okay; go do your chores and homework and I will introduce you to him later. So, later that afternoon I hear my father drive in, and we go to the door as we always did when he came home from work. He opened the door, tool a step in the house and my mother says, “There is your hero”. I was flabbergasted! WHAT?? My father is one of the heroes my teacher was gushing with pride about at school that day?? I remember saying.. “You are one of the heroes?” Very emphatically and definitely he replied, “NO, I am NOT a hero, the heroes never made it home”.
That was my first memory of anything to do with my father being at Pearl Harbor.
He woke up to “all hell breaking loose”. He was on the 3rd floor of the sub base barracks, ran downstairs as did everyone else. At the door, rifles were being passed out.. Dad had a .30-06 bolt action Springfield. There was so much chaos, no one had a clue what to do other than take a gun and defend Pearl Harbor. He ran out the door, looked around for a safe place to sit and shoot from. He ran down the pier where the submarines moor.. At the end of the dock was an old steam shovel that had been dredging the channel. Dad climbed into the iron bucket and waited for the Japs to fly over. He took several shots at the planes and one was hit, had smoke and crashed. He never knew if it was his bullet or someone else’s or what, but it crashed. He always wondered if his bullet had done the job.
Dad said that it was so chaotic with so many planes in the air that he watched two of our planes have a head on collision over Hickam which is just to the south of Pearl. He saw the battleships get hit on battleship row and saw the bomb fall onto the Arizona and the massive explosion. Dad never once told this much in one try of telling the story.. He always would freeze and end it when he realized that he was “remembering”. Over the many years I would get snippets of the story… One time we were discussing watch making and repair… he mentioned that he had a good buddy who was a great watch maker, who stationed on the Arizona. By the time he reached the ships name, it came out “Arrrr-iiiiiii-zooooo-n-aaaaaaaaa… end of conversation. It was always that way; he would recall something that reminded him of something horrific that day, and BAM, end of conversation. Dad said that it ended up taking about six months to finally get to Moffat.
He either doesn’t remember the rest of that day, or just refused to ever think of the rest of the day. The rest of the day was nothing compared to that morning. The worst, most sad story that my mother would relate of the aftermath was, “the tapping”. All who related “the tapping” to my mother (including my father apparently) said it was gut wrenching. After the bombing ended and the rescue efforts started the men trapped were tapping out Morse Code messages of where they were trapped, how many injured and so on in hopes of being rescued. The story was always told with such reverence and quiet sadness… the tapping got less and less everyday until there was no more tapping… and all the men who had been tapping messages who were never secured…
There are a many more details of dad’s story and my own; however this is most of my story as a Daughter of a Pearl Harbor Survivor and a Navy WAVE.
“Loose Lips Sink Ships”
–Patti Waldron Cline.
