'I Think We Forget Too Easily'

Two of my stories were published on Page One of The Bellevue Gazette on December 7, 1981. The banner carries the headline “Proposal drafted for sheriff services,” accompanied by a photo I had taken of the mayor at his desk with the safety-service director standing beside him.

The other story, played on the lower left, has one headline, “Bellevue survivor remembers Pearl Harbor,” with a another beneath it printed in larger type: “They did their job well,” and a photo I took of a man in late middle age standing by pictures and framed medals hanging on a wall. The lede:

“Bellevue’s Thomas Stark was pressing a suit of whites, preparing to go ashore on liberty, when the first Japanese bombs were landing.”

Stark was the first Pearl Harbor survivor I met and interviewed. I no longer remember how I found him. Bellevue is a small town in north central Ohio. The population in 2020 was about 8,200. Bellevue was a railroad hub earlier in the century. An outfielder for the Chicago Cubs was born there. The town historian was my barber.

Stark was twenty-one when the Japanese attacked, a Second-Class Quartermaster serving on the USS Pelias, a submarine tender. He had joined the Navy in November 1936, not long after graduating from Bellevue Senior High School. He was up at 7 that morning and expected to spend the day in Oahu. “Which I didn’t quite make,” he told me. The Pelias was docked about a mile from Battleship Row. The first bomb fell at 7:55 a.m. and within two or three minutes the Pelias crew was at its battle stations. It was armed with two five-inch guns and an assortment of .30- and .45-caliber machine guns. The Pelias crew and a submarine crew got credit for downing one Japanese plane. “Our anti-aircraft guns were pitiful, obsolete,” Stark said. “They were worthless against their high-altitude bombers.”

Several men aboard the Pelias were wounded but none was killed. The all-clear sounded at 9:45. On a motor launch from the battleship USS California, Stark served as the signalman for a rescue party that ventured over to the USS West Virginia. There’s a famous photograph of the burning ship. In the background of the grainy picture, the crippled giant billows thick, black smoke. In the foreground, a motor launch is dwarfed by by the sheer bulk of the ship. Discernable as a white smudge on the bow of the motor launch is a sailor reaching over the side of the boat, pulling another sailor from the water. “That’s me,” Stark said.

Stark remained stationed at Pearl Harbor until April 1942. He stayed in the Navy until 1946 and served the rest of the war in the Pacific, finishing at Iwo Jima. Stark’s wartime animosity against the Japanese had faded. “You can’t hold a grudge forever,” he said. “You can’t hold it against them for doing their duty.” Stark revisited Pearl Harbor in 1976. He was a member of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association and wore its ring on his right hand. Around a blue sapphire, representing the blue skies of Hawaii, was the group’s motto: “Remember Pearl Harbor – Keep America Alert.” He told me: “I think we forget too easily.”

Stark died in Bellevue in 1988 at age sixty-nine.