“Another night, and we are again in darkness. It will be another long dark night of waiting and watching.”

That’s how my mother began a letter to her sister, typed in darkness during the blackout on December 8, 1941, a day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Click on the letter, below, to read a larger version.

The short, half-page typed letter reflected rampant rumors (continuing raids on Pearl Harbor or Hickam, and “skirmishes” involving planes flying over head the night of December 7, machine gun fire on Kahala Beach, flares fired by Japanese sympathizers, etc.).

My mother’s parents had driven from their home in Waipahu and moved in the day before. On the 8th, She wrote that my father had gone to his job as a manager at the downtown Honolulu office of Dohrmann Hotel Supply Company, a San Francisco-based wholesaler of restaurant and hotel equipment and supplies. Her father and younger brother drove back to Waipahu to retrieve their stored canned goods, fearing they might otherwise be lost in an uprising by plantation workers. Meanwhile my mother and my grandmother went up the hill to Kaimuki in search of food, and managed to to get “liver and meat for stew that will keep us in food for this week.”

It’s an interesting bit of family history that sheds light on the historical events of the day.