It’s been 108 years since my father, John Montgomery Lind, was born, second son of Scot immigrants. He was born and lived his first few years in Berkeley, California, where his father built a house on Burnett Street, if I recall correctly. Later, the family moved down to Long Beach as my grandfather followed work in the west coast shipyards.
It is also the anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
My parents told of going to a football game and partying afterwards on the night of the 6th. On a whim, I looked up the Honolulu Advertiser’s December 7 edition. It was the morning newspaper, so was already on the street when the attack began around 8 a.m.
The football game was between the University of Hawaii and Willamette University (Salem, Oregon) in the Shrine Classic, and was apparently a big deal, as the Advertiser reported a crowd of 24,400 packed into the old Honolulu Stadium in Moiliili.
That was 9.5% of Oahu’s total population at the time! Compared to the population, that would be like a crowd of 97,593 today.
I never heard any stories about the after-game party, but they were still bed when my grandmother called from Waipahu with word of what they first thought were very realistic maneuvers taking place. It didn’t take long, though, to figure out this was the real deal.
In the past, I’ve written a number of December 7 posts, with a letters describing that day, one from my mother to her sister, and another by University of Hawaii Professor Carey D. Miller. You can easily find then with a little searching.
Here’s another bit of December 7 lore.
First, a photo of my dad at lunch up at the Contemporary Art Museum in Makiki on his birthday in 2006, followed by a page he typed later describing #93.
My father’s notes on his 93rd birthday, Dec. 7, 2006 by Ian Lind on Scribd
