This morning, one image stands out in Jean Shandera’s mind. She can still picture the face of a Japanese flier.
"One plane dove down so low that we could see him. He had a white bandanna with a red rising sun," said Shandera, 73, remembering a Sunday morning long ago.
She was an 11-year-old living in an island paradise.
Her parents, Henry and Hazel Clement, had come to Hawaii from Chicago when she was 5. With the country gripped by the Great Depression, her father found work in the territory, first with a milk company and later in a Pearl Harbor shipyard.
"It was a wonderful place to grow up," said the Everett woman, who ate papayas from the trees and swam at Waikiki Beach when it had just a few hotels.
Dec. 6, 1941, had been a happy day. Because her father did key jobs on naval ships, the family had moved from Honolulu to defense housing near Pearl Harbor and Hickam Army Air Corps field.
"That Saturday, my folks and I drove into town and picked up a girlfriend of mine in Honolulu. We went to a football game, and she spent the night," Shandera said.
In the morning, the girls were awakened by her parents. They all went outside to see what they thought were maneuvers.
Even after seeing one plane go down, they were so used to seeing airplanes "that it was hard to comprehend there was an attack," she said.
Comprehension came quickly once they saw the low-flying Japanese planes. Then a car roared into the apartment complex and someone ordered "all men, report to Pearl," Shandera said. "There were guys sitting all over the car," she said.
Jean and her mother didn’t see her father for 48 hours. "He spent day and night fighting fires, and then was in his office coordinating repairs," she said.
Her girlfriend’s father came from Honolulu to pick them up, taking her mother and a neighbor woman into the city.
"I remember standing, waiting for my mother. A plane flew low and strafed us. It hit right by my friend’s father’s feet. I remember he said, ‘Get in the car, girls,’ " Shandera said.
In Honolulu, a bomb hit a school three houses from where they were staying.
"They hit a house two houses away and set it on fire. My mother climbed up and hosed off the roof of my girlfriend’s house so it wouldn’t burn," Shandera said.
When the attack ended just before 10 a.m., less than two hours after it began, the American dead numbered 2,403, including 68 civilians, according to the Department of the Navy’s Naval Historical Center.
Twenty-one ships of the U.S. Pacific Fleet were sunk or damaged. The highest toll was on the battleship USS Arizona, where 1,177 crew members died.
The family stayed on in Hawaii until 1943. In wartime, it wasn’t the carefree paradise it had been. Children wore gas masks to school, Shandera said. "And right away, there was a blackout. You couldn’t open the door at night."
In 1943, with her mother nervous about the war, her father transferred to a shipyard in Bremerton. Jean graduated from Bremerton High School and went to college at Central Washington State College, where she met her future husband. Both are retired from the Everett School District, where Bill Shandera taught middle school.
The couple spent their 25th wedding anniversary in Hawaii, visiting the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. Shandera said as a girl she didn’t fully grasp the gravity of what had happened there. "I don’t think at that age you really can," she said.
She was surprised at her reaction when she saw "Tora Tora Tora," a 1970 movie epic showing the attack on Pearl Harbor from both Japanese and American points of view.
"I saw it in Seattle with my husband. When I saw the attack, I started to shake and cry," she said.
Sixty-two years have passed since that Sunday in Hawaii, that date which lives in infamy.
Shandera and her husband have raised four children. They have traveled the world, from England to Istanbul. They have seen other dates loom large in history, from Nov. 22, 1963, to Sept. 11, 2001.
"You never know when something is going to happen," Shandera said. "It was like that even way back then."
Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com
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