LAKEPORT, Calif. – Three-quarters of a century later, to Bill Slater, the fact that he survived Pearl Harbor still looks more like dumb luck than skill or providence.
Slater, 92, is Lake County's last living survivor of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
In 1941, Slater was a 17-year-old who had spent part of his childhood in an orphanage before joining the Navy and finding a new home at sea.
On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, Slater – who had just arrived in Hawaii – was serving aboard the USS Pennsylvania, and like the thousands of other sailors and members of the military at Pearl Harbor that Sunday morning, he wasn't expecting all hell to break loose.
Some had planned to go on liberty, others were finishing breakfast or going to church services, still others were doing routine tasks.
What they didn't know is that 11 days earlier, the Japanese First Air Fleet had set sail, headed for Hawaii.
The attack on Pearl Harbor wasn't the only site in the Pacific targeted by the Japanese. They also launched attacks on the Philippines and Guam the following day, and Attacked British colonies in Asia.
The Pearl Harbor attack began shortly before 8 a.m.
For Slater, the moment of his greatest luck came just over an hour later, during what a Navy chronology explains was a second wave of the Japanese attack aimed at ships in drydock.
Slater said he and his fellow sailors were returning fire. However, the hoist that was used to bring shells to the Pennsylvania's deck was broken, so Slater and other ammunition handlers had to go below deck and bring up the shells manually.
He said the one bomb that hit the Pennsylvania struck his battle station while he was down getting the shells. He said about 24 men died from that bomb blast.
“You gotta be damn lucky to survive something like that,” said Slater during a Wednesday morning commemoration of the attack's 75th anniversary at Lakeport City Hall.
In Lake County and across California, Dec. 7 was commemorated as Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day thanks to a proclamation issued Wednesday by Gov. Jerry Brown.
The Wednesday morning ceremony, which began at 9 a.m. – 8 a.m. Honolulu time – started out at Library Park at the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association's memorial mast, where Boy Scouts “two-blocked” the US flag along with those of the association, and Rev. Shannon Kimbell-Auth gave the invocation.
In the audience this year were a number of students from the Clear Lake High School humanities class, whose young members had their pictures taken with Slater and Alice Darrow – widow or “sweetheart” of Pearl Harbor survivor Dean Darrow – after the event concluded.
The guest speaker was Lake County Superintendent of Schools Brock Falkenberg, a veteran who as a reservist served time in Iraq.
He emotionally recalled the deaths of friends he had served with there, who were ambushed by Iraqi security forces they were training in June 2004. He escorted the body of one of the men home to his family in Tracy.
Event master of ceremonies Ronnie Bogner, who along with wife Janeane hosts the annual commemorations and are honorary members of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, also introduced John Ornellas, who is a child survivor of the attack.
Ornellas recounted watching the attack, and said his family had a home that was just built by a Japanese contractor who later was arrested by the US military after it was discovered he was a colonel in the Japanese army.
In addition to Slater, the other guest of honor Wednesday was Alice Darrow, who at the time of the attack was a Navy nurse assigned to Mare Island. She said she'd entered that branch of the service because “the boys were so cute.”
There, she met her future husband, Dean Darrow, a 21-year-old sailor from Wisconsin who had been aboard the USS West Virginia during the attack, and who at one point was literally blown off the ship by a bomb.
As he was being pulled from the water, he was hit by a bullet from a strafing run by a Japanese plane. However, at that time he didn't realize he was hit, she said.
It would be early in 1942, after months of fainting spells that were thought to be “battle nerves” and a persistent pain in his side – which initially led the Navy doctors to remove his appendix – a doctor would discover that Dean Darrow had a bullet lodged in his heart.
He agreed to undergo open heart surgery – a little-performed procedure at that time – and elicited a promise from his young nurse to go on liberty with him if he survived. She agreed, and when he woke up from surgery, he reminded of her promise. They married not long afterward and were together for nearly 50 years before his death in December 1991.
At the Wednesday ceremony, Alice Darrow brought the bullet – which clearly showed marks of having hit something, and possibly ricocheting – before it hit her husband.
Dean Darrow's name and the names of a number of the other men who survived Pearl Harbor and went on to call Lake County home were recalled with the tolling of a bell, on which is engraved the names of deceased members.
Whether his narrow escape from death was dumb luck or providence is anyone's guess, said Slater.
However, he said his whole life has been a matter of being at the right place at the right time.
And he's hoping for a bit more good fortune, as he tries to keep his name off of the association's memorial bell.
“With any luck at all, I'll see you all next year,” he told the audience, adding as an aside, “That's real optimism.”
Email Elizabeth Larson at
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