Positivity: Pearl Harbor survivors were ready to let go of their reunion, but one boy changed that
From Overland Park, Kansas (HT Michelle Malkin):
Posted on Sat, Dec. 06, 2008
Two years ago, a waning fraternity of local men who had survived the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor thought their 65th anniversary reunion would be the last.
“We are all getting old now,” Jack Carson of Overland Park told The Kansas City Star at the time, “and it’s almost too much to get anything done.”
A boy named Quinn changed that.
Today, Kansas City Metro Chapter III of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association — now fewer than a half-dozen veterans — will gather again for the 67th anniversary at a Mission community center.
The task of organizing and promoting the reunion was seized by 13-year-old Quinn Appletoft, a World War II buff who happened upon the group about eight years ago. Last year, he served as master of ceremonies.
Recently, he distributed fliers at two Shawnee Mission schools. His fliers read: “We will remember this day with survivors. … You can hear their stories of this tragic day and look at artifacts.”
Refreshments provided. Quinn hopes maybe 10 kids will come.
“When you have these guys together, what’s cool is they tell their own stories. I think that’s way better than reading out of a textbook,” he said.
Across the nation, aging Pearl Harbor veterans groups have begun to fold their collective tents: A Massachusetts chapter of seven active members held its final meeting in June. In Nevada, the Silver State Chapter No. 1 of the survivors association intends to surrender its charter today.
But the Kansas City chapter has been revved up by the kid from Mission and by his classmates.
“So long as this boy wants to put it on, we’ll go along,” said survivor Edmund “Russ” Russell, 91, of Lenexa. “Anytime I get a chance to talk to kids about Pearl Harbor, well, they seem to get interested.”
Russell, who on Dec. 7, 1941, was an Army Air Corpsman and a butcher in the Wheeler Field mess hall, said it wasn’t difficult to get a rise out of middle-schoolers when telling of Japanese attackers “flying so low you could see the grins on their faces.”
That’s Quinn’s kind of stuff.
Since he was about 4, he would sit up in bed and gaze with rapture whenever his dad read the Pearl Harbor story from a children’s history book.
“Did all that really happen?” Quinn would ask. He never cared much for fairy tales.
Quinn was in kindergarten when he and his father, Ron Appletoft, made their first visit to the reunion of local survivors of the sneak attack that hurled America into World War II.
“He was so shy,” recalled Dorwin Lamkin, 86, a neighbor of the Appletofts who was a 19-year-old sailor aboard the USS Nevada when the bombs fell. “Quinn was hiding behind his father’s leg!”
But by the time the boy was 11, and those white-haired veterans were ready to hang it up, the kid felt ready to help run the show.
“I told the guys, ‘What if my son and I did all of the organizing and all you’d have to do is show up?’ said Ron Appletoft, a former Mission city councilman.
Last year Quinn pitched the reunion to two sixth-grade classes at Highlands Elementary School, and a field trip was born.
“The guys were really energized by that. They decided they wanted to do it again,” said Quinn’s dad.
“The key? It was the kids.” …..
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