COLUMBUS – Americans today mark the 74th anniversary of the Japanese bombing of the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, drawing America into World War II.
Governor John Kasich ordered all flags to be flown at half-staff from sunrise until sunset in honor of service men and women who lost their lives.
“We remember the lives lost that tragic December morning and we owe all men and women of our military a debt of gratitude that we can never fully repay,” he wrote in a statement announcing the resolution.
Despite a dwindling number of members, the Pearl Harbors Survivors Association Columbus Chapter 4 continues to gather at an Upper Arlington restaurant.
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There was a time when more than 100 men regularly gathered around rows of squeezed-together tables in some Columbus diner to share coffee, catch up on careers and families and tell their latest big-fish tales. As they transformed over the decades from virile young men to middle-age parents to graying grandpas, the single tie that bound them never broke: Each had survived the Dec. 7, 1941, attack and were all members of an unofficial fraternity that few outsiders would understand.
The National Pearl Harbor Survivors Association dissolved in 2011 because so few members were left. But that didn’t stop these locals from continuing to get together.
Still, at the Saturday get-togethers held once a month now at the MCL Cafeteria in Upper Arlington, Milton Mapou is often the only survivor there.
But Mapou, a church-going 94-year-old widower from the South Side, doesn’t dine alone. A handful of honorary members — widows and children — join him.
He wouldn’t miss it for the world.
“The fellas are gone. Dying off, so people don’t hear about Pearl Harbor no more,” Mapou said in a thick Queens, New York, accent even though he hasn’t lived in his native state since he joined the Navy in February 1940.
“There’s nothing you can do or say to fix that. People already forgot.”
He has not.