Sons, daughters, relatives of WWII generation remember Pearl Harbor

Dec. 6—Bakersfield resident Naomi Brewster was just a young girl when she learned America had been attacked in a far-off place called Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

"I remember very vividly ... I was 9," she recalled. "It was a Sunday, and after Sunday school, our teacher took her girls class home with her for lunch.

"We were at her house when a neighbor told her to turn on her radio, and President Roosevelt was telling the nation what had happened.

"It was a very sad Sunday," she said.

Marc Sandall, an organizer of the Pearl Harbor Day event scheduled for 9:50 a.m. Thursday at the World War II Veterans Memorial at Jastro Park, said it continues to be important for Americans to mark the day, even though it was four score and two years ago.

"It serves as a reminder that we owe our freedom to the Greatest Generation," said Sandall, who lost a distant cousin, Merrill Keith Sandall, when the battleship USS Arizona was sunk in the harbor that day.

"If we don't take time to remember, we won't know where we came from," Sandall said.

Taft native Dick Snyder was not even old enough for school when the sun rose on that Sunday morning, a day President Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously described as "a date which will live in infamy."

"At age 4, I was aware of suddenly being 'at war,'" Snyder remembered in a Facebook conversation and a phone interview.

"I asked my father if we would win," said Snyder, now 86.

"Of course," his father told him. "America always wins its wars."

Somehow, his father's surety and confidence eased the anxiety the little boy was feeling.

"I remember that conversation as if it were yesterday," said Snyder, who now lives in Bakersfield after a career serving as a university professor in Wisconsin.

"His response put me at ease," the 4-year-old remembered 82 years later. "I didn't have to worry anymore."

In 1945, Snyder's father was drafted into the Army. He ended his service in Little Rock, Ark., preparing to invade mainland Japan, a plan that ultimately became unnecessary.

The memories are as various as the people.

Elaine Taylor, whose family lived in San Francisco at the time, was just a small child. But she remembers the blackout curtains.

Indeed, blackout regulations in many communities along the West Coast required that all windows and doors be covered at night with heavy curtains, cardboard or paint, to prevent the escape of any glimmer of light that might aid enemy aircraft.

"I remember my mother closing the blinds so the Japanese couldn't use the lights to bomb us," Taylor said in a Facebook comment.

She also recalled that her father couldn't enlist or be drafted into the service because he worked for Standard Oil, and maintaining the flow of oil and gas was seen as imperative for the war effort.

Bob Lechtreck was just 16 when the Japanese Imperial Navy attacked Pearl Harbor.

He was in the class of '43 at Kern County Union High School, which later would become Bakersfield High School.

"My dad ... joined the Navy two months before his 18th birthday. He needed parental permission," said Lechtreck's son of the same name.

The elder Lechtreck will turn 99 in April, and he is scheduled to attend Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day at Jastro Park.

Like Sept. 11, 2001, the attack on American soil in 1941 had young Americans lining up to join the fight. Lechtreck was too young, but he made it into the war as a sailor aboard the USS Rowe, a destroyer based out of Seattle.

The ship was involved in the Allies' island-hopping campaign designed to break the back of the Imperial Japanese Navy and its early domination of the Pacific Theater.

"We were involved in the bombardment of the islands," the Navy veteran told this reporter in an earlier interview.

"We dealt with Kamikazes in Okinawa," he said of the Japanese aviators who flew suicide missions against Allied naval vessels in the latter days of the war.

Lechtreck, who still lives in Bakersfield, was a diesel mechanic, but in battle he was stationed on a 5-inch gun, meaning it fired a projectile 5 inches in diameter.

His son, whose name is also Bob Lechtreck (but not a junior) said he's proud of his father, who went on after the war to join the Kern County Fire Department, where he rose to the rank of chief.

It all began for America with Pearl Harbor. Today, Japan remains one of the nation's closest allies.

Steven Mayer can be reached at 661-395-7353.