Remembering Pearl Harbor

December 7, 2021, is the eighty-year anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World WarII. It was always an important day for my father. He was not there, but he remembered.

My father, Gilvin Cooper Broxson, was born in 1919. His mother had the Spanish Flu. He was born three months early. He weighed in at one and a half pounds. The doctors told his mother, "He has no chance."

He never knew his father, mostly because his father was in prison. His father was a thief and not a good one. He kept getting caught.

When Gil was nine years old, his mother married a farmer twenty-five years older than she. The farmer needed someone to help him work the farm. Gil's mother needed a place to live and raise her only child.

The farmer died after Gil's junior year in high school. Gil laid out of school the next year to get the crop in. After graduating a year late, he asked his mother to "Sell this worthless 100 acres, I don't want no more farming."

In 1941, Gil married my mother, Christine Dodd, a lovely eighteen-year-old Texas lass. He joined the Army Air Corp and was stationed at Randolph Field in San Antonio, Texas.

My father would tell me in some detail about the bombing in Hawaii. How the radios were following what was happening. Everyone, on and off base, was glued to the broadcast. He told of the President's speech to the people. He told, in no uncertain words, of the determination to avenge this attack.

As a young child, my father was a poet. Simple rhymes at first, but he wrote for his entire life. There was no FanStory in those days. He kept the poems in a file. Some of the poems were handwritten, some typed. After he died in 1992, I kept the file. Many years later, I self-published some of the poems for family and friends.

This Pearl Harbor Day, I am sharing my favorite poem of his, as he wrote in 1943:

ARMY WINGS

A far-off sound of
motor tune, A
shadow cast against
the moon.
A moment here and
Then gone by. Into the
Distance of the sky.
A fading sound. A
dimming light. It's
Army Wings, in the
Night.

Gilvin Cooper Broxson