Hawaiian Eye

Childhood memories can be conjured with the smallest of prompts — a certain aroma or taste, for example. For Dorinda Nicholson, who at age six witnessed the attack on Pearl Harbor unfolding outside her kitchen window, the trauma was renewed this past summer with the release of the movie Pearl Harbor and ceremonies marking the sixtieth anniversary of the attack. Then there was the day two months ago when planes smashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a horror almost immediately tagged the “new” Pearl Harbor.

On September 11, Nicholson was surprised to get a call at her home in Kansas City from an editor in New York who wanted to know if she was OK. “I definitely had the feeling of, this can’t be happening again — the uncertainty and the utter shock,” she says. “Like Pearl Harbor, it changed the way America lives.”

Nicholson will discuss her book, Pearl Harbor Child, at Johnson County Community College on November 28. Her mother was Pansy Kaula Akona, a hula teacher known as a “Kumu hula,” and her father was Ishmael Stagner, a Scottish-Irish employee of the Honolulu Post Office. As a child of a mixed marriage, Dorinda was called a “hapa-haoly,” which she recalls wasn’t that unusual on the islands.

Nicholson’s family lived a few hundred yards from Battleship Row, and she recalls that Sunday’s attack like “a slide show in my head.”

“The first picture is of being in the kitchen with my mom getting ready for church,” she says. “We heard planes flying very low, which wasn’t unusual, except on Sunday. The next slide is standing in the front yard watching the torpedo bombers flying about thirty feet off the ground — so close you could see the pilots’ goggles.

“The third slide is hiding in the sugar-cane fields,” she continues. “The next one is sitting in the dark where we were evacuated, wondering what was going to happen next.” Nicholson also recalls iconic images of war that Americans had been spared to that point and haven’t much thought about since: gas masks, camouflage netting and air-raid sirens. “We lined up for smallpox vaccinations. And not one piece of mail in and out of the islands wasn’t censored,” she says.

When Pearl Harbor opened in May, Nicholson had mixed feelings. “I was afraid to see it, afraid what it would do to me,” she says. “But I was very pleased and have seen it quite a few times.” Scenes from the film, such as one showing little girls in their Sunday best skipping to church, might just as easily have appeared in her book.

Pearl Harbor Child was published in 1993 and has been used in classrooms across the country. Nicholson’s self-publishing skills will be tested again with her new volume, Pearl Harbor Warriors, a true story of the unlikely friendship between a U.S. Marine bugler and a Japanese dive bomber whose paths crossed on December 7, 1941.

After lecturing at Johnson County Community College, Nicholson heads to Hawaii to speak at a ceremony at Pearl Harbor. With the anniversary next month, her memories are in high demand. It’s a story she doesn’t want to forget.