Hawaii, 1989, Brings Back Hawaii, 1941

Harry Albright and my wife and I had been together on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, when the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor began. We hadn’t seen him since late in 1942.

He picked us up at our hotel on our second day in Honolulu. Harry lives today with his wife, Janet, between Diamond Head and Coco Head, several miles from the congestion and hustle of Waikiki.

He was exactly on time, as a former Army officer ought to be. With him were Janet, and Robert and Jean Trumbull. Bob had been city editor of the Honolulu Advertiser when I went to work there early in 1941. After the war started he had been hired by the New York Times as a war correspondent, and after the war had had a distinguished career with the Times as a correspondent in the Far East.

Bob once had some local celebrity as the author of “Sol Says,” a daily front page box quoting Sol, in pidgin English, on the day’s weather forecast. Since there is rarely any weather in Honolulu, it was usually some kind of a pidgin joke. I recalled contributing one: “Sol says signs say, ‘No U Turn.’ He says, ‘No good English. Should say, “U No Turn.” ’ No rain today.”

I thought maybe Bob had got the New York Times job on the strength of “The Raft,” his nonfiction book about three sailors who were stranded for weeks on a rubber raft in mid-Pacific. I was working on the night desk when a message came over the Teletype with the news that “The Raft” had been selected as the Book of the Month. It was 2 a.m., but I woke Bob up at home. I knew he wouldn’t mind.

“I never got back to sleep,” he recalled. But he didn’t get the job with the Times because of the book; he got it because the Times stringer, who worked for the opposition paper, had failed to file a story on Pearl Harbor. Said he was “too busy.”

We were delighted to find Iolani Palace intact. This jewel of Victorian-Florentine architecture was ordered built by King Kalakaua in 1882 after he had visited the capitals of Europe. I doubt that any public building anywhere is prettier.

My former home, the old Advertiser building, was also still there--a solid, square, two-story building with a broad, curving double staircase that leads from the entry court to the second-story editorial offices. Albright introduced me to the editor, who was still in the corner pocket once occupied by Ray Coll, the storied “old man” who had hired me. He had at first rejected me, but I sat on a bench outside his office every day for a week until he finally gave in.

I told the new editor, “When I retire maybe I’ll come out here and apply for a job.” He said, “Good, there’s a bench right outside my office.”

Albright turned off teeming Kalakaua Avenue down a street that led to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, still salmon pink, still elegant, still redolent of times past. We walked through pink rooms over rose rugs to the Surf, a dining terrace overlooking Waikiki Beach. Lunch was served outdoors on pink tableclothes. A light surf washed up softly on the sand. Surfboards flashed in the shining water. Tan bodies glistened. Here, again, was the life that had been so rudely interrupted that morning more than 47 years ago.

We didn’t talk much about the raid. Albright had recently written “Pearl Harbor: Japan’s Fatal Blunder” (Hippocrene), a fascinating history of the raid with some ingenious speculations on what might have been.

I have already told how Albright, then a major in Army public relations, was driving us home from a party that historic morning. Lying in the back seat with my head in my wife’s lap, I looked up through the window and saw a flight of planes streaking toward Pearl Harbor. I remarked that someone was shooting at them. Albright stopped the car, got out, stood in the middle of the street, hands on hips, and said, “Damn those guys! I’ve told them and told them not to do things like this without letting me know.”

(Evidently Albright thought he was seeing some plans exercised. It took us all awhile to realize what was happening.)

“Do you remember saying that?” I asked him.

“I remember every word,” he said.