‘Our Lives Were Never the Same Again’

The attack on Pearl Harbor 60 years ago caught Americans in idle Sunday pursuits and changed many of them forever. It sent many down career paths they couldn’t have imagined, opened opportunities for women and injected plot twists into countless love stories.

Some recollections:

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Paul Grassley had just taken his first flying lesson under his brother’s guidance, piloting a small Cessna over Caldwell Airport in New Jersey, when he heard the news that would land him in the pilot’s seat of a B-24 bomber.

“Our lives were never the same again.”

At 18, too young to join the armed forces without his parents’ permission, he started college but signed up the next year. “I want to do what I’ve got to do, which is fly airplanes,” he told his father.

He flew 12 bombing missions over Europe. Now, he works for a credit-card processing company in Savannah, Ga., and volunteers at the Eighth Air Force museum.

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Kitty Dlugonski was 24, in love, and sitting in her Pittsburgh home, waiting to walk to Sunday Mass with her future husband, Raymond.

“We heard it on the radio,” she said. “That day everyone was excited and shook up.”

Raymond enlisted the next day and the couple spent the next four months trying to hold onto old routines. After Raymond started basic training in North Carolina, they first discussed marriage.

Raymond returned from the war in 1945 with the ring she gave him and a broken rosary he carried throughout his tour. They married a year later. She quit her job at a cork factory in 1950 and reared two children, going to work at a hospital when they were grown. Raymond died in 1986 at age 70.

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Jack Davies, now 91, was a promotional manager for a zipper company in New York City in December 1941.

“A friend of mine had invited me out for the weekend in Westchester County. We were having dinner when we got this news. We walked outside and both of us looked upon one another and said, ‘Within a year, we’ll be in the Army.’ And it worked out about that way.”

He became a captain in the Army Air Corps. After the war, he owned a Grand Rapids, Mich., food brokerage for 25 years.

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Larry Powell was a 19-year-old photographer and reporter at The Wichita (Kan.) Eagle when he heard the news on the radio.

“It was kind of surreal. At first, you’re not really gathering it all in, what it all meant.”

He tried to enlist but was rejected because he weighed only 125 pounds. “They told me to go home and fatten up.”

After stuffing himself with bananas and water, he walked into a Navy office and was accepted. He became a Navy pilot, flying combat missions over the Philippines Sea, and returned to teach air-to-air gunnery.

After the war, he worked as a sporting goods sales representative, opened a golf shop and wrote novels, five published so far.

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Elizabeth Estelle, 80, is a retired teacher in Phoenix. She worked in a factory and tended a victory garden during the war.

“It changed our lives. We learned to do without things and to recycle what we needed. We women suddenly had the opportunity to go out and be part of the labor force, like Rosie the Riveter, instead of scrubbing the floor at home.”

During rationing, she would dry out coffee grounds and reuse them all week.

“We weren’t consumerists like we are now. If you saw a line anywhere, you got in that line and waited because you knew that whatever it was, it was something you needed.”