Hofferts Visit Hawaii To Experience Pearl Harbor Day
December 15, 2016 at 4:38 p.m.
Hofferts Visit Hawaii To Experience Pearl Harbor Day
By David [email protected]
The attack on Dec. 7, 1941, led to the United States’ entry into World War II.
Ryun, 12, a sixth-grader at Eisenhower Elementary School, traveled Dec. 5-11 with his father, Warsaw Community Schools Superintendent Dr. David Hoffert, and Dick and Nancy Rooker, to Hawaii for the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The trip provided Ryun with research for his group’s National History Day project.
Last year, former WCS teacher Dick Rooker asked Ryun and three other students if they wanted to do an NHD project on the Alamo. They got to visit the Alamo in December on the anniversary of the Battle of San Antonio. The team won first place in the regionals and at state.
“If they had nationals for our age group, we would have been going to them, but they didn’t have nationals for fourth- and fifth-graders at that time,” Ryun said.
In the National History Day contest, students choose a historical topic related to the annual theme, and then conduct primary and secondary research. After they have analyzed and interpreted their sources, and have drawn a conclusion about the significance of the topic, students present their work in one of five ways: as a paper, an exhibit, a performance, a documentary or a website.
Rooker approached the students again this year and suggested the battle at Pearl Harbor.
“We’ve done very good on it, but we haven’t started the skit or the script yet, but we’re going to start it really soon,” Ryun said.
David said Dick has always had a passion for Pearl Harbor, and his son Zach did a similar project a few years ago as his NHD project.
When David was a Warsaw Community High School history teacher, he had his students work then with a number of WWII veterans.
“Unfortunately, most of those guys have passed away. There are a couple out of the hundreds of Pearl Harbor survivors that we worked with that are still alive and still very active. Ray Emory, who lives in Honolulu, Hawaii, is one of those. He was always a very close friend of my classroom. Ray had been suffering from serious health issues over this last year, and again we knew that this was going to be an opportunity to really spend some time with him. I wanted Ryun to get that opportunity,” David said.
David said Emory, now 96, is an amazing guy and a hero at Pearl Harbor, though Emory doesn’t look at himself as such. Over the years, Emory has been featured by CNN?and NPR as a Pearl Harbor survivor who has made it his mission to identify the unknowns from Pearl Harbor and to ensure servicemen’s graves from then are properly marked. Emory, a native of Peoria, Ill., was serving as a seaman first class on the light cruiser USS Honolulu Dec. 7, 1941, according to a Dec. 7, 2012, story on CNN’s website.
“He started the movement that got the national government moving to identify those that were mismarked, misburied, buried in mass graves after the attack on Dec. 7, and Ray’s really made that his life goal,” David said. “So having Ray over there in Honolulu, Hawaii, and giving Ryun the opportunity to get to spend a few days with Ray and just get to know him, be a part really of Ray’s family for a couple of days – it was an experience that I knew probably just would never happen again.”
Emory got Ryun special tickets for the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack because it was by invitation only.
“Really, you had to be somehow closely related to a Pearl Harbor survivor to be on the pier and be able to do that, so Ryun was able to go and got to go to a number of activities for the 75th. So we tried to work it out and get him as many opportunities to spend with the veterans as we could,”?David said.
After arriving, unpacking and getting some sleep in Hawaii Dec. 5, Ryun said they their first stop was Ewa Field for the memorial.
“It’s now a modern-day archaeological site and it had been forgotten for a bunch of years. They had the wrong site, but they found it later,” Ryun said. “Planes from the USS Enterprise, an aircraft carrier, came over and dogfighted the Japanese in the skies above Ewa Field. Today, you can see a bunch of scorch marks on the field itself, and a bunch of bullet marks.”
The paved runway now is being slowly covered up by grass. Showing a picture he took of the runway with a scorch mark on it from a Japanese plane crashing into it, David said there’s been some excavation of the site. The excavation has been able to show where the Japanese Zeros came down and strafed the field. The bullet holes are still visible along the field. David said people kind of forgot about it after it was closed down and overgrown.
“They really only open it up once a year, so it really is an archaeological dig site, a modern-day one,” David said.
For the next part of the day, Ryun said they went to Emory’s house and interviewed him.
“It was a really good one. I have a video of the interview,” Ryun recalled.
One thing about his interview with Emory that really got Ryun’s attention was Emory’s ship list.
“Ray has been good memory, so he named pretty much all 200 and some ships in the harbor when Pearl Harbor was attacked because Ray used to be the historian of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association as well. So Ryun challenged him to see if he could name all the ships, and he named them all out of memory,” David said.
On Dec. 7, they drove to Ford Island for the Pearl Harbor ceremony on a Naval pier. A big tent was set up, and the keynote speaker was the commander of the Pacific Theatre, Admiral Harry B. Harris Jr. Ryun stated the commander is in charge of 385,000 men including all the Army, Naval and Coast Guard in the Pacific.
David guessed there was less than 100 survivors at the ceremony. Indiana only has four or five Pearl Harbor survivors still living, David said, the same as Ohio.
“Having even just a number somewhere between 50 and 100 of these men that are there – the young olds are 95 or 96 years old – it’s really a last chance for someone from Ryun’s generation to interact with these individuals, because a large piece of the conversation we had was how was Pearl Harbor going to be remembered even in just a couple of years without that living legacy sitting there, being able to correspond back and forth, being able to talk with somebody,” David stated.
Ryun said it could become like the Civil War or the American Revolution. “It doesn’t come alive to people because there’s no survivors to tell their stories about how they fought in it and what it was really like,” he said.
Besides Emory, Ryun said he got to talk to WWII veteran John Hughes along with some others at Ewa Field.
“John Hughes even made a speech talking about his recollections about the attack on Ewa Field. In that speech, he said that he and a bunch of other guys pushed the planes away from fires, and every few minutes would stop and fire back, one or two shots, at the Japanese that were attacking,” Ryun said.
He recalled that Hughes’ last quote was, “I have no ill-feelings toward the Japanese.”
Ryun will take what he learned during his trip to Pearl Harbor and incorporate that into his group’s NHD project. He said Emory may be a part of the skit.
Since a lot of Ryun’s classmates can’t make it to Hawaii, Emory wanted the students to be able to study Pearl Harbor.
“He’s going to talk to them and give them a contest with a prize to it. So whoever can write the best essay will be able to get a prize for it,” Ryun said.
David said the essay contest will be for the Eisenhower Elementary sixth-graders. Emory and his family put together a special award and prize for it. Emory will speak to all the kids over speakerphone at some point, David said. The students will do some research to put it together.
The ceremony Dec. 7 wasn’t the end of the trip for the Hofferts. On Dec. 8, Ryun said they went back to Emory’s home and had dinner. He cited the ship list again and talked to them about Pearl Harbor.
On Dec. 11, they traveled to the Punchbowl – the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific – where many graves are. Reading books about the Punchbowl, Ryun said it seems so unreal that so many people died, “but when you look out along the mass number of graves, many of them unknown, you realize that so many men have died in the Pacific Theatre and all over the world to help us obtain freedom and liberty for the United States.”
He described the Punchbowl as a “big cemetery in Hawaii for the whole Pacific Theatre.”
David said it’s only graves for servicemen and where Emory did most of his work.
“So you can still go see there. One of the big differences is that you can see a number of where the graves used to be. They’re not there now because of Ray’s work of being able to bring these men home 75 years later,”?he said.
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The attack on Dec. 7, 1941, led to the United States’ entry into World War II.
Ryun, 12, a sixth-grader at Eisenhower Elementary School, traveled Dec. 5-11 with his father, Warsaw Community Schools Superintendent Dr. David Hoffert, and Dick and Nancy Rooker, to Hawaii for the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The trip provided Ryun with research for his group’s National History Day project.
Last year, former WCS teacher Dick Rooker asked Ryun and three other students if they wanted to do an NHD project on the Alamo. They got to visit the Alamo in December on the anniversary of the Battle of San Antonio. The team won first place in the regionals and at state.
“If they had nationals for our age group, we would have been going to them, but they didn’t have nationals for fourth- and fifth-graders at that time,” Ryun said.
In the National History Day contest, students choose a historical topic related to the annual theme, and then conduct primary and secondary research. After they have analyzed and interpreted their sources, and have drawn a conclusion about the significance of the topic, students present their work in one of five ways: as a paper, an exhibit, a performance, a documentary or a website.
Rooker approached the students again this year and suggested the battle at Pearl Harbor.
“We’ve done very good on it, but we haven’t started the skit or the script yet, but we’re going to start it really soon,” Ryun said.
David said Dick has always had a passion for Pearl Harbor, and his son Zach did a similar project a few years ago as his NHD project.
When David was a Warsaw Community High School history teacher, he had his students work then with a number of WWII veterans.
“Unfortunately, most of those guys have passed away. There are a couple out of the hundreds of Pearl Harbor survivors that we worked with that are still alive and still very active. Ray Emory, who lives in Honolulu, Hawaii, is one of those. He was always a very close friend of my classroom. Ray had been suffering from serious health issues over this last year, and again we knew that this was going to be an opportunity to really spend some time with him. I wanted Ryun to get that opportunity,” David said.
David said Emory, now 96, is an amazing guy and a hero at Pearl Harbor, though Emory doesn’t look at himself as such. Over the years, Emory has been featured by CNN?and NPR as a Pearl Harbor survivor who has made it his mission to identify the unknowns from Pearl Harbor and to ensure servicemen’s graves from then are properly marked. Emory, a native of Peoria, Ill., was serving as a seaman first class on the light cruiser USS Honolulu Dec. 7, 1941, according to a Dec. 7, 2012, story on CNN’s website.
“He started the movement that got the national government moving to identify those that were mismarked, misburied, buried in mass graves after the attack on Dec. 7, and Ray’s really made that his life goal,” David said. “So having Ray over there in Honolulu, Hawaii, and giving Ryun the opportunity to get to spend a few days with Ray and just get to know him, be a part really of Ray’s family for a couple of days – it was an experience that I knew probably just would never happen again.”
Emory got Ryun special tickets for the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack because it was by invitation only.
“Really, you had to be somehow closely related to a Pearl Harbor survivor to be on the pier and be able to do that, so Ryun was able to go and got to go to a number of activities for the 75th. So we tried to work it out and get him as many opportunities to spend with the veterans as we could,”?David said.
After arriving, unpacking and getting some sleep in Hawaii Dec. 5, Ryun said they their first stop was Ewa Field for the memorial.
“It’s now a modern-day archaeological site and it had been forgotten for a bunch of years. They had the wrong site, but they found it later,” Ryun said. “Planes from the USS Enterprise, an aircraft carrier, came over and dogfighted the Japanese in the skies above Ewa Field. Today, you can see a bunch of scorch marks on the field itself, and a bunch of bullet marks.”
The paved runway now is being slowly covered up by grass. Showing a picture he took of the runway with a scorch mark on it from a Japanese plane crashing into it, David said there’s been some excavation of the site. The excavation has been able to show where the Japanese Zeros came down and strafed the field. The bullet holes are still visible along the field. David said people kind of forgot about it after it was closed down and overgrown.
“They really only open it up once a year, so it really is an archaeological dig site, a modern-day one,” David said.
For the next part of the day, Ryun said they went to Emory’s house and interviewed him.
“It was a really good one. I have a video of the interview,” Ryun recalled.
One thing about his interview with Emory that really got Ryun’s attention was Emory’s ship list.
“Ray has been good memory, so he named pretty much all 200 and some ships in the harbor when Pearl Harbor was attacked because Ray used to be the historian of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association as well. So Ryun challenged him to see if he could name all the ships, and he named them all out of memory,” David said.
On Dec. 7, they drove to Ford Island for the Pearl Harbor ceremony on a Naval pier. A big tent was set up, and the keynote speaker was the commander of the Pacific Theatre, Admiral Harry B. Harris Jr. Ryun stated the commander is in charge of 385,000 men including all the Army, Naval and Coast Guard in the Pacific.
David guessed there was less than 100 survivors at the ceremony. Indiana only has four or five Pearl Harbor survivors still living, David said, the same as Ohio.
“Having even just a number somewhere between 50 and 100 of these men that are there – the young olds are 95 or 96 years old – it’s really a last chance for someone from Ryun’s generation to interact with these individuals, because a large piece of the conversation we had was how was Pearl Harbor going to be remembered even in just a couple of years without that living legacy sitting there, being able to correspond back and forth, being able to talk with somebody,” David stated.
Ryun said it could become like the Civil War or the American Revolution. “It doesn’t come alive to people because there’s no survivors to tell their stories about how they fought in it and what it was really like,” he said.
Besides Emory, Ryun said he got to talk to WWII veteran John Hughes along with some others at Ewa Field.
“John Hughes even made a speech talking about his recollections about the attack on Ewa Field. In that speech, he said that he and a bunch of other guys pushed the planes away from fires, and every few minutes would stop and fire back, one or two shots, at the Japanese that were attacking,” Ryun said.
He recalled that Hughes’ last quote was, “I have no ill-feelings toward the Japanese.”
Ryun will take what he learned during his trip to Pearl Harbor and incorporate that into his group’s NHD project. He said Emory may be a part of the skit.
Since a lot of Ryun’s classmates can’t make it to Hawaii, Emory wanted the students to be able to study Pearl Harbor.
“He’s going to talk to them and give them a contest with a prize to it. So whoever can write the best essay will be able to get a prize for it,” Ryun said.
David said the essay contest will be for the Eisenhower Elementary sixth-graders. Emory and his family put together a special award and prize for it. Emory will speak to all the kids over speakerphone at some point, David said. The students will do some research to put it together.
The ceremony Dec. 7 wasn’t the end of the trip for the Hofferts. On Dec. 8, Ryun said they went back to Emory’s home and had dinner. He cited the ship list again and talked to them about Pearl Harbor.
On Dec. 11, they traveled to the Punchbowl – the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific – where many graves are. Reading books about the Punchbowl, Ryun said it seems so unreal that so many people died, “but when you look out along the mass number of graves, many of them unknown, you realize that so many men have died in the Pacific Theatre and all over the world to help us obtain freedom and liberty for the United States.”
He described the Punchbowl as a “big cemetery in Hawaii for the whole Pacific Theatre.”
David said it’s only graves for servicemen and where Emory did most of his work.
“So you can still go see there. One of the big differences is that you can see a number of where the graves used to be. They’re not there now because of Ray’s work of being able to bring these men home 75 years later,”?he said.
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