Episode 122: Tales from Punchbowl, Part II

 

Donn Beach, the father of tiki culture, founder of the Donn the Beachcomber restaurant chain, and  creator of the mai tai cocktail started out in California but after his service as a lieutenant colonel in WWII, he relocated to Hawaii.

In Hawaii, he established Waikiki's still popular (though very different than when it was founded) International Market Place and was part of a group of entrepreneurs who went out of their way to preserve historic sites across the islands.

Army Air Corps Lieutenant Colonel Donn Beach is buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Section B, Grave 1-C.

1920's Notre Dame University football legend Jack Chevigny was not only part of the Fighting Irish's surprise upset over powerhouse Army in the now-classic 1928 Gipper Game, he was the one who yelled "That's one for the Gipper" as he crossed the goal line to tie the game up. He went on to coach football at first the NFL and then the collegiate levels after earing his law degree.

Chevigny joined the Marines and after multiple recruiting and physical training assignments, he requested a combat assignment. He ended up with the 27th Marines where he landed on Iwo Jima on D-Day where he was killed.

After initially being interred on Iwo Jima, Marine Corps First Lieutenant John "Jack" Chevigny's remains were moved to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific where he was buried in Section C, Grave 508.

Wah Kau Kong excelled in athletics and chemistry while attending the University of Hawaii. He was in the middle of a Master's Degree in chemistry when he decided to volunteer for the Army Air Corps in 1942.

He achieved the highest score on the air cadet entrance exam that had ever been seen at the time (he was already a licensed pilot) and when he graduated from Army flight school he was the first Chinese-American to become a fighter pilot. He was shot down over Germany protecting a crippled B-17.

Army Air Corps Second Lieutenant Wah Kau Kong was buried in Germany by the Germans who recovered his remains before being moved after the war to the American Cemetery in the Netherlands. He was eventually moved to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific where he rests in Section D Grave 453.

Family man Stanley Dunham served as an ordinance sergeant in World War II. After his daughter Ann graduated from high school in 1960, the family moved to Hawaii where he worked in the furniture industry, his wife Madelyn became the first senior executive at the Bank of Hawaii, and their daughter Ann studied Anthropology at the University of Hawaii. Ann married a fellow student from Kenya and together they had a son, future US president Barak Obama.

Ann divorced her first husband - it turns out that he forgot to mention that he was already married to a woman back in Kenya who he had two children with - and then married a surveyor from Indonesia. She and her son moved to Jakarta after Ann graduated but when Obama turned 10, he moved back to Hawaii to live with Dunham and Madelyn so he could attend school in the United States.

Army Sergeant Stanley Dunham was cremated and his ashes placed at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in columbarium CT1-B, row 400, niche 440.

Episode 121 - Tales from Punchbowl, Part I

Charles Lacy Veach was the second astronaut from Hawaii. After a career as an Air Force fighter pilot he went to work for NASA as a consultant but eventually became an astronaut himself and flew on two shuttle missions.

Air Force Colonel Charles Lacy Veach died of cancer on October 3, 1995, he was 51 years old. His ashes were placed in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific Columbarium Court 3, Wall J, Niche 233.

Yashiyuki Harold Sakata began life working on various Hawaiian fruit plantations before taking up weightlifting. After World War II began, he joined an Army engineer battalion that stayed on Hawaii for most of the war which gave him the chance to continue to train. He even won a few local lifting competitions. After the war, he won a national event which qualified him for the 1948 London Olympics. In London, he won a silver medal.

After the Olympics, Sakata retired from weightlifting and took up professional wrestling. Over a little more than a decade, he performed with ten or twelve promotions and won three solo and nine tag team championship belts.

Then, in 1964, he hung up his wrestling trunks and began acting. His first role was as the iconic Bond Villain Oddjob in the James Bond file The Man with the Golden Gun. He continued acting for the next two decades in movies, television, and commercials. His last TV appearance was just a few months before his death on stage at the Academy Awards in his Oddjob persona while Sheena Easton performed the Oscar-nominated Bond title song For Your Eyes Only.

Army Technician Fifth Class Harold Sakata dies in 1982 at age 62. He is interred at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Section III, Grave 317.

Leo Sharp, Sr. was a decorated World War II infantry soldier in the Italian campaign before returning home and eventually gaining fame in the botanical circles for his hybrid daylilies.

While he was well known in the daylily community (he claimed to have even been invited to plant some of his flowers at the White House by President George HW Bush), it apparently didn't pay well and he had a lot of financial issues.

Leo was talked into become a drug mule for the Sinaloa cartel, driving hundreds of kilos of cocaine from Arizona to Michigan and then returning thousands and thousands of dollars back along the same route. He was caught in 2011 and eventually convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. He was released after one year due to poor heath and died in 2016. He was 92 years old.

I'm not sure how he ended up there as he didn't seem to have any prior connection to Hawaii, but Army Private First Class Leo Sharp, Sr. is interred at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Section CT13A, Row 100, Grave 150. The 2018 Clint Eastwood film The Mule is based on Sharp.

The Godfather of modern American tattooing, Norman Collins, known as Sailor Jerry for most of his professional career. He joined the Navy in 1930, spent several years in East Asia and the Pacific, and learned tattooing from the masters in that region of the world. After he left the Navy, he settled in Honolulu and continued tattooing the service members on Oahu.

Sailor Jerry's tattoos quickly became world famous as US service members took his designs all over the world.

When World War II broke out, he wanted to get back into the Navy but had developed a heart condition and was not allowed to reenlist, but the Merchant Marines were more than happy to get another experienced navigator in their ranks and made him a lieutenant commander.

After the war, Sailor Jerry continued his tattooing. On June 9, 1973, he had heart attack while riding his motorcycle and died three days later. He was 62 years old. Navy Seaman First Class Norman "Sailor Jerry" Collins is interred at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Section T, Grave 124.

Episode 120 - Ernie Pyle's War, Episode VIII

After Ernie Pyle was killed by a single shot from a sniper, the Army's 77th Infantry Division, who he was with at the time, built a temporary memorial. After the three month battle of Okinawa, engineers from the 77th replaced the temporary marker with a permanent one. I had the opportunity to visit the marker of the island of Ie Jima in 2008 while assigned to the 505th Quartermaster Battalion on Okinawa.

The Original Pyle Memorial Marker

The Permanent Marker when it was dedicated July 2, 1945

Pyle was buried on Ie Shima (now Ie Jima) two days after his death in April 1945.

After World War II, Pyle's remains were disinterred and reburied in a cemetery on Okinawa. In 1949, when the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific was dedicated in Hawaii, Pyle's remains were buried there its first day of operation. After the burials of two unknown soldiers (one of either side of Pyle), Pyle was honored as the first known person buried at the site.

Pyle was honored in many traditional ways, but also in a few unique ways. Boeing employees build a B-29 and named it the Ernie Pyle...

...and the Ernie Pyle Memorial Theater, one of the largest headquarters/recreation sites in all of occupied Japan (specifically in downtown Tokyo was also named in his honor. The Pyle Theater was depicted on the front of a commemorative medal many service members purchased a souvenirs.

The back of the Pyle Theater medal was engraved with "Memories of Landing in Japan" and the year the medal was minted. A new batch was put out every year.

Episode 119: Ernie Pyle's War, Part VII

In June 1944, Ernie Pyle hit the beach in Normandy, France just one day after the D-Day invasion. He followed ally forces through six weeks of hard fighting over difficult terrain before breaking out of hedgerows and driving the Germans east. He was on hand for the liberation of Paris in late-August and then decided that he had seen enough of war. But that didn't last; by late-December he was in the Pacific covering that theater of the war

When he got back from this trip to Europe, his newspaper bosses commissioned a bust by renowned sculptor Jo Davidson which Pyle sat for while on a layover in New York City.

Today, the bust is at the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.

I was planning on finishing Pyle's story this week until I heard of the passing of golden-age-of-space-exploration astronaut Air Force Lieutenant General Tom Stafford and deviated from my plans a little to eulogize him as well. Final funeral arrangements are still pending so it is unknown if Stafford will be interred alongside other astronauts at Arlington National Cemetery at this time.

Episode 118: Ernie Pyle's War, Part VI

 

After retuning to Italy from his R&R, Pyle gets a tip from a pre-war friend - who also happens to be the senior US Army air forces commander in the Mediterranean - that he should return to London because the long awaited invasion of western Europe is going to happen sooner rather than later. It's nice to have friends in high places!

Pyle returns to England, is awarded the Pulitzer Prize, graces the cover of Time magazine (which more or less does a smear article/hatchet piece) about him, and then he sails with the Allied armada across the English channel toward France and the D-Day invasion. He is one of only 55 war correspondents to accompany the initial invasion.  

Episode 117: Ernie Pyle's War, Part V

After spending a year and a half in war zones, Ernie Pyle finally makes it back to Albuquerque, New Mexico for some much needed rest and relaxation with his wife, Jerry. Unfortunately, he finds little of either and has to return to the war far sooner than he would have liked to. 

When he does make it back to the front lines in Sicily, he pens what his usually considered his best article, "The Death of Captain Waskow" which I read in its entirety to close out this week's podcast.

 

Episode 116: Ernie Pyle's War, Part IV

With the Allied invasion of Africa on, Ernie Pyle's fame back in the US as "the only reporter to bring the war home to us" begins to grow. In just six month's time his column is pick up by more than one hundred additional newspapers and his daily readership increases by nearly six and a half million people. He continues to write human interest pieces about the soldiers "over there," but he also includes his own first hand accounts of loss and of the feelings that soldiers experience. He isn't writing about bravado and heroics - though there are heroes in his columns to be sure, they are just also the everyday people who have had war thrust upon them and are trying to survive.