Back in the early '80s I lived in a Hollywood apartment, neighbors to cameraman Dutch Heckman. Once, our elderly landlady, Mrs. Murphy, told Dutch and I that she'd been present in Honolulu during the Pearl Harbor attack. (A great danger came from falling shrapnel, courtesy of exploding U.S. anti-aircraft shells.) Evacuated from Oahu to California, Mrs. Murphy bid farewell to her husband, Bill, a Marine major. Bill was gone for years, fighting in the Pacific. He once wrote Mrs. Murphy from Eniwetok that "nothing smells worse than a dead Jap." Bill survived the war, but, like the stench of enemy corpses, the horror of that island always lingered.
Mrs. Murphy eventually became a manager at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. (She was present that day in 1968 when Robert Kennedy was assassinated.) Talking later, Dutch and I realized that Mrs. Murphy was a history sponge, soaking up the events spilling around her.
In time, Eniwetok vaporized from hydrogen bomb tests, the Ambassador Hotel was torn down, Bill died, and Mrs. Murphy ended up a landlady, drinking double bourbons in the afternoon and sharing her memories with a constantly employed cameraman and an unemployed comedy writer. She always regretted never moving back to Hawaii after the war. (She prounced it 'Ha-vi-ee.") A few years later, Mrs. Murphy passed away. She is forever tied in my mind to December 7th. I wish her a good afterlife and hope it contains palm trees rustling in the warm trade winds.
Having grown up in Illinois, I've followed the Governor Blagojevich corruption scandal with a sense of nostalgia. My senior year in high school, Paul Powell, the Democratic Secretary of State, died of a heart attack. Under investigation for corruption, a maid found over 800k in cash stuffed in shoe boxes, briefcases and strongboxes in his Springfield hotel room. Powell walked liked he talked: "There's only one thing worse than a defeated politician, and that's a broke one."
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