It's Friday, the day of the week when I pass along a quotation intended to be uplifting or educational. Today's words of enlightenment come from a high school student I've never met or even heard about until yesterday. Her quote is about Richard C. Higgins, who died at 102 this week. Dick Higgins was one of the last remaining U.S. Navy "band of brothers" who survived Japan's Dec. 7, 1941 surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. He passed away on Tuesday.
If you worry that Americans today, particularly Millennials and their young Gen Z successors, are pampered woke snowflakes who take this country for granted -- and who use our hard-won freedoms to denigrate this nation's history and promise -- take a trip to Oregon, to the small city of Bend located on the lovely Deschutes River.
This past Dec. 7, Bend High School observed National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day by paying homage to the 33 Bend High graduates who lost their lives during World War II, along with six MIAs. The occasion was also celebrated as "Dick Higgins Day" in honor of its famous 102-year-old resident who was present for the ceremony.
"I never expected something like this," Higgins told a local television reporter. "I'm very honored to be here. I just represent all those that couldn't be here."
Dick Higgins, known as "Gramps" in Bend, grew up on an Oklahoma farm that withered under the dual scourges of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. Military service offered a new start in life, not to mention three square meals a day, so Higgins volunteered in January 1941. He initially signed up as an aviation mechanic, but was serving as a radioman in Hawaii on the day the 7th Fleet was attacked. On that fateful Sunday morning, he rushed out of the barracks as the bombs fell to see a 20-foot crater in place of the plane that had brought him to Hawaii two days earlier. As the bombs fell and Japanese Zeros strafed the base, Higgins and other men started towing planes away from each other to prevent further carnage.
"I was moving planes away from ones that were on fire, because when the tanks exploded, they threw burning gas on the others," he recalled in a 2008 oral history. Higgins spent the rest of the war performing similar heroics and retired from the Navy in 1959.
In civilian life, he was an engineer and he and his wife Winnie Ruth, who died at age 82, raised two children before eventually setting in Orange County, California. Ten years ago, when his memory started to fail, "Gramps" went to live with the family of granddaughter Angela Norton in Oregon.
"I just never left his side," Angela told the Orange County Register after he passed away three days ago. "I wanted to be with him on his final breath. At 1:42 a.m., he went home to be with his savior and his wife, Winnie Ruth."
But the last word this morning belongs to a Bend High School junior named Carlie Shields. After attending the Pearl Harbor Day assembly in December, she said this:
"It's an absolute honor being here today. Mr. Higgins was an absolute delight to have. It's pretty incredible being able to celebrate him."
And that is our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon
