Amherst Regional High School students earlier this month received a valuable history lesson from a man who lived through the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor nearly 77 years ago.
U.S. Navy veteran Leonard Gardner, 96, an Amherst native, described the chaotic scene he witnessed from the destroyer USS Reid as the bombing began Dec. 7, 1941. A signalman, he was sent below to rouse the crew sleeping late on a Sunday.
“You can imagine the reception I got when trying to wake them up,” Gardner told the high school students. “I might as well have told them Martians were landing.”
As the assault continued with some 350 Japanese planes overhead, the American gunners on his ship and others began firing at everything in the air. “If a bird flew over, it became a target,” he recalled.
Gardner described a frightening situation, with the sailors aboard the USS Reid uncertain about what they would face as they made their way from Pearl Harbor into the open sea. “Confusion and chaos was rampant,” he said.
They also had no idea whether the mainland United States was under attack, because, as Gardner reminded the students, communication then was not what it is today. “There was no TV news, there was no instant pictures of far-away wars.”
Gardner spent much of World War II assigned to the USS Reid in the Pacific theater, though he was not on board Dec. 11, 1944, when the destroyer sank from repeated Japanese kamikaze plane crashes.
Gardner, who now lives in Virginia, returned to his hometown to receive an honorary degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he earned a history degree after the war and met his future wife, Doris. They have been married for 71 years. He went on to work for the Naval Research Laboratory, Navy Bureau of Aeronautics and National Science Foundation.
Gardner said he never regretted his decision to join the Navy after graduating from high school at age 16, rather than remaining a clerk at the Grange store in downtown Amherst. “Every man, woman and child old enough to participate, participated in World War II,” he said.
It was a meaningful lesson for the students. Isabela Shepard, 16, a sophomore from Amherst, said, “It touches us a lot more than if it’s just a teacher teaching us.”
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Beit Ahavah, the reform synagogue of greater Northampton, marked a milestone May 12 with a party celebrating its 20th anniversary.
One of its founders marveled at the achievement. “I sure hoped it would last and I really didn’t project 20 years out,” Judy Goldman said. “We were just, at the time, going day by day, week by week, as we created the congregation. I am extremely excited about the 20-year anniversary.”
The congregation began in the living room of the home shared by Goldman and Sheldon Snodgrass in Williamsburg 20 years ago. Today, the congregation shares a building with the Florence Congregational Church.
“Many synagogues don’t make it and we’ve magically made it and we continue to thrive and that is a great thing,” Goldman said. “That is such a beautiful thing.”
We salute Beit Ahavah as it begins its third decade as a significant Jewish institution in the Valley.
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Congratulations to jazz musician Felipe Salles, of Florence, who in April was named one of this year’s 173 recipients of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
Salles, 44, an associate professor of jazz and African-American music at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said, “It took me about four or five years to get the courage to apply because it’s so prestigious.”
The fellowships are awarded to artists and scholars “who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts,” and are funded for between six and 12 months.
Salles, a native of Brazil, plans to use his fellowship for a project titled “Dreamers: The New Immigrant Experience,” exploring the role of language in shaping culture and people’s identities. He will interview immigrants in New York City who have been part of the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program, and compose music inspired by those conversations.
We wish Salles well with his groundbreaking work that should illuminate the challenges faced by these contemporary immigrants in America.