Dorinda Nicholson was 6 years old and living on the Pearl City Peninsula when Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. She still has vivid memories.
The octogenarian was back in Honolulu to help open a new exhibit at the USS Battleship Missouri Memorial. Her story is the basis for “Life After Infamy: The Resilience of the Aloha Spirit in Wartime Hawaii.”
She lent various wartime artifacts to the exhibit, including her gas mask and the bullets her dad dug out of the kitchen walls. She's also authored a couple of books about growing up in wartime Hawaiʻi, and is even the inspiration behind the American Girl doll Nanea.
The Conversation sat down with Nicholson, who encouraged others to share their story. She now lives in the Kansas City area and flew to Honolulu for the June 25 opening.
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DORINDA NICHOLSON: I've been telling this story for a long time. And I want the listeners to know how important it is to write your own family history. You don't have to be an eyewitness to a 9/11 or any major event. You are an eyewitness to where your family came from. The exhibit on the USS Missouri will be up for about a year, and it features the work that Red Cross did during that time. And the part that is the most touching to me, in fact I cried when I looked at that panel, was hula won the war, according to me. My mother was a kumu in the Pearl City area, and now we're talking the '40s, '50s, '60s. My heritage is Hawaiian and haole. I love the stories my mother tells me who was born in 1896 when Hawaiʻi was still a monarch and Hawaiian being our first language, being punished for speaking Hawaiian. So my generation grows up not learning our language. Nobody's teaching it because we're going to be so American. And I started telling my story at the 25th anniversary of the beginning of the war where I now live in the Kansas City area. And, you know, I thought 25th anniversary. So I contacted the newspaper and said I have a story. And they said, please write it. So I asked Mom and Dad, you know, what do you remember? Send me pictures. And I wrote the story, and it got published in the big Sunday edition. And I folded up the newspaper, put it away in the drawer, and really another 25 years goes by, and it's now 1991 and the papers are saying huge anniversary, the 50th of the beginning of the war. And so I called Honolulu, and I said, I understand you have this commemoration event. Who are your speakers? And they said it was admiral so and so and captain such and such, and a historian and biographer and I said, do you have any natives speaking? Oh, no. And I said, do you have any women speaking? No. Do you have any children of the war? They said children weren't involved. And I said I want to tell you my story. And the Arizona Memorial, the committee, or the group that was in charge of the memorial events asked me to write my story, and they first published it. And then National Geographic saw my book, and I was so pleased because World War II had been documented, but nobody told the children's stories. When my story was published, servicemen, Pearl Harbor survivors, my Japanese neighbors, people started bringing me their stories. What a makana, what a gift. And so I added those stories to the back of mine and found out there's so many stories. One of the men, he's on the West Virginia battleship, the bugler, so he's up on the bridge getting ready to blow [the bugle call] so the men know to get up and in position to raise the flag at 8 a.m. And out of the corner of his eye, he sees this low-flying airplane, and his first response is, how dare that American plane come in here like that. And it's Sunday morning, I'm going to get the number off the tail of his airplane. I'll have him court-martialed. And then out of the belly of the plane are the torpedoes. They take six of them. His ship is sunk. He only survives when Capt. [Mervyn] Bennion actually tells the men abandon ship, and he swims to Ford Island. I treasure those stories, but that illustrates the sheer shock and surprise. It can't happen. And my dad and I run out in the yard, we look up and it's early. It's, you know, it's just a little before 8 a.m. And because of where we live, right by the water, the planes are coming in so low, and the canopy opened up, and when the pilots are looking, you can see the goggles on their eyes. We were that close, just barely above our house top and our rooftop. I'd love to know what my 25-year-old father was thinking. He grabbed me, went in the house, got baby brother out of the crib. Mom put us in the back seat, and we drove up Lehua Avenue, cross Kamehameha Highway and go straight up, the Waimano Home was located up there, and then just sugar cane fields, and pretty soon, more and more and more of our neighbors were coming. That's when we started listening to the car radio. Webley Edwards was an old-time radio broadcaster, and he came on the air saying, "Stay in your house. This is the real McCoy. This is not a drill."
LILLIAN TSANG, INTERVIEWER: The memories you have, what happened to your family, to evacuate, hearing what was coming over the radio. These are all parts of wartime. Going back to this exhibit, though, why is it important to continue sharing your story? What would you like to underscore about life after infamy?
NICHOLSON: Here in Hawaiʻi and at the USS Missouri, we are telling our story. I believe my exhibit is important. We are the ground zero of the beginning of the war and the resiliency, again, of the aloha spirit. Hawaiʻi changed so much so quickly. The military had to send their families away. So you have this exodus, less people to watch, guard, feed, and so you're going to fill ships, send all the women and children away and put these young men who signed up to come to Hawaiʻi shores. The military is everywhere, but you bring them home with you, and you thank them for their service. You see them hitchhiking. You pick them up, the men in the harbor. In fact, we imported workers to work in the shipyards. The West Virginia that I mentioned to you that sunk, I love that it was raised, because Pearl Harbor is shallow, so we didn't lose it in the deep ocean. We raised it, fixed it, and it attended the USS Missouri ceremony Sept. 2, Tokyo Bay, 1945. It was there, the beginning of the war and at the end of the war, and just one of the many stories of living through that time. The men, such a time of coming together, and we felt such a love for our country and for the flag, and what can I do. So when I visit today, and I talk to schools and kids, and in fact, there's an American Girl doll that is my story, and I love the way the message ends with her in that Nanea asks, "What can you do now?" You know, does your tutu, nan, need you to take out the garbage? Do you need to go pick up trash in your neighborhood? Does your teacher need help? What can you do to help with the aloha spirit on your own? And no wait for an anniversary, right, today, your history, your story, your family needs your story.
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The exhibit will be on display through June 2025 — just prior to the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.
This interview aired on The Conversation on July 2, 2024. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1.
