Seventy years ago tomorrow, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt bore his blue eyes into the primitive newsreel cameras and said, famously:
“Dec. 7, 1941, is a day that will live in infamy.”
Infamy, however, isn’t what it used to be.
FDR guessed way wrong about its shelf life.
If he had been more prescient, he would have said:
“Dec. 7 is a day that ought to live in infamy 20 or 30 years.”
Some people forget. Many others never knew.
At 7 o’clock on that dreary Sunday morning in 1941, the Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and thousands of defenseless American military personnel; were wiped out.
In a vastly different world cluttered with high-tech diversions, daily front-page wars and nearly devoid of survivors of that horrible strike, Dec. 7 nowadays has more in common with Sept. 20½, Grandparents Day or Arbor Day in Burma. In speeded-up times, Dec. 7 is an unremarkable, forgettable yawn, the way the start dates for the Great War and the Civil War faded into oblivion for earlier generations.
Tomorrow will be special, though, for Fred Iglesias of Culver City. He missed Pearl Harbor because he was only 13 years, but three years later he convinced military recruiters that, at a secret 16, he was mature enough to go to war.
Mr. Iglesias is an amazing pillar of the community today for numerous accomplishments and associations.
One of the busiest members of the Culver City Historical Society, he is one of two or three fixtures at every Monday night City Council meeting.
Everybody Knows Him
Except for illness, no one can recall the last time this outgoing, broadly knowledgeable 83-year-old widower missed a Council meeting.
Thankfully, he came to last night’s meeting.
Otherwise, Dec. 7 would have skidded past City Hall and the rest of the community unacknowledged.
In his always recognizable high-pitched voice, attired in his uniform of jacket and baseball cap, Mr. Iglesias strode to the microphone as if he does it every week. Rarely, though, does he speak publicly.
As a member of the G.I. Generation, Mr. Iglesias said he wanted ti salute his fellow veterans.
He was too polite to say that America has virtually forgotten, or at least chosen to ignore, him and his peers, and especially the significance of Dec. 7.
Mr. Iglesias went on, at length, as old soldiers are wont to do, about his war zone experiences.
Scott Malsin, Chair of the Redevelopment Agency, smiled kindly as Mr. Iglesias sailed past the usually sacred 3-minute maximum.
Mr. Malsin kindly indicated that Mr. Iglesias could continue until he finish his whole story.
When he did, Mayor Mehaul O’Leary, an immigrant from Dublin born closer to the Vietnam War than World War II, had only a three-word salute to Mr. Iglesias:
God bless America.”
