The parade ka-langed and ka-boomed down the street, pretty girls high-stepping. People cheered as sailors and soldiers marched behind them, and why not? We were at war.
What Bob Pennock did next would change his life.
Pennock stepped off the curb and fell in step behind the gaudy procession. He followed it until the parade passed the U.S. Navy’s recruiting office in Houston. He marched in and said he was ready to fight.
A huge one was brewing. The Navy was girding for epic conflict with Japan, and Pennock, 21, joined it. An aerial gunner in World War II, the Atlanta resident came through the war with nothing more serious than a loss of sleep.
“You are looking at the luckiest bastard you’ll ever know,” said Pennock, now 93.
So many others who fought for our country weren’t as fortunate. They’re buried in national cemeteries under gleaming white headstones that inventory our nation’s struggles: Civil War, Spanish-American, World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, to name the best-known. The remains of others, lost in jungle and forest, are known only to the angels.
Since the Civil War, nearly 1 million Americans have been killed in battle. All are honored today, Memorial Day.
For those who made it back, the holiday is a reminder that life can be fleeting. Pennock knows.
He grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, a tall kid with a knack for tackling quarterbacks. In 1938, he enrolled at the University of Texas.
"I didn't want to learn anything," Pennock said. "I just wanted to play football."
He played until a knee injury sidelined him. In 1941, he moved to San Diego, and, against all common-sense advice, signed up to play football with the San Diego Bombers. Pennock, nearly 6-foot-4, figured he could still butt heads.
The team was part of the Pacific Coast Professional Football League, which was racially integrated. Pennock soon heard about a fast-running back for the Los Angeles Bulldogs, a guy named Jackie Robinson.
Yes, that Robinson, No. 42 for the Brooklyn Dodgers, who broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball in 1947.
“That’s when I learned about color, that it doesn’t matter,” Pennock said.
He was playing on Dec. 7, 1941, when newsboys waded into the stands, waving papers and yelling about an attack. “That’s when we learned about Pearl Harbor.”
Pennock enlisted a few months later. Stationed in Lake City, Fla., he helped train flight crews, keeping machine guns operating while novices aimed at targets in the ocean. Pennock soon discovered he had a talent with the guns, .50-caliber weapons that spat bullets the length of a grown man’s index finger.
By 1943, with the United States and Japan battling for supremacy in the Pacific, Pennock decided he couldn’t stay stateside.
“I enlisted … with the sole purpose of getting into some action against the Japanese,” he wrote to the chief of naval personnel at the Lake City air station. “I can have no peace of mind until I accomplish that end.”
He got a transfer and wound up on the USS Princeton, an aircraft carrier launched the year before. His move, he discovered, was a mistake: Officers had asked for an electrician but got him instead. They assigned the new arrival to a squadron of Avenger torpedo planes.
“I’d never seen one before,” Pennock said. The first night of his new assignment, Pennock checked one out. He liked what he saw.
It was a powerful machine, armed with .30- and .50-caliber guns, with the capacity to carry torpedoes or bombs. He also saw something he did not like: the ball turret, defended by the larger gun, was tiny. He was not.
Most turret gunners were 5 foot 10 or shorter; none was as tall as Pennock. They could rest their feet on the turret’s shelf and aim between their legs. Pennock discovered he’d have to tuck one leg under the other to allow room to fire.
Pennock also realized he was too big to wear a parachute in the turret, as shorter gunners did. He’d have to fly without one.
He remembers that first strike, a pre-dawn raid on a Japanese installation at Nauru, an 8-square-mile island in the South Pacific. Pennock squeezed himself into the turret and waited. The Avenger’s 1,900-horsepower engine sang, then screamed. A catapult hurled the machine off the deck, into the darkness over a restless sea. Somewhere in the night, the enemy waited.
They hit Nauru before sunup. A spotlight pierced the dark as the airplanes passed over their target. Anti-aircraft fire banged all around them. The Americans, Pennock knew, were in trouble. He aimed at the light below and started firing. The light went out, and the attack went on.
They returned to the Princeton, where a sailor told Pennock the captain wanted to see him. Thinking the worst — why else would the skipper call him to the bridge? — Pennock trudged up to meet the ship’s old man.
“He complimented me for having a cool head,” Pennock said.
He kept that cool head for more than 30 missions before shipping out from the Princeton in mid-1944. In October, the Princeton sank in the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
Pennock shrugged. “I’ve always had two qualities,” he said. “ ’Dumb’ and ‘lucky.’ ”
Pennock went on to a successful career in the furniture industry. He married, then married a second time after his first wife died. He and Jean Pennock have raised five children to adulthood.
Time has taken its toll on Pennock. He walks with a cane, and each breath is a gift.
But he’s not complaining. Life, he knows, is a gift — a good thing to remember on Memorial Day.
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