Editor’s note: The following was written by Athens author Bill Hunt, an occasional contributor to The News Courier. We are happy to publish the piece as Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day is Friday.

Colorful lights were strung from one side of Main Street to the other for almost a mile. Along with the crowds shopping, the lights signaled the happiest time of the year. Christmas was coming. For me, it meant I’d be 7 years old in only a few days.

I went with my mother that evening to visit my grandmother in town. Their conversation quickly turned to a place with a pretty name, Pearl Harbor. It was a name I’d heard several times when I listened with my grandfather, who lived with us, to his big Zenith radio in our living room.

When visiting at my grandmother’s house, my mother and grandmother always spoke in French, which I did not understand. But it wasn’t long that evening before I realized Pearl Harbor apparently had great significance, especially with my grandmother, who began to cry. I sat back in my chair, wondering if I should console her or also cry. I didn’t know why this strong and usually very happy woman was shedding tears about a place with a pretty name. On the way home, my mother explained why Pearl Harbor was important, about war and about how our large family was going to change.

By my ninth birthday in 1943, I’d become old enough to see and feel the impact of the Pearl Harbor of Dec. 7, 1941. From our family, seven cousins and two uncles, my grandmother’s two sons, were at war somewhere. I’d learned from daily reports from my grandfather and his Zenith radio the entire world had become a dangerous place, even for little towns like mine, places that were seldom thought of in the backwoods of Louisiana.

In time, I had become the responsible person in my family to save the tinfoil from gum wrappers, the toothpaste tubes for the lead in them, and to roll them into balls to take to Aunt Sook’s country store for the bread delivery man to pick up and deliver to a government drop-off point in town. And every broken plow or discarded pieces of iron I could find on the farm, I’d take in a burlap sack on the school bus.

It was exciting to hurl the iron as far as I could onto the growing pile of scrap beside the flag pole. The heap eventually towered to 20 feet. Like everyone I knew, I was a patriot, too.

Dec. 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor; “a date which will live in infamy” our President said. And so it has, and after many years and many reminders every year, I now can hear the bombs, see the smoke and feel the pain as though I had been at Pearl Harbor on that Sunday morning, a day that awakened our nation and its people who stood proud and tall, never floundering in their determination to defend freedom at home and around the world.

And now, 77 years from 1941, I rejoice in having seen firsthand the sacrifice, the will and the power of “the greatest generation.” Today, under the Christmas lights in 2018, I’m most grateful to have lived my life in freedom beneath the magnificent furls of the Stars and Stripes, my flag, my country.