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December 2, 2016
Pacific base still at peace on pastor’s Pearl Harbor By Garth Snow
VALOR IN THE PACIFIC: A REMEMBRANCE
gsnow@kpcmedia.com
The U.S. military base of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was big, busy and at peace on Saturday, Dec. 6, 1941. It remains so on Fort Wayne pastor Todd Hammond’s 1-2,400 scale model. Pearl Harbor and the world changed the next morning, Sunday, Dec. 7. Japan sent 353 aircraft and 52 ships and submarines on a surprise attack that destroyed or disabled 19 U.S. Navy ships and more than 300 U.S. aircraft. The attack claimed 2,403 military and civilian lives, with more than half that number aboard the USS Arizona. By the next day, the U.S. was at war with the Empire of Japan. Within days, the U.S. was swept up in a global conflict. The Great War that had been fought just one generation before Pearl Harbor would now be known simply as World War I. The U.S. and its allies would win the new war less than four years later. The cost of the struggle between
9-10 a.m. Wednesday, Dec. 7
National Museum of the U.S. Navy, Building 76, Washington Navy Yard, Washington, D.C. A remembrance ceremony and exhibit preview. Two vice admirals and the museum director will install the final two pieces of the exhibit. This exhibit incorporates artifacts, photographs and film footage. The ceremony closes with a wreath-laying with 99-year-old Pearl Harbor survivor Chief Frank Ruby. The exhibit, which continues through March 1, includes a Pearl Harbor scale model created by Fort Wayne pastor Todd Hammond. The pastor is seeking funding to transport the model to the capital; visit gofundme.com. Find more information about the exhibit at history.navy.mil/nmusn.
PHOTO BY GARTH SNOW
Todd Hammond’s scale model of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, occupies most of his Fort Wayne garage. The model will be part of an exhibit through March 1 at the National Museum of the U.S. Navy in Washington, D.C.
World War II victors would continue to be paid at new borders across the globe for generations to come. Hammond chooses to remember the last day before that dramatic and permanent change. It’s still a bright Saturday on Hammond’s little, peaceful
Pacific island, which will go on display 75 Decembers later at the National Museum of the U.S. Navy in Washington, D.C. The USS Arizona rests in Battleship Row. Hammond, the pastor of Agape Church of the Brethren, has preserved
Nostalgia takes the reins at Christmas in Country By Garth Snow gsnow@kpcmedia.com
FILE PHOTO
Horse-drawn wagons will carry visitors through the Allen County Fairgrounds to enjoy the stillness and admire the decorated trees at Christmas in the Country.
club will take four teams to take turns pulling two wagons. The clop-clop of hooves will echo through the stillness. Strings of holiday lights will silhouette the leafless trees. Families will bundle up in blankets for the adventure that will leave them right where they started. “We get a tremendous
amount of comments. That’s why we’re there every year,” said Griffis, a horsemen’s association board member and former vice president. “People really enjoy it. They will ride all the wagons. People get off one wagon and get on another one. See REINS, Page A12
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Teams of horses pulled plows and wagons in the farming community where Dick Griffis was raised. Griffis watched such a team from the seat of a snowplow that his father built. That was at Carroll and Hand roads, north of Fort Wayne. That was early in Griffis’ story, which is 76 and growing. It’s a special feeling that has defied time. Griffis and other members of the DeKalb County Horsemen’s Association share that feeling with crowds at about 90 events each year. They will do so again four nights in December at Christmas in the Country at the Allen County Fairgrounds. Griffis said the club’s horse-drawn contingent is always received warmly on those cold nights. The
that moment on a meticulously painted plywood base that holds ships, housing and airfields. His 25-year project has won the support of a survivor of that attack. Chief Frank Ruby, USN, retired, was aboard an oiling barge moored off
Merry Point that morning in 1941. Ruby first visited Hammond’s scale Pearl Harbor years ago in Dayton, Ohio. “He was very impressed when I first met him and I invited him to come and see my little mini-museum,” Hammond said. “He was just sort of humoring me. He thought it would be a few model ships. In fact, he had made a model of the Arizona and then he had seen someone else’s model of the Arizona Memorial, so he was keen to come see it. But then he saw the size of it and the detail involved and he was
terribly impressed, and he said ‘Oh, you have to share this.’ And at that point there were a number of friends of his — veterans, both Navy and Army Air Corps — who came to see it.” Ruby proposed to take the model to elementary schools on a flatbed truck, “which would have been just untenable,” Hammond said. “Then he gave the contact information to the director of the National Museum of the United States Navy, and I offered to loan or even donate the model to them. They See PEARL, Page A15