A sailor’s strange and wondrous journey back from Pearl Harbor – The Mercury News

Thomas Curwen | (TNS) Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — No one knows where Everett Titterington was when the first torpedoes slammed into the USS Oklahoma on that infamous day in 1941. Was he thrown out of his bunk? Was he thrown to the deck? Did he die fast, or did he die slow?

The force of the explosions, as one survivor recounted, seemed to lift the massive battleship out of the water before it settled and, within 15 minutes, capsized. Titterington was one of the 429 sailors and Marines attached to the Oklahoma, who were killed during the attack, and one of the 2,400 who perished at Pearl Harbor.

When the news reached Milford, Iowa, Titterington’s hometown, details were sketchy. His family had to wait almost two weeks before a telegram arrived, addressed to his mother.

The Navy Department deeply regrets to inform you that your son Everett Cecil Titterington Fireman First Class US Navy is missing….

Hardship and grief seemed forever braided into Pearl Titterington’s life. She had lost her husband 15 years earlier — in a scaffolding collapse — leaving her with five children, ages 15 months to 6. The family had weathered the Depression, but now the country was at war and Everett, her oldest boy, would soon be reported dead.

A new sorrow had forced itself into her home, an unwanted guest she and her children made room for, and every year on Dec. 7, they were reminded of its unwanted presence in their lives.

The country’s public honoring of those lost at Pearl Harbor never quieted their grief, the stories they told themselves, the words they shared, the feelings they passed from one generation to another.

“It’s never been about Pearl Harbor for me,” said April McKinnon, Pearl Titterington’s great-granddaughter. “It’s always been about the uncle who never came home.”

Some service members killed aboard the Oklahoma were identified, but most, like Titterington, were laid in mass graves, marked “Unknowns,” in a cemetery on a hill above Honolulu.

Unknown until the phone rang this year, and McKinnon was told that bones had been identified through DNA analysis as Titterington’s. Her great-granduncle was coming home.

Sitting with the news of Titterington’s imminent return, McKinnon felt a familiar current of grief sparking inside her, but this time it was different, as if it had suddenly branched throughout the family tree. She wanted to tell her mother, who had died two years earlier. She wanted to tell her grandmother, who died in 1994. She wanted to tell her great-grandmother, who died in 1964.

“Their dreams and thoughts and hopes were passed onto us, but also their sorrow,” she said.

Yet McKinnon also felt something else. Wiping away tears, she wondered: Was it happiness and pride as well?

Grief is an uneasy inheritance, but McKinnon had accepted its terms. If generations of women before her could bear this pain, then so could she. Just as Titterington had been in their lives, so had he been in hers.

Yet still she puzzled over this man, whose life she never knew but for fragments of memory and family lore. She pulled out a large Tupperware box she had stored in her garage in Rancho Mirage after she and her sister, Lora Parrish, had cleaned out their mother’s home two years ago.

Inside were a folded American flag, a Purple Heart, decorations and medals, a certificate signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, gold-fringed souvenir pillow cases from Hawaii and California that Titterington had brought home, pages from an old family album and an 8×10.

Standing in his apprentice seaman uniform, he looked like a child playing soldier. At 5-foot-7 and 137 pounds, according to enlistment papers, he was a wisp. Blue eyes, ruddy complexion and light brown hair, he reminded her of her grandmother.

McKinnon studied the image, so outlined in grief. She knew Titterington not for who he was but for the emptiness he left behind.

Everett Cecil Titterington was born Aug. 25, 1920, in the heart of America’s Corn Belt, in a town of 440 residents, close to the Minnesota border. His parents were eager to start a family, and in five years, they had five children, which only made his father’s death at the age of 26 all the more tragic.

Fatherless at 5, Titterington grew up close to his uncle’s family, who started calling him Buzz. He joined the Boy Scouts and attended school through eighth grade and worked for a year as a bar boy at Ye Olde Town Tavern.

In 1937, he enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps, which got him out on his own: farmwork for room and board, clothing and a salary. Every month, he sent home $25.

Not quite 19, he set his sights on the Navy. For references, he listed the mayor, the butcher, the dairyman and the service station operator, and his mother signed papers saying that she wouldn’t request his early discharge.

After training 30 miles north of Chicago on Lake Michigan, he was eventually posted in March 1940 to the Oklahoma, based in Pearl Harbor as part of the Pacific Fleet. A fireman first class, he worked next to the boilers that powered the World War I-era ship.

The small-town boy had traded the big skies and furrowed plains of the Midwest for the blue Pacific stretching to the horizon.

Furloughed once, he made it home in early 1941, buying his niece, less than a year old, a sweater set and presenting his uncle with a ring that he had made from a 50-cent piece.

When imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Titterington had just turned 21, and for 18 months the Oklahoma would be his watery grave, lying semi-submerged on its side in the mud flats of the harbor until righted for salvage and specialists entered its catacombs to retrieve his remains and those of his fellow servicemen.

McKinnon tried to imagine what his mother might have felt upon learning that her son was missing. Not quite a year ago, McKinnon had danced with her own son at his wedding. He was 26, his life just starting.