Lesson from Pearl Harbor veteran
No glory in war, says 100-year-old
James Blakely survived the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor aboard the St. Louis, and Saturday his loved ones threw him a 100th birthday party in Brooklyn.
Before the party at Sacred Heart of Faiths Church, I dropped into Blakely’s nearby apartment as he dressed in a fine back suit, bow tie and spanking new white Air Jordans.
“Oh, boy, my, oh, my, the Daily News is here again,” he said, smiling broadly as he shook my hand. “You heard I turned a hundred? I don’t feel it. Matter fact, I can still hear the tap-tap-tap of the men on my ship when we were out in the Pacific who were trapped behind the wall as the water rushed in on them, uh huh, but we couldn’t burn a hole in time to get them out. That tapping, that still sounds like yesterday. I used to say I’ll remember that if I live to be a hundred. Now what do I say?”
James Blakely fell into a deep silence, the furrows on his brow like the waves of the Pacific he sailed after Pearl Harbor to Guam, Guadalcanal and New Zealand, winning combat ribbons and bearing the burns of poison gas. “I remember them poor nurses at Pearl, oh, boy, running to get back to the hospital and those Japanese planes swooping down and firing the machine guns at them.”
He pulled on a Navy hat and said his secret for a long life was the good Lord. “I also never touched alcohol or tobacco,” he said. “I can’t say I never touched a pretty girl. That was my vice. In fact I was raised in Little Rock, Ark., which was not a good place to be a person of color. One day a white guy went out of his way to step on my shoe. So I stepped back on his. That didn’t go over big in Arkansas so my grandfather, who’d served in WWI told me to go join the Navy before they strung me up.”
James Blakely joined the segregated United States Navy and was assigned to mess aboard the St. Louis when the Japanese planes came out of the predawn sky on Dec. 7, 1941.
“A few bombs landed on our ship but didn’t explode,” he said. “But I’ll never forget the alarms and the screams and the roar of the engines.”
After the war Blakely settled in Brooklyn, working long shore, and then as a janitor at NYU. He took a GI loan and bought a brownstone in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
Eight years ago, Brooklyn College history professor Phil Napoli informed me that there might be a Pearl Harbor vet living in a trailer without running water in a junkyard on Buffalo Ave. in BedfordI
Stuyvesant. drove out there to look for him.
I found James Blakely, Pearl Harbor veteran, washing himself with cold water from a bucket. He invited me into his trailer where a biography of Satchel Paige, the legendary African American baseball pitcher, lay on a single bed.
James Blakely told me his life story in an hour, focusing on the part where a grandson had swindled him out of his house in one of those fast money schemes and how he lived in his car for a year before he was mugged at age 91 and a local junk dealer offered him a bed in the trailer.
The column ran in the next day’s Daily News. Two days after that the city’s Department of Veterans Affairs had him in an apartment. He’s still there.
On Saturday, his family and friends threw him a bash including Commissioner James Hendon of the city Department of Veterans’ Services, reps from Borough President Eric Adams, local pols and Pastor Glover Reed.
James Blakely was honored.
But when I asked him to smile for a picture he said, “What’s there to smile about? I was at Pearl Harbor and served in WWII. I lived through Korea, Vietnam, and all these other wars in the Middle East. Now, boy, oh, boy, there are rumors of war with Iran. It’s always the young boy who gets killed in these terrible wars as the old-timers make money and get elected. War is not something you want for any child of yours or anyone you love.”
Especially if you survive the Jim Crow South, Pearl Harbor, the rest of WWII in the Pacific Theater, and homelessness in your 90s.
“You never get over war,” said James Blakely. “Not even if you live to be a hundred.”