HOLLAND (WHTC-AM/FM) — On this 77th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 2018, it seems fitting to remember the long and interesting life of Holland native Frank Verano.
He was eating breakfast on the mess deck — he recalled it was scrambled eggs — of the USS Detroit at Pearl Harbor when the bombs began falling. He was not one of the 2,400 Americans killed in the U.S. naval base attack that destroyed or damaged five battleships, including the USS Arizona. What then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt, called “a day that will live in infamy,” led to a declaration of war on Japan on Dec. 8, 1941, and on Germany three days later.
Frank Verano, son of Italian immigrants, one of that couple’s 10 children, graduated from Holland High School at 17, in 1936, in the midst of the Great Depression. He found work first with the Civilian Conservation Corporation, the government labor corps, where he worked planting trees.
As war seemed to loom, he wanted to join the military, knowing he’d likely get drafted and wanting to choose a branch of service. First the U.S. Marines rejected him, then the U.S. Navy did. He was a scrawny 109 pounds.
He tried the U.S. Navy when he was 23, when the need for recruits was greater, and they let him in. He became a radio man, a guy with a natural proclivity to all things technology.
He got onto Facebook and Twitter — and even had a LinkedIn account, not that the happily retired former electrical engineer was looking for work. He listed his graduation with a bachelor’s of science degree from MIT in 1952, recapped some of his life’s achievements, finishing his LinkedIn bio by asking, “… why am I in Linkedin when I should be sitting in a rocking chair with a cigar in my mouth and a martini in hand?”
He was filled with curiousity, that’s why.
He routinely talked to groups of all ages about his Pearl Harbor experiences at March Air Force Field Museum in Riverside, California. In 2008, he told a group of students, “Live as if you’re going to die tomorrow and learn as if you’re going to live forever.”
In 2007, he recalled his experiences on Dec. 7, 1941. He’d been eating breakfast on the USS Detroit when he felt two depth charges and heard the ship’s alarm signalling that sounds were not a drill.
“When we saw the destruction that took place, and the smoldering of the battleship row, then we know it was going to be a long war,” he told KZSW reporters.
After his six years of military service, he graduated from Michigan State and went on to earn an engineering degree from MIT, then to working as an electrical engineer for Lockheed, where his met his wife, Lois. They married in 1958; she died in 1985, according to a Feb. 23, 2018, story in the Riverside Press-Enterprise. In the early 1950s, he and a Holland pal, Bob Lokker, filed a patent for inventing better circuit coils.
He taught college classes, he wrote books — most light-hearted joke collections — and often went days without mentioning Pearl Harbor. He was soft spoken and quick to joke, loved music so well that he continued playing guitar as long as possible, one of several instruments he mastered during his long life: ukulele, marimba, harmonica were some.
In April, he emailed a group of friends one of the two newsletters he wrote and edited. He always had some project or another going on, something to keep his mind busy.
In a 2014 Facebook post to friends about a 1941 photo of himself with some fellow sailors, he wrote, “During the WW2 in the Pacific, when on rare occasion when the ship returned to Francisco after being at sea for many months, the sight of the general public (that we were defending!) was shocking to say the least. Instead of young robust men between 20 and 30 years, we would see little people (called babies), girls, women, old people some who could hardly walk, they were Struldbrugs. The norm at sea consisted of youth and vigor. The norm ashore consisted of a sordid motley of humans. (Now I am one, a Struldbrug.)”
Frank Verano longed to visit his hometown one more time, knowing the city would be different, his friends gone, the tulips returning every year. Curiousity. But he was too frail.
Holland native Frank Verano turned 100 on Jan. 28, 2018, and died July 14, 2018. He is buried at Riverside National Cemetery in California.
