Monday, May 26, 2008

Sub Vets Memorial Day Ceremony

Today, I took ES with me to the Sub Vets Memorial Day ceremony at the PARCHE memorial on the sub base.

Aside: ES has shown such an interest in taking pictures, we decided to get him his own camera for his birthday. Being a 7 year old boy, we wanted to get him something shock-proof and water-proof, so we got him an Olympus Stylus 850SW. As an added bonus, the camera even comes in his favorite color - yellow. The Sub Vets Memorial Day ceremony today was essentially ES's maiden voyage with his new camera. All the pictures in this post were taken by ES with his new camera (except for the last one).

ES took this photo of me by the PARCHE's
conning tower before the ceremony.

We sat towards the back of the crowd,
but ES walked forward to take some pics.

Commodore Hankins from Submarine Squadron ONE was the guest speaker. He have a very nice eulogy for LT Jeff Ammon and talked about the history and meaning of Memorial Day.

They did the traditional Tolling of the Bells ceremony, but with a Hawaiian variation on it. Just like Sub Vets ceremonies in other home ports, they read off the name of each of the 52 submarines lost in World War II, how the sub was lost, and how many men were lost or captured, and rang the bell. In the ceremony here in Pearl Harbor though, they placed a flower lei on the plaque for each submarine as they read off the names.

View from the front row of seats.

There's a brass plaque on the wall for each sub lost in World War II. I had not noticed before today that there are hooks on the top of each plaque for them to hang the leis. Notice in the picture above the leis hanging from the first half of the top row of plaques as the MC at the podium calls off the names of each of the submarines, and the guy in the middle right rings the bell.

USS BULLHEAD was the last submarine to be sunk in WWII.

After the ceremony was over, we went closer to look at the plaques and talk about some of the boats.


Before we left, I handed the camera off to someone else to get a picture of the two of us.
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1 comment:

  1. JudMay 27, 2008 at 1:31 AM

    Nice job, ES! If you can talk your mom and dad into moving to Utah, we're looking for an intern at the paper for next fall...oh wait. There's no sub base in Utah. Dang.

    Seriously, though, I'd love to hear how the camera works out. I saw those point and shoots at Costco and was intrigued by the waterproof feature. Might be a cool toy to play with in the pool. Or snorkeling?

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