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November 11, 2021 @ 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Park City Museum will host a Veterans Day Lecture given by David Nicholas and Steve Leatham on Thursday, November 11th from 5-6 p.m. at the Park City Museum Education and Collections Center Building located at 2079 Sidewinder Drive in Park City. Please register for the lecture at www.parkcityhistory.org.
In a live Veterans Day lecture, David Nicholas and Steve Leatham pay tribute to all those who have so nobly served our country. Nicholas and Leatham will look back 80 years to the events leading up to Pearl Harbor. The two will trace Park City’s unique connection to the “day that will live in infamy.” From the development of the B-18 “peace time” bomber to the sinking of the USS Arizona on December 7, 1941, the local historians will tell the story of a courageous group of airmen and a navy coxswain whose lives came together on that ill-fated day.
That Sunday morning began calmly enough at the U. S. Army’s Opana radar station located on the north shore of Hawaii’s Oahu Island. Unexpectedly at 7:02 a.m. the radar scope picked up an enormous flight of incoming aircraft. The system could not tell an inbound target’s altitude, size or number, nor could it differentiate friend from foe. This information was forwarded to the officer on duty at the Fort Shafter Information Center east of Pearl Harbor. The officer felt sure that Opana had picked up a flight of twelve B-17 Flying Fortresses coming from the mainland to Hawaii and at 7:20 a.m. told the radar operators not to “worry about it.” Three of the B-17E’s had ties to Park City.
Seven of the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s battleships lay in port at Pearl Harbor along “Battleship Row.” Most of Arizona’s 21 member band were on deck preparing to play music for the daily flag raising ceremony when the ship’s air raid alarm went off at 7:55 a.m. At 8:06 a.m. a bomb hit the black powder magazine near the forward section of the ship. A cataclysmic explosion shattered the battleship instantly killing a young man from Park City and 1,176 of his USS Arizona shipmates.
In the latest in a series of talks emanating from the crash of an Air Corps bomber on Iron Mountain in November of 1941, David and Steve reveal new information discovered in their ongoing research of that incident in relationship to December 7, 1941. Rory Murphy will join the two with a first-hand account of what it is like to bail out of an airplane on a “dark and stormy night.”
If you have any questions, please contact Diane Knispel at education@parkcityhistory.org or 435-574-9554.
Register for this lecture