No one is aware of Everett Titterington’s location when the first missiles struck the USS Oklahoma on that notorious time in 1941. Was he forced to leave his bedroom? Was he thrown from the board? Did he die quickly, or did he die sluggish?
The power of the blasts, as one victim recounted, seemed to pull the huge ship out of the waters before it settled and, within 15 moments, capsized. Titterington was one of the 429 sailors and Marines attached to the Oklahoma, who were killed during the invasion, and one of the 2, 400 who perished at Pearl Harbor.
When the information reached Milford, Iowa, Titterington’s home, facts were dubious. A letter addressed to his family was about two weeks away from his family.
The Navy Department regrets greatly that Everett Cecil Titterington Fireman First Class US Navy is missing.
Hardship and anguish seemed long braided into Pearl Titterington’s career. She had lost her husband 15 years earlier, when a crane fell, leaving her with five youngsters, ranging from 15 months to 6 years old. The home had weathered the Despair, but now the land was at war and Everett, her oldest son, would immediately become reported dead.
Every year on December 7, they were reminded of the unnecessary appearance of it in their life because a new grief had forced itself into her house, an unwanted visitor she and her kids made place for.
The country’s open honouring of those lost at Pearl Harbor not quieted their pain, the tales they told themselves, the words they shared, the emotions they passed from one generation to another.
” It’s never been about Pearl Harbor for me”, said April McKinnon, Pearl Titterington’s great-granddaughter. The brother who rarely returned has always been the subject.
Some service members killed aboard the Oklahoma were identified, but most, like Titterington, were laid in large tombs, marked” Uncertainties”, in a graveyard on a hill above Honolulu.
Mysterious until the phone rang this year, when McKinnon was informed that Titterington’s bones had been determined by DNA research. Her great-granduncle was coming house.
Sitting with the announcement of Titterington’s inevitable return, McKinnon felt a common current of anguish sparking inside her, but this time it was different, as if it had instantly branched throughout the household trees. She wanted to tell her family, who had died two years earlier. She wanted to tell her aunt, who died in 1994. She wanted to tell her great-grandmother, who died in 1964.
” Their goals and thoughts and hopes were passed onto us, but even their sorrow”, she said.
McKinnon nevertheless felt something different. Wiping away tears, she wondered: Was it joy and pleasure as also?
Grief is an uncomfortable legacy, but McKinnon had accepted its words. She may endure this suffering if generations of women before her. He had been in her life only as Titterington had been in it.
Yet she remained perplexed by this person, whose life she had no idea existed except for recollections and family history. After two years of cleaning up their mother’s house with her sister, Lora Parrish, she and her sister Lora Parrish, pulled out a sizable Plastic box from her door in Rancho Mirage.
A wrapped American flag, a Purple Heart, designs and awards, a certificate signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, memory pillow cases from Hawaii and California that Titterington had brought home, sites from an old home record, and an 810
Standing in his assistant man even, he looked like a baby playing man. At 5-foot-7 and 137 weight, according to advancement papers, he was a wisp. Blue eyes, red color and light brown hair, he reminded her of her mother.
McKinnon studied the image, but outlined in pain. She was aware of Titterington for the loneliness he left behind rather than for who he was.
Everett Cecil Titterington was born Aug. 25, 1920, in the center of America’s Corn Belt, in a city of 440 people, close to the Minnesota borders. His parents were eager to start a home, and in five years, they had five children, which just made his father’s death at the age of 26 all the more horrible.
Fatherless at 5, Titterington grew up close to his friend’s relatives, who started calling him Buzz. He joined the Boy Scouts, went to school through seventh grade, and worked for a time as a table son 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, clothes and a wage. Every month, he sent household$ 25.
Not really 19, he set his sights on the Navy. For references, he listed the president, the barber, the farmer and the service station controller, and his mom signed papers saying that she would n’t ask his first 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. Next to the boilers that powered the World War I-era ship, he was a first-class fireman.
The small-town boy had traded the Midwest’s wide skies and sloping plains for the blue Pacific that stretched to the horizon.
After being let go once, he returned home in early 1941, buying his niece, who was less than a year old, a sweater set, and giving his uncle a ring he had made out of a 50-cent piece.
Titterington was just 21 when the imperial Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the Oklahoma would sit beside him in the harbor’s mud flats until he could be saved. For 18 months, he lay semi-submerged in the bay, where he and other servicemen had been buried.
McKinnon made an attempt to imagine what his mother might have thought when she learned that his son was missing. At his wedding less than a year ago, McKinnon and her son had danced together. He was 26, his life just starting.
Pearl Titterington was left speechless when she opened the telegram, and while the Navy acknowledged her “great anxiety” and promised to provide more information as needed, it also asked her to refrain from “divulging the name of his ship or station.”
McKinnon — grieving the loss of her mother and, more recently, a dear friend — wondered how her great-grandmother coped. Pearl Titterington was unable to really connect with their, despite friends and neighbors ‘ condolences. She was all she could say was that he had visited Pearl Harbor.
” Everyone who grieves has questions”, McKinnon said,” but she had no answers”.
It’s no wonder the doubts started to permeate. Maybe Titterington was n’t dead. Perhaps he was on a different ship. Maybe he’d gone ashore for breakfast. Maybe he was wounded, misidentified, forgetful of who he was.
Maybe the Navy was mistaken, even when he was declared dead two months later and the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery issued a certificate of death in his honor with instructions to “interlocally all bodies recovered”
Without a body, how did they know he was dead?
His mother wrote the Navy’s name back while he was seated at her desk.
Dear Sirs, I am writing you in regard to my son Everett Cecil Titterington Firman]sic ] 1C, lost at Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7th, 41 ship USS Oklahoma. Could you give me any information as to how he met ]his ] death? If you are authorized to do so ,]I ] would be ever so grateful.
A week later, the Navy replied. Titterington had lost his life in the service of his country and in the performance of his duties. Cmdr. A. C. Jacobs extends his sincere sympathy.
Living in the unheated home where she’d raised her children, the 45-year-old bereaved mother eventually broke ties with Milford. She cashed the$ 492 death gratuity and moved to San Bernardino, soon joined by her oldest daughter, Mildred.
Iowa appeared a long way away, but it never really seemed that far.
Family tales are on the verge of history, just beyond the official accounts and textbooks in a time when the past is always present.
As a little girl, McKinnon hung on to the words of her grandmother, Mildred Watson, and the stories she told at her dining room table, over her glass of wine, or coffee with a slice of lemon cake, about growing up in the Midwest, the bitter cold winters, the father she never knew — and the brother who went to war and never returned.
Watson did all that she could to keep her brother’s memory alive.
The American flag with 48 stars that her mother had received from the Navy was hung from her porch in Rialto. She spoke about Titterington at Elks Club luncheons, at gatherings of the Professional Business Women’s Assn. and on Thanksgiving, when she invited airmen from Norton Air Force Base for dinner.
McKinnon heard the pride and sadness that crept into her grandmother’s voice and, because hope ca n’t be sustained indefinitely, a begrudging acceptance of his fate.
When Watson died in 1994, her daughter Sharon Baxter and her children — McKinnon and her siblings— became keepers of Titterington’s story. Its future now centered more on his final moments than on his potential survival.
They had heard stories that some sailors, trapped inside the Oklahoma, had lived for hours — even days — before succumbing. They had unsuccessfully attempted to capture the attention of the outside world by pounding on the side of the hull.
They were lost to their families when they sat still until almost ten years ago when national phone lines rang.
On the outskirts of Omaha, the laboratory was housed inside an outdated bomber factory at Offutt Air Force Base. The Enola Gay, the B-29 super fortress that dropped an atomic bomb on Japan, was constructed inside these walls sixty years ago.
Now, in the converted space, on rows of stainless tables, lay 13, 000 bones exhumed from 46 graves— and 62 caskets — from the cemetery on the hill above Honolulu. The complex task of disintering and sorting through the commingling skeletons had been assigned to the Department of Defense. Technicians hoped to identify 388 sailors and Marines from the Oklahoma out of this charnel house with an American flag hanging at one end.
The voice on the other end of Baxter’s phone said she was a member of the Navy. They were working with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, and as best as Sharon Baxter could understand, they might have found Uncle Everett.
Her daughter was immediately suspicious. ” Mom, are you sure this is n’t a scam”? McKinnon asked. ” Watch what you say”.
When a DNA sampling kit arrived in the mail — cotton swabs and vials — Baxter and McKinnon’s sister, Parrish, obliged.
A few months passed, then a few years. The family’s timeline vanished. McKinnon underwent treatment after being diagnosed with cancer. The pandemic came and went, and in 2022, her mother died after a lingering illness. Among her final words: Do n’t forget about Everett.
McKinnon knew that would never happen. He was now his next of kin, along with her sister and brother.
Combing through the Tupperware box of Titterington’s things, McKinnon felt the impact of a life ending so abruptly.
” When mom passed, I knew all about her, and it was easy to let go”, she said. ” Her story had been told from the beginning, the middle and end. It was hard, but it was acceptable. For Everett, it was never acceptable. There was no end”.
McKinnon was more irritated than excited when the Navy finally called back. Too much time had passed. However, the Navy requested a meeting.
She and her sister listened to what two uniformed officers had to say while sitting around a table in the VFW Hall in Palm Springs. They had a book, almost 200 pages, and began leafing through it.
They began showing us images of what Pearl Harbor and Oklahoma looked like, which I had seen all my life,” McKinnon said.
One page followed another, pretty much all old news. Then the words got technical and statistical: Y chromosomes, mtDNA, an occurrence 9.04 million times more likely.
Then they turned the page to a picture of Titterington’s skull. Her great-granduncle’s empty eyes stared at her, and she began to cry.
No one knows what Everett Titterington would have said in relation to the riots.
When Southwest Airlines Flight 883 touched down in the Ontario airport in September, its passengers experienced a brief delay as a casket with a flag-draped casket was taken out of the cargo hold.
A service honor guard was standing at the attention of the tarmac wearing campaign hats and blues and service dress blues. Behind them were firefighters.
McKinnon wrapped her brother and sister in arms. They walked up to the casket, touched it, and gave one another hugs as they approached. Everett Cecil Titterington Fireman 1st Class was laid to rest five days later in Riverside National Cemetery.
During the ceremony, McKinnon sat next to Titterington’s 91-year-old cousin from Northern California, Mary Hambrock. They had n’t known about each other until two weeks earlier. When Titterington passed away, Hambrock was 8 years old and could recall him drawing for her for her at her home in Milford. She wore the ring he had engraved for her father on a chain around her neck at the funeral.
McKinnon had never seen it before.
” It’s like freeing a ghost that’s been trapped”, she said. ” It’s an answer to something that’s been haunting my family for so long”.
She now understands why her family never believed Titterington had been killed while attempting to flee the Oklahoma.
” His death was n’t the script that life is meant to follow”, she said. So Pearl, Mildred and Sharon had imagined him alive, getting married, having children, watching his grandchildren.
” But every story has an ending”, McKinnon said, “even if the answers are not what you want, and whether you like that ending or not, we all need closure”.
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, which has reunited 362 families, has determined that Titterington was the 328th serviceman to have died aboard the Oklahoma. More than 81 000 American service members have been missing from action since World War II and all subsequent conflicts.
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