Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Tuesday marks the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
More than 350 Japanese fighter planes attacked the U.S. Naval base at 7:48 a.m. on Dec. 7, 1941, killing more than 2,000 Americans, leaving another 1,000-plus injured, and forcing the nation to enter into World War II.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt called it “a date which will live in infamy.”
It’s a date still to pause and remember all those who sacrificed for freedom. Among them: Dick Shumate of Portales and Clovis’ Davenport Beasley. Both had front-row seats at Pearl Harbor.
Shumate said he was asleep, below deck in the living quarters of the USS Phelps, when the bombs started falling.
He told family members he jumped up and immediately went to work in the ship’s boiler room. He worked in his underwear, never having time to put on his clothes.
Shumate shared his Pearl Harbor memories with a newspaper reporter in 1971. He said the initial reaction for the crew of about 150 “was to get mad.”
“We were scared, too,” he said, “and any man that says he wasn’t is a fool. We were scared, but we were mad enough that the fright didn’t matter.”
Shumate said the USS Phelps was docked near the USS Oklahoma, one of the ships destroyed in the attack.
But there were no casualties on the Phelps.
“There were a few injuries,” Shumate told the reporter, “but they were all self-inflicted as we scrambled around trying to put out to sea.”
The USS Phelps is credited with shooting down one enemy plane early that Sunday morning.
Shumate spent nine years in the Navy. After that he became a printer, first for the Clovis News-Journal in 1945, then for Bishop Printing in Portales from 1959 to 1992.
Family members said he loved to joke around, treated everyone with respect and knew how to fix anything.
He died at age 78 in 1997.
Beasley had just finished breakfast when hundreds of planes began to fly into Pearl Harbor. He told a reporter in 1966 that he was “the scaredest man there.”
“Bullets hit about three feet away from us,” he said. “We dug up (a) bullet with our kitchen utensils and found it was live ammunition. That’s when we realized that it wasn’t the Navy doing exercises.”
Beasley and his Army buddies attached to the 97th Coast Artillery Anti-Aircraft Unit hadn’t been in Hawaii long. They’d not yet been assigned to barracks. While their mission, he said, was to defend Pearl Harbor, “we hadn’t been issued our weapons yet.”
Beasley said he and a friend soon found rifles and began firing at the Japanese pilots, “to keep them as high as possible.”
Beasley survived Pearl Harbor and later D-Day in 1944 before his military career ended. After that, he spent 32 years as an educator in Clovis schools.
Beasley’s daughter, Sidna Gee, told a reporter in 2014 that her dad preferred to talk about his career as an educator rather than his heroics as a soldier.
That career included integral roles in building Gattis and Yucca junior high schools and Bella Vista, Sandia, Cameo, Lockwood, Zia and Barry elementary schools under four superintendents.
Port Beasley was 91 when he died in 2011.
Most of those at Pearl Harbor 80 years ago are gone now. Let’s keep their memories alive.
— David Stevens
Publisher
