The city of Duluth lost a great citizen this weekend.Mel Robinson, who survived the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor, died in his home at the age of 84.
Roughly a week before the 65th anniversary of those attacks, I had the honor of visiting Mel -- a fellow Bemidji native -- in that very home to discuss what it was like to be there on O'ahu that fateful morning.
Mel was a little hard of hearing back in November, but still as sharp as a whistle -- as the vivid details he provided me can attest:
A Certain Sunday in Pearl Harbor
By MATTHEW R. PERRINE / DULUTH BUDGETEER NEWS
(Originally published Dec. 3, 2006)
Mel Robinson’s Pearl Harbor story sounds like something straight out of Hollywood. And, had the machine gun mechanisms on Japan’s attacking planes not been so unsteady 65 years ago, he might not have been here to tell it.
“You could just imagine going down the road and a plane coming down, machine gun is strafing, and you’re in line,” he said. “You know doggone well that something is going to happen. Fortunately, they stopped and, after they got by us, they started again, because they were firing in bursts.”
Best of all, Robinson was riding around in a roofless truck.
“You could hear the bombs dropping. The Japanese planes were coming down so low you could see the red ball insignia, and you could see the pilots,” he said. “For a little old farmer boy from Duluth that never heard anything louder than a firecracker, it was kind of scary.”
Robinson was in Pearl Harbor working for the Navy as a civilian. He and four other classmates left Central High School around the 10th grade to work there.
“That was right in the height of the Depression,” he said, “People were leaving school, getting jobs and going into the military — anything to make a living.
“People were trying to support families on 50 cents an hour. The starting wage over there, for a punk like me, was 85 cents an hour.”
He said lodging in the Naval cantonment was cheap, and they were fed well, but the real highlight was the nightlife in Honolulu — which he compared to the 24/7 atmosphere of Las Vegas.
“It was a fun area,” he said. “One thing I know about the Hawaiians is they don’t have any bad times in their life, as far as I could see then. Everything to them was fun and happy.
“You kind of, sort of, did the same thing when you were there.”
In fact, the night before the attacks had just been another spent out on the town.
“Well, Saturday night in Hawaii we were out playing,” Robinson said. “(Sunday morning) I was sound asleep and all of a sudden they come in and they woke everyone up. ‘Get dressed, we gotta take you down to Pearl’ and so forth and so on. They got us out in the vehicles and started down the road to Pearl.”
Something was up: They didn’t even get breakfast that morning.
Robinson and his mates were dropped off at the gates that day, told to hoof it to their assigned shop.
He recalls walking past the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard and examining the USS Pennsylvania (BB-38), which was in drydock, when … “We got there, and there was a helluva big explosion,” he said. “It kind of shook us up a little bit, but we did get down to the shop. From there, we just did what we were told.”
While most of their days were spent doing routine yard maintenance, their duties for the day that lives in infamy revolved around cleaning up debris so fire trucks and ambulances could get around — all the while worrying about more attacks.
“It was kind of scary,” Robinson said, before pausing and continuing, “Not kind of scary. It was scary.”
Turning the page
After he grew tired of his position at Pearl Harbor, Robinson returned to Duluth … only to join the Army.
“The only way I could quit was if I promised to join the service,” he said. “So I quit there, came back here and enlisted in the Army.”
He was sent back to the Pacific — with stops in New Guinea and the Philippines — as an engineer specializing in small boat maintenance. The Army also sent him to New York training for hard-hat salvage diving.
“The closest we ever come to combat would be on a landing craft when they would be coming in,” Robinson said.
Upon returning to Duluth, he said he “goofed around” for a few months, living off the Army’s unemployment compensation — which he referred to as “52-20” ($20 a week for 52 weeks).
“I was trained as a salvage diver for the Army. I got back here, and it was a closed deal,” Robinson said. “A guy by the name of Thompson had all of the diving jobs in town here. He did everything. There was nothing.”
Eventually he found work with Diamond Tool and, after that, doing water and gas maintenance for the city. After 28 years, he retired from that job as a superintendent.
Robinson, now 84, currently resides in the most interesting of living situations: with Caroline Gradine, a girl he couldn’t get a date with in high school.
“I told her she was stuck-up then,” he said, laughing.
They both lost their spouses in the early ’90s, so when Robinson needed a suitable place to live after falling ill, longtime family friend Gradine opened up her home.
“I told him he could come here and stay for a couple of weeks,” she said, “That must have been about seven years ago. … So now we’re stuck with each other.”
“I just got so comfortable I never left,” he piped in.
Despite telling his story hundreds of times, Robinson always looks back at the time fondly.
“It’s not that I did anything important at Pearl,” he said, “but people want to know about it.
“It’s kind of been a feather in my cap.”
("All Those Yesterdays" photo by Matthew R. Perrine for the Duluth Budgeteer News)
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