The Signalman’s Story                                                     December 7, 1941   What do you do with the news? When the call came in from Honolulu — Sunday morning, the San Francisco coast is clear, all the other men asleep — nobody warned you, just a kid from St. Cloud, that today you would handle history’s lightning bolt, you would be the first to know. Do you pray? But you don’t know the words: Midway, Gold Star Mothers, Guadalcanal, The Bulge, loose lips, Hiroshima. History belongs to you, alone at the teletype. Refuse the truth, as if you could choose? You’re not wrong, not right — what do you do with the news? You do your duty: you pass it along.                                                     for my father     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont December 2011