BANGOR, Maine — More than four decades ago, a Bangor veteran who was fed up with driving to Portland to commemorate the 1941 attack at Pearl Harbor started his own remembrance in the Queen City with the support of a veterans’ organization.
After serving as the man behind the curtain for what he hopes is the last time, 90-year-old Paul Colburn is looking for someone else to take the reigns.
“It’s no easy job, I’m telling you,” Colburn said of organizing the event during a Tuesday afternoon interview, soon after he returned from a trip to the hospital. He said his health is getting in the way and is making it more and more difficult to set things up each year.
Colburn said he held the first Bangor event about 1970, after driving to Portland in a snowstorm, only to find it had been cancelled. He then told Veterans of Foreign Wars leadership he was tired of driving to Portland and argued Bangor should have its own event.
The VFW commander gave the OK, but only as long as Colburn took the brunt of the work.
“If you want something done, do it yourself,” Colburn said.
More than 40 years later, the event is still going.
This year’s commemoration will be held noon Friday, Dec. 5 on the pedestrian bridge that stretches from Exchange Street to the parking garage. Remarks are expected from U.S. Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King, U.S. Rep. Mike Michaud and local officials. It was moved from Dec. 7 to allow high school bands to attend and perform.
Colburn still remembers the first time he heard about Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. He was walking out of a Bangor church with his family on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, when he overheard a radio blaring news about the Japanese attack on the major U.S. military base.
“I was dumbfounded,” Colburn said. “I couldn’t believe it.”
A year later, at age 18, he joined the U.S. Army and was sent to the Pacific Theater. He left the service in 1946.
The Japanese Imperial Navy’s surprise attack claimed the lives of nearly 2,400 Americans and struck a devastating blow to the United State’s ability to respond.
Among the fallen was Pfc. Willard Carleton Orr, the only Bangor resident to be killed in the assault. Orr, who graduated from Bangor High School in 1939, was serving as a cook at Hickam Field when Japanese bombers unleashed their payloads. His remains were never identified. The Bangor footbridge on which the Pearl Harbor ceremony is held is named after Orr.
Colburn said he’s worried people might one day forget what happened at Pearl Harbor and what it meant for the future of the United States.
“I hate wars, I really do,” Colburn said. “I hate to see youngsters going in the service and getting sent to these places, but when the time comes and he’s needed, he goes.”
About the same time Colburn started the Pearl Harbor ceremony in Bangor, he also started a “Remember the Maine” event commemorating the anniversary of the explosion that sank the USS Maine in Havana Harbor on Feb. 15, 1898, which killed 267 Americans and sparked the Spanish-American War.
In 2010, he told the Bangor Daily News he planned on putting that event in someone else’s hands after 40 years. He still organized the event in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014 because he couldn’t find anyone to take over the planning.
Colburn said he’s hopeful he’ll find some veterans’ organization or some dedicated Bangor resident to assume the organization of these remembrances, in his stead.
“I enjoyed doing this I really did, getting out and talking with different organizations and so forth,” Colburn said. “I never got turned down.”
Follow Nick McCrea on Twitter @nmccrea213.