A survivor's quest to keep memory alive

VIRGINIA BEACH

The autumn sky is gray and the air damp as Frank Chebetar eases into his gold Chevy and pulls away from the small beige house where he has lived since 1959.

Supplies in hand, he makes the short drive to Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek, as he has done countless times over the course of decades.

At the gate he flashes his Navy ID and the guard waves him past.He steers through a maze of two- and three-story office buildings, past the base gym, the movie theater and a group of young sailors jogging in bright yellow T-shirts.

As he reaches his destination, he makes a sharp left into the grass, turns off the engine and opens the door. His cane hits the ground first, then his left leg, and then his right, which is swollen worse than usual today.

Moving slowly, he gathers from the trunk what he needs: a wooden stool and the plastic bin where he keeps a handful of rags and an old juice bottle filled with vinegar. It's labeled in shaky handwriting with magic marker, "ships bell cleaner."

A few paces away, a quiet grove of leafless Bradford pear trees surrounds a stone monument dedicated to the victims of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor - those who died and those who did not.

Chebetar knows this park intimately.

As a founding member of the local chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, he helped to build it, and over the decades, as other members have died, fallen ill or simply lost interest, he has remained its most dedicated caretaker. He sees that the monument, which is prone to moss, is regularly power washed.

He prunes the trees and stakes tiny American flags into the ground beneath them. And every week with few exceptions, he polishes the brass ship's bell that hangs at the monument's side.

"You gotta use vinegar," Chebetar says with a slight New York accent. "That's the trick that some of these young guys don't know."

He sets the stool at the base of the post where the bell is suspended, then drops his cane into the leaves blanketing the ground and steps up. Steadying himself, he reaches for a rag and begins.

Now 90 years old - 90-1/2, he will tell you - Chebetar was 20 when World War II began. A cook aboard the destroyer Phelps, he had never seen war before Dec. 7, 1941. Seventy years later, what happened at Pearl Harbor is not merely a part of his past. It is also his present.

In addition to the time he dedicates to the memorial park, he is also the survivors association president, a role that no other member has volunteered to take since Chebetar accepted it more than a decade ago. As their ranks have dwindled over the years, he has been the glue holding them together.

There are now fewer than 20 members, down from more than 100 in the 1990s.Even so, Chebetar continues to organize monthly lunch meetings where he ensures that every word of the previous gathering's minutes are read aloud and that even the smallest of matters are put to a proper vote, including whether jeans will be allowed at this year's Christmas party and whether the wreath to be laid this anniversary should be fake or live.

When a member falls ill, he is quick to visit at the hospital. When local schools, civic groups or parade organizers request the presence of a Pearl Harbor survivor, he is happy to oblige. He has lobbied all levels of the government - the governor for special license plates commemorating the attack, the city for permission to fly the association's flag - to ensure that Pearl Harbor is remembered.

And every year in the months leading up to Dec. 7, a time that Chebetar's children and grandchildren call "his busy season," he spends countless hours fretting over the details of the annual remembrance ceremony, held at the Little Creek park: What admiral or general will be this year's keynote speaker? Which local high school will send its junior cadets? Will the ship's bell be shined and ready?

"In a way, he still lives Pearl Harbor every day," says Chebetar's oldest daughter, Ellen Burns, a Chesapeake resident. "The truth is, I think it helps him. To a degree, I don't think he's ever really gotten over what happened, even after all these years."

Born in 1921, Chebetar grew up in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., the small town just north of Manhattan where Washington Irving set his story about a headless horseman.

He was the middle of seven children born to parents who immigrated from Eastern Europe shortly after the turn of the century. His father was a horticulturist who worked for a time at the Rockefeller estate. His mother died during childbirth when he was 16. Two years later, in October 1940, he enlisted in the Navy hoping to be made a cook.

He reported aboard the Phelps, his second ship, a few months before the start of the war. The morning Pearl Harbor was attacked, he was on the quarterdeck awaiting inspection so he could go ashore to meet friends. He remembers seeing flames and smoke in the distance and word coming quickly that it was not some kind of drill.

Soon, he was manning a machine gun as Japanese planes flew a few hundred feet above his head, and the nearby battleship Utah was capsized and foundering.

"What I remember most was the crew of the Utah trying to get off the ship," Chebetar says, his bright blue eyes filling with tears. "I hate to put it like this, but they looked like hundreds of rats crawling over the side. They were just trying to survive, trying not to drown, and the Japanese were just shooting them - shooting them in the back, shooting them in the water."

The Phelps went on to fight at Coral Sea, Midway Island, Guadalcanal, the Marshall Islands and Saipan. Chebetar remembers vividly the day that the crew, steaming somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, received word that the war was finally over.

"I was in the galley cooking," he recalls. "I was just stunned that we'd actually done it, after all that time, all those terrible battles."

Yet it is Pearl Harbor that became his singular focus in the years after he left active duty in 1960. By then he'd been married to his high school sweetheart, Joan, for 15 years. They bought a newly built house in Virginia Beach where they would raise two sons and two daughters. Chebetar began a second career working as a civilian at Naval Security Group, an intelligence command at Norfolk Naval Station.

In 1971, he helped found the local chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, and in the following decades, he remained one of its most dedicated members.

He began speaking at local schools about the attack, took on any cause or project that he thought might bring renewed recognition for Dec. 7, and played a key role in building the memorial park at Little Creek in 1990.

Today, Chebetar is as committed as he has ever been. Of course, he has interests besides Pearl Harbor. He loves to drive, to tell jokes, to fish and to bake. Even after the decades he spent feeding sailors and Marines, he never tired of cooking and still enjoys serving elaborate meals for his family.

One of his favorite places is the Navy Exchange, which he visits often, even when he needs nothing in particular. He's still active with Star of the Sea Catholic Church. Occasionally, when he is feeling up to it, he golfs.

But it is his efforts related to Pearl Harbor that have become his third career of sorts. The phone in his kitchen rings steadily with business involving the survivors association and requests for his presence at official functions - parades, Memorial Day and veterans events, various Navy ceremonies. He has glossy business cards imprinted with a picture of the memorial site in Hawaii that he passes out freely.

He is well known among community leaders and in veterans' circles as the local face of Pearl Harbor.

As he has aged, Chebetar has of course slowed down. When he takes part in parades, he rides in cars now instead of walking. While he still makes sure it gets done, he no longer has the strength to power wash the Little Creek monument himself. And although he remains closely involved in planning the annual Dec. 7 remembrance ceremony, over the years he has accepted more and more help from the base's public affairs staff.

What has not diminished is his desire to keep the local survivors association together, despite its dwindling numbers, and that job is one he bears largely alone.

"He's the force that has really kept the local group going," says Bill Muehleib, who lives in Virginia Beach and is president of the national Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, which will soon disband because of declining membership. "I'd like to think that someone else will step up if Frank reaches a point where he can't continue, but I'm not sure."

It's a prospect that Chebetar, who decries the breakup of the national organization, does not like to think about: "We're the last ones left, and that's something," he says. "Even when there's only two of us, that's still enough for a group."

At the local association's monthly meetings, held every second Tuesday at Gus and George's Spaghetti and Steak House, Chebetar insists on strict rules of order, even when only a handful of members, all of them his close friends, are in attendance. While he enthusiastically welcomes guests - wives and widows of survivors, community leaders, journalists - he is also careful to remind those who come that only official members who lived through Pearl Harbor get a say in decisions. "Remember, only survivors can vote!" he announces with each motion.

It's a distinction that has come to mean more and more to him over the years. In the plastic-covered sleeve of his wallet, where most people keep their driver's licenses, he keeps his individually numbered membership card - his is No. 4625 - to the national survivors association, which he considers his proof that he was there.

"You read about these fakers in the newspaper sometimes," he says. "If you were really there, you can prove it."

Also undiminished is Chebetar's concern that Pearl Harbor's place in history - and his own - is being forgotten.

"They hardly mention it in the schools anymore," he says, shaking his head. "I think some people don't remember that Pearl Harbor was the very beginning of it all, of the whole war. And that's never changed, right to this day."

Burns sees her father's efforts, at least in part, as a mechanism for coping, despite the time that has passed.

"He saw terrible things at Pearl Harbor, and his little town lost a lot of men in the war," she says. "But he and his four brothers all came home, and I think that's always weighed heavily on him."

She describes her father as endlessly positive and loving - someone who has never met a stranger. Yet for years, she says, he refused to speak to Japanese people. "I think that says a lot about how personally he took it."

It wasn't until 2007, shortly before their mother died, that Chebetar finally revealed to his children that he'd hit a Japanese plane at Pearl Harbor.

"It was very emotional when he told us," Burns says. "For all of us."

It's Veterans Day, and Chebetar is on his way to the Oceanfront for the annual parade. He arrives characteristically early in his standard attire for such events: a white fabric hat stitched with the words "Pearl Harbor Survivor," and his favorite blue jacket, which is covered with patches commemorating various Dec. 7 anniversaries. In one hand he has his cane and in the other he has two oversized car magnets emblazoned with the survivors association logo, which he slaps onto the side of a bright blue '69 Camaro.

"We gotta make sure we get these on here so they know who we are," he says to his friend, Dave Davenport, the other Pearl Harbor survivor riding with him.

The car's owner and driver, a volunteer whom Chebetar has never met, helps him into the passenger seat and asks how long he's been taking part in the parade. Chebetar thinks a moment, then says, "Since they started it, I guess."

"So you were really at Pearl Harbor?" the driver asks next.

"I sure was, on the USS Phelps," Chebetar answers. He offers to show him his national membership card, but the driver says it isn't necessary.

As they pass cheering crowds, Chebetar waves and smiles. He remarks that he's glad to see so many young people in attendance.

When they reach the end of the route, Davenport says goodbye and Chebetar takes a seat below the announcer's stage to watch the rest of the procession. As he does, he is approached by a steady stream of friends and acquaintances - various Army colonels and Navy captains, members of the city council, the mayor - who say they are glad to see him out and about.

"You're looking good, Frank!" one of them says as they shake hands.

As the parade comes to an end, Chebetar looks tired, but he is not going home yet.

He looks to the other side of the street, to the Tidewater Veterans Memorial, and slowly begins across. As he reaches the sidewalk, he spots a small American flag that a parade-goer must have dropped. Carefully, he bends to the ground, dusts it clean and stuffs it into his pocket.

He gazes to the top of the memorial's tall white monument and breathes in deeply before continuing to a nearby patch of grass that is home to a collection of smaller monuments dedicated to various conflicts and battles. He finds the one for Pearl Harbor - a rock mounted with a bronze plaque - and leans over to examine it.

"I shine this one too," he says, "like the ship's bell."

He reaches down and picks a bit of dirt off the plaque's face and then brushes away a few fallen leaves.

"There," he says quietly. "That's better."

Corinne Reilly, (757) 446-2949, corinne.reilly@pilotonline.com