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? No one even knows the words: Midway, Gold Star Mothers, Guadalcanal, Saipan, loose lips, Hiroshima. Right now it belongs to you, alone at the teletype. Refuse to believe, as if you could choose? 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