CONCORD — Chuck Kohler, 98, saluted before he pressed the red button that sparked the rotating lantern atop Mount Diablo in the 59th annual Eye of Diablo beacon lighting at Cal State East Bay’s Concord campus on Wednesday near dusk.
Kohler, who turns 99 in January, was a 17-year-old Seaman 1st Class when he charged across Ford Island base in the center of Pearl Harbor the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, with bombs and machine gun bullets raining down on him as he grabbed a .50 caliber machine gun, hopped into an aircraft and started firing into the sky. Now he’s a Concord resident and fixture at the annual beacon lighting, which this year marked the 81st anniversary of the surprise attack that killed 2,403 Americans and thrust the U.S. into the second World War.
“When that beacon light is turned on, that’s a tribute to those individuals who lost their lives at Pearl Harbor,” Kohler said of the ceremony in 2020.
The rotating lantern was installed in the late 1920s to assist transcontinental aviation. To ease fears that the beacon would be used as a navigational aid by enemy submarines, the system was deactivated during World War II, and only reignited on Pearl Harbor Day for one night only in 1964 at the suggestion of retired Admiral Chester Nimitz, wartime commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
The tradition has continued to the present. The beacon is lit once a year, every Dec. 7 from sunset to sunrise the next day, to remember those lives lost at Pearl Harbor.
An exception was made during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the beacon was lit each Sunday beginning in April 2020 and ending in April 2021.
“Pearl Harbor still contains invaluable lessons for the nation,” said Robert Phelps, director of the Concord campus. “One thing people forget is how divided Americans were before the attack. Twenty years after the end of World War I, 70% of Americans polled believed that U.S. participation in the Great War had been a mistake. Immediately after Nazi Germany invaded Poland, 90% of Americans opposed getting involved in this next European war.
“Yet, Pearl Harbor immediately unified the nation, ensuring the eventual defeat of the Axis powers and their ambitions for global conquest.”
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