BY WALTER ELLIOTT
NEWARK – The next Guyton-Callahan Pearl Harbor Day Commemoration, tentatively set for 10 a.m. Dec. 9 here at Military Park, will be a landmark observance.
The Archie Callahan Monument had served as the Newark native’s honorary headstone for the last 81 years – but not this year or in the future.
This Dec. 7 will be the first time that Callahan’s remains have “come home” or at least Stateside. Although his body was among 2,403 recovered by the War Department through June 1944, he could not be positively identified. He and other “Unknown” soldiers, sailors, Marines and aviators were buried in Honolulu, HI.’s National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific – also called “The Punchbowl.”
The City of Newark meanwhile erected the Callahan Monument in 1942 in Douglas-Harrison Park, the courtyard of the Douglas Harrison Homes where Callahan and his parents lived until he joined the U.S. Navy in 1940. It stayed in the courtyard until it was moved to Military Park before the apartment complex was demolished in 2005.
The then-Emmet Guyton American Legion Post No. 152 held annual Callahan-Pearl Harbor Day commemorations at both locations. The post added Callahan’s name to World War One U.S. Army Air Force member Guyton’s in their title in 1959.
The U.S. Department of Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, who have been identifying “Unknowns” from past wars, on April 6, announced that they have identified Callahan’s remains by matching mitochondrial DNA samples with those of a relative.
Callahan’s remains were buried with full military honors in Arlington (Va.) National Cemetery Sept. 8; his headstone has since been set. A rosette has been carved by his name on The National Cemetery of the Pacific’s Courts of the Missing.
All five known Newarkers who were killed during the Sunday morning surprise attack by Imperial Japanese air and naval forces have now been accounted for.
Ironbound native Eugene K. Eberhardt is also buried in Arlington. The US Navy First Class Machinist Mate was aboard the USS Oklahoma with Callahan when the first wave of Japanese torpedo bombers struck at 7:55 a.m. Hawaiian Time.
The DPMAA used similar DNA searches to identify Eberhardt’s remains in 2018. He too got a rosette beside his name in the Courts of the Missing.
US Army Air Force Private First Class Louis Schleifer is buried in Mt. Lebanon Cemetery in Woodbridge’s Iselin section. The East Side High School graduate was at Hickam Field, firing his rifle at an advancing Japanese Zero fighter who gunned him down.
Newark’s local Jewish War Veterans chapter erected a marker and a water fountain at Milford-Schleifer Park, a South Ward green triangle with the nearby Guyton-Callahan American Legion Post and South Side Malcolm X Shabazz High School across Elizabeth and Belmont avenues.
The monument still stands; members of Temple Beth Shalom took the fountain with them to their synagogue in Livingston in the 1960s. The local Pearl Harbor Survivors Association have held annual observances there.
Nicholas Runiak and Raymond J. Kerrigan’s remains are in the National Cemetery of the Pacific.
USN First Class Seaman Runiak was aboard the Arizona when he was struck by shrapnel and was burned; he died from those wounds on Dec. 27, 1941. The city renamed a north-south street along Mt. Olivet Cemetery to the Elizabeth border after him, near his 246 Dayton St. address.
First Class Machinist Mate Kerrigan, an East Side High School graduate and Vailsburg resident, was stationed on the USS Vestal – a repair ship that was moored alongside the Arizona. He was struck and killed by shrapnel aboard the Vestal when a torpedo blew up the Arizona.
Kerrigan Boulevard runs past his last address in Vailsburg. The city had renamed the southern five blocks of Oakland Terrace by 1944.
For the record, Society Hill at University Heights Condominiums named one of its private streets ‘Callahan Court” in 1995. Callahan’s name is among those of the USS Oklahoma 429 dead in a ship monument along Ford Island.
Archie Callahan, Jr., who was born in Atlanta, was promoted from NPS Monmouth Street School and had transferred from Newark Vocational Boys High School to Central High. The CHS Class of 1940 graduate left the 75 Somerset St. part of the Douglas-Harrison Homes to enlist with the Navy that August 21.
Callahan spent his last 15 months training in Norfolk, Va. and being assigned as Third Class Mess Attendant on the USS Oklahoma BB-37. The segregated Navy also placed him in the Messman Branch, along with other African Americans, Filipinos, Chinese and other “foreign nationals recruited from overseas.”
3CMA Callahan, 19, was most likely below deck, preparing breakfast for the staff. The Oklahoma was moored against Ford Island along Pearl Harbor’s Battleship Row when the first three of five torpedo bombers attacked at about 7:55 a.m.
Callahan and his deckmates likely had not the chance to scramble up to the third deck or topside. Many were trapped there when the battleship capsized.
Some dodged strafing fire to flee to the USS Maryland and man that ship’s anti-aircraft guns. Another 32 sailors were rescued after a repair boat cut a hole in the Oklahoma’s hull.
Callahan, Eberhardt and 427 others from the USS Oklahoma were listed as killed or missing. It was second in by-ship death toll to the USS Arizona, where 1,177 of its 1,512 crew died.
The Navy, under pressure from civil rights groups, reclassified Messmen as Stewards in 1943. Full desegregation did not come to the US armed forces until President Harry S. Truman’s executive order in 1945.
Callahan was posthumously promoted to Second Class Ship Steward. He, like many killed or wounded in the Pearl Harbor attack, were awarded Purple Heart, WWII Service, Distinguished Service and Valor medals. All those who were killed, injured or survived the attack were enlistees; many were 18-20 years old at the time.
Saturday’s anticipated observance will be more public than Callahan’s Sept. 6 Arlington burial.
Arlington National Cemetery was closed to the general public after it had received a bomb threat earlier that Friday. Internments resumed once law enforcers had given the all clear.
Lou Conter is meanwhile anticipated to attend Pearl Harbor Day services on the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor. Conter, 101, of Grass Valley, Calif., is the last of the ship’s 335 known survivors.
