When Dick Higgins, the last survivor of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association’s Orange County Chapter 14, spoke of fellow survivor John Hughes’s death, he remarked on the importance of the association’s brotherhood.
“We were a band of brothers,” he said in a 2022 interview.
That brotherhood is now forever eternal. Higgins died Tuesday, March 19, at 102.
“I just never left his side,” said Angela Norton, Higgins’ granddaughter with whom he lived in Bend, Ore. “I wanted to be with him on his final breath. At 1:42 a.m., he went home to be with his savior and his wife, Winnie Ruth.”
Higgins lived with Norton and her family for the last decade, since leaving Orange County in 2013.
Most recently, she said her grandfather was honored on Dec. 7, the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, by a local high school that named him a “Bend Bear,” a recognition given to local heroes who are extraordinary. The day before was recognized as “Dick Higgins Day” by the Bend City Council.
Higgins was a radioman stationed on Ford Island with a squadron of PBY seaplanes when the Japanese attacked the harbor.
“He shared he will never forget the explosions of the ships and the planes all around him and helping the sailors and Marines – who jumped off burning ships and were swimming toward the launch ramp – get to land and out of the burning water, ” said Dwight Hanson, a retired Marine aviation electrician who served at the Marine Corps Air Station El Toro from 1987 to 1993. He met Higgins, a longtime Orange County resident, at a memorial ceremony for Pearl Harbor veterans years ago and later attended meetings of the survivors’ association.
Though he is half Higgins’ age, Hanson became fascinated by the elder petty officer’s tales, he said, and would always ask more about his 20 years of service. Higgins served in the Navy from 1939 to 1959.
That history is also what Gary Laine, a Bay Area Honor Flight member, was after when he chatted…
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