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TUESDAY November 12, 2013 • www.langleytimes.com NEWS A Longhouse for Kwantlen
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ARTS & LIFE The Art of Living Well
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SPORTS Lightning Strike at Districts
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‘No greater reward than to serve’ LANGLEY’S BOB CRERAR SERVED IN TWO WARS AS A MEMBER OF THE U.S. NAVY BRE NDA A NDE R S ON Time s Re po rte r
It was the briefest of encounters — but it remains one of the most memorable of Bob Crerar’s life. As he stood on the bow of an American warship, watching a small plane fly low overhead, the aircraft’s pilot turned his head and locked eyes with the U.S. Navy corpsman. It was over in a heartbeat, but Crerar remembers the wordless exchange like it was yesterday. In fact, it happened more than 70 years ago — on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941.
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Lois and Bob Crerar are pictured in their wedding photo, taken in October, 1943, when Bob was on a brief shore leave from his duties as a U.S. Navy hospital corpsman. Crerar, who now lives in Langley, is likely the last surviving Canadian who was involved in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. He went on to serve in the Korean War, as well.
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Crerar was born in Rossland, B.C. on April 23, 1919, to American parents. When the Great Depression forced his father to close his insurance business in the B.C. Interior, the family moved to Spokane and opened another branch. When that business, too, closed its doors, they returned to British Columbia, this time moving to Nelson. But the family’s strong connection to the United States remained, and when Crerar was 20 years old he walked into a Navy recruiting centre in Opportunity, Wash. and signed up for military service. “I joined because I had a
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great opportunity to join the Naval Corps Medical School to get training — which I never regretted,” said the 94-year-old Langley man, seated in the living room of his daughter Susan Miller’s Walnut Grove home. After finishing his training in California, Crerar was assigned to the USS Cummings (DD365), a Mahan-class destroyer. At just 22 years old, he was to serve as the medical officer aboard a vessel carrying 215 souls — 15 officers and 200 enlisted men. “You can imagine the responsibility I had … but because of my training, I was able to carry it through,” he said. Though the U.S. was not yet actively engaged in the Second World War, the Cummings — along with the other three destroyers in its division — patrolled the South Pacific, making goodwill stops in Australia and New Zealand along the way. On Dec. 1, 1941, they sailed into Pearl Harbor, where each ship was scheduled to undergo repairs or refitting. The most junior of the four vessels, because it was captained by the most junior officer of the group, the Cum-
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