Herbert Bullock, the Preacher Who Survived Pearl Harbor

This article was published in 2003 in "The Pilot" newspaper in Southern Pines, N.C. Herbert Bullock worked at Gulistan Carpet Company in Aberdeen, N.C., at the time this article was published. He died a few years after that. 

Pearl Harbor Naval Base, Hawaii – Sunday, December 7, 1941: Herbert George Bullock of Southern Pines, N.C., was there. 
 
“We’d just come off fleet maneuvers two weeks earlier,” says Bullock, who served as a third class petty officer on the USS Raleigh.  
 
His ship, a 7,050-ton Omaha class light cruiser which was damaged by a torpedo and near-missed by a bomb, survived the battle in which the U.S. sustained about 3,700 casualties and saw 18 ships sunk or badly damaged and 170 planes destroyed.
 
“We’ve been out dancing and drinking in Honolulu,” says Bullock, 82, who weighs 137 pounds and stands 5 feet-9 inches tall. He still works part time as a security guard and serves as an elder at Aberdeen’s New Hope Church of God in Christ. “We stayed in Honolulu on Friday night, and I said, ‘We’d better go back to Pearl Harbor.’”
 
Pearl Harbor Naval Base lies west of downtown Honolulu on Oahu Island. Bullock rode a bus to Pearl Harbor.
 
“Motor boats would take sailors to ships,” he says. “We got back to the ship about 9-10 p.m., Saturday night. One man went to the USS Arizona. I got to bed about 11.”
 
Bullock, who “had a hangover,” intended to return to shore on Sunday, but his plans changed around 7:55 a.m. 
 
“My mother always was a praying woman; when she called, I came,” Bullock says. “Before we got hit, what woke me up was my mother calling me, ‘Herbert.’ And I heard ‘boom, boom, boom.’ I thought some big shot was coming to visit the ship. I said, ‘Let me go see what’s up.’”
 
Clad only in underwear, he ascended the hatch.
 
“We’re being attacked by the Nipponese,” an officer yelled.
 
“Who’s the Nipponese?” Bullock asked.
 
“The ‘Japs,’” the officer said.
 
“Everybody was running everywhere,” Bullock says. “Sirens were going; I saw 2 Zeroes flying from Diamond Head. One fired a torpedo, and I felt the jolt when it hit the middle of our ship. We closed off the damage. After that first attack, they sent another wave.” 
 
The USS Raleigh’s commanding officer, R.E. Simons, reporting on the Dec. 7, 1941 attack, wrote: “Shortly after 0900 a glide-bombing attack came in, which met with a warm reception. Many near misses fell about the ship. Only one bomb hit.”
 
A bomb fell through an oil tank and pierced the skin of the ship below the water line, detonating on the harbor’s bottom, about 50 feet from the ship.
 
“In its flight,” Simons said, “this bomb went over the heads of the gun crew of #7 3-inch gun and also passed very close to our two large tanks containing 3,000 gallons of high-test aviation gasoline. This plane machine-gunned the ship also.

“I saw some planes shot down,” Bullock says. “Nobody died on my ship. Two Japanese suicide subs stayed right around our hospital ship. The USS Arizona went down.”

Richmond Roots

Born in Richmond, Va., on June 12, 1921, Herbert Bullock grew up “Baptist” with one older sister and a younger brother and sister.
 
“I believed in having fun,” Bullock says. He laughs and reminisces. “Mama said to me, ‘If you don’t stop the way you’re doing, you’re gonna die with your shoes on.’”
 
His father worked in a cigarette factory.
 
“He made a lot of Lucky Strikes,” Bullock says. “I used to smoke a lot of them.”
 
Bullock enjoyed bike-riding and skating and wanted to play football but couldn’t gain weight.
 
“I used to shine shoes,” he says. “People—mostly white people—would bring shoes for me to shine when I was 10 or 11. I even gave my mother some money.”
 
His mother wanted him to attend college, but he graduated from Richmond’s Armstrong High School, moved to Washington, D.C., and worked on a James River excursion boat.
 
“I sold food and everything on that boat,” he says. “It had bands. Cab Calloway played at times.”
 
The idea of “travel” attracted Bullock to the Navy. He served as a steward for officers and felt that some officers talked to him more than they did to their staff members. After Pearl Harbor, he served in the Pacific arena.
 
“When the war ended, I was near Okinawa, on the USS Wyndham Bay,” Bullock says.
 
After leaving the Navy in late 1946, he worked at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., where he met Matilda Hadley, a Raeford, N.C., native who worked in naval research. They married and bought a home in Washington and raised twin sons.

Mother McCrae

In the early 1950s, Bullock met “Mother McCrae.”
 
“I used to have parties at my house,” Bullock says. “This old neighbor lady, Mrs. McCrae, talked to me about the Lord—she’d call me ‘Son’—and I tried to make her mad.
 
“She’d have prayer meetings at her house, but her husband drank, so I’d get him all feeling good, and he’d go home and raise hell at the meetings. Mrs. McCrae was a ‘holiness’ lady. She just got nicer. I finally told her, ‘Mother McCrae, I’m going to church with you.’”
 
Bullock and his wife attended McCrae’s church but sat near the back “to hide.”
 
“I saw people singing, praying, and enjoying the Lord,” Bullock says.
 
As the service ended, the minister saw Bullock and addressed him from the pulpit: “Mr. Bullock, would you like to say something?”
 
“Whatever this is y’all got, I’m gonna get it,” Bullock told the congregation.

Preaching and Praying

Bullock recalls that some thought he had become sick and was preparing for death. 
 
“When I got saved and started going to church, all my friends thought I was going to die,” Bullock says. “Some of them were influenced and became ministers.”
 
Bullock received ordination in the Church of God in Christ in 1956 and is still a card-carrying elder in the denomination. He and his wife lived in Union, N.J., before moving to Southern Pines in the 1970s. He worked as a pastor and a chauffeur and also worked with William “Buzz” Hicks at Theatre Antiques in Southern Pines. Bullock’s wife died in 1987.
 
“Mr. Bullock tries to help everybody and loves people,” says Evangelist Thelma Ingram, Bullock’s pastor at New Hope Church, Aberdeen, N.C. “He prays for them and cares about souls.”
 
“When they attacked Pearl Harbor,” Bullock says, “it caused Americans to put aside differences and get together. We as a people—I’m talking about black and white—we ought not to be against one another.
 
“And the young people—they just want somebody to love them. The rest of my life I’m going to preach and pray for the young people and help them back to God. If God gives me strength, I’m going to help them. If God can fix me, he can do the same for our young people.”

Our First Photo Together: Carol and Me

Carol E. Williamson and I are pictured, probably in 1968. This was our first photo made together. We are shown standing in front of a house (Greenville, S.C.) where Carol rented a room. We married in August 1970 at Bethany Baptist Church in Travelers Rest, S.C.

Charlie Brown's Barber Shop

 Pictured are my Aunt Frances and late Uncle Fred Crain. Fred enjoyed making music at Charlie Brown's Barber Shop.
 

I drove on Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018, to Greg’s Barber Shop located in a shopping center on Wade Hampton Blvd., between Taylors and Greenville, SC. At 8:55 a.m. Greg Barnes wasn’t there and didn’t show at 9:00, his weekday opening time. Another arrival, David Rogers, said, “Greg’s usually here early.”

David and I introduced ourselves. He’s a Vietnam vet and a Christian. We talked about where we were stationed in Vietnam. He was injured — shrapnel in the back — and has suffered a couple heart attacks, he said. After 15 minutes, we left, figuring something delayed Greg.

I drove back toward Taylors and made a first-time stop at Zack’s Barber Shop on Wade Hampton. Corey, age 21, invited me to one of three chairs. His brother, Zack, 23, runs the business. Corey said the shop used to be called “Charlie Brown’s Barber Shop.” I was stunned. My Uncle Fred Crain, who died on Feb. 21, 2018, at age 92, frequented this shop and probably had sat in the same chair I was using. Carol and I moved to Taylors in January of this year after living in N.C. for over 29 years because of my work in carpet manufacturing. During those years, I telephoned Fred who often told me of getting a haircut at Charlie Brown's Barber Shop and then, if there were no customers waiting, “making music” with Charlie B. and a younger barber, David, who played trumpet. I had not known exactly where Charlie Brown's shop was located but had "stumbled into it." I pictured Charlie (who also plays guitar) on keyboard, David on trumpet, and Uncle Fred on guitar, enjoying jamming in that small shop. I missed my uncle as I sat there and thought of him making music with friends. 

“There used to be a lot of junk sitting around here when Charlie owned this shop,” Corey said. “Charlie’s retired but he doesn't drive now. He lives up on St. Mark Road and walks down here sometime. I don’t know where David is working.”

I thought about “change.” Carey and his brother sport youthful hairstyles. Relocated are Charlie Brown and David and gone is Charlie’s “junk.” Gone are the sounds of their music. Gone to Glory is Uncle Fred.

Here is an internet blurb about the old shop: “Brown’s Barber Shop was founded in 1990, is located at 3058 Wade Hampton Blvd. #14 in Taylors, S.C. It’s a hair salon offering such things as haircuts and hair styling and blowouts. Sample prices include $13 for a men's haircut.”

Matthew Craft, a customer, wrote about the shop on March 13, 2014, saying, “Absolutely one of the most surreal haircut experiences I have ever had. The Charlie Brown Barber Shop on Wade Hampton. Jazz music playing on the stereo — come to find out the two barbers are musicians. Before I left Charlie and David said, "Lets play a little ditty.” They are all from New York. Best 13 bucks spent yet.”
 
Here are youtube sites showing Charlie and David playing music, along with an old fellow (not my uncle): 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ka1JJozSJY8 
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPRMnz3Mu_o 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFeHrwDD80A

Cinder Was a Great Dog

Cinder, pictured here, was a great dog. 

We found “Cinder” caged alongside various yapping dogs. She appeared shy . . . a quiet, sad-eyed black canine (still a puppy) looking for someone to adopt her from a Greenville, S.C., shelter in early 1972. She was part Labrador Retriever and part “something else,” probably a mix of Lab and small hound of some kind.      

  

“I think her face will haunt me if we don’t take her,” I told my wife, Carol, after we looked at other young dogs.   

  

I named her “Cinder” because she was black, except for a small white spot on her chest. A cinder is “a small piece of partly burned coal or wood that has stopped giving off flames but still has combustible matter in it.” That named fit because we learned Cinder was recovering from canine distemper, a viral illness that usually affects dogs with high fever, reddened eyes, and discharge from nose and eyes. “An infected dog will become lethargic and tired, and often anorexic,” sources say. Distemper can affect a dog’s spine and nervous system. Cinder never was able to raise her tail very high or wag it well. 

   

Distemper caused her teeth to appear a bit brown, but our vet vouched they were OK, just discolored on the outside. I tried to get Cinder to run and play, but she cowered and seemed as weak as a kitten. But several weeks later, she raced around and appeared healthy.  

  

Before we married, my wife, Carol, and I worked as first-year teachers for Greenville, S.C., public schools. She served in elementary school, and I taught art at Woodmont High. Uncle Sam called, and I completed basic training during hot summer months at Ft. Jackson, S.C. We married in August 1970 and I spent a year in Vietnam, working first at Long Binh for the U.S. Army’s inventory control center as a draftsman and later for “The Army Reporter” newspaper as an illustrator (81E MOS). 

  

Carol wanted a dog after I left the army in Feb. 1972, so we found Cinder. Some folk say a couple shares a dog before they get a child. We adopted Cinder, and Carol soon announced she was pregnant. Cinder loved lying on our black Naugahyde couch. Not noticing, I once half-sat on her, before she yelped. She later pawed a hole in that settee after circling to prepare herself a place to sleep.  

  

I worked at Faith Printing until a client of that business offered me a job as art director for his Christian book publishing business, Logos International (no longer in business) in Plainfield, N.J. Carol and I staged a garage sale at our tiny rented house, shipped furniture to N.J.,  loaded Cinder (who had grown to about 30 lbs.) into our 1969 Nova, and headed north in July 1972. Carol had to change doctors during her pregnancy, but we were young and adventuresome. 

  

The owner of Logos bought an old 2-story apartment house for us to rent and share with another couple (the Balsigers and their two young daughters). David Balsiger, hired as a Logos writer-editor, and his wife, Janie, moved from California to N.J. just before we moved from S.C. When we arrived, the Balsigers had settled into the second floor apartment. The house lacked air-conditioning at that time, and our windows had no screens. Our landlord (the owner of Logos) planned to supply screens as soon as he could. Houses in that neighborhood were close. Our driveway, to the right of our house, jutted up to our neighbor’s drive. The two passageways were divided by a sliver of yard and a waist-high wire fence. 

  

Our master bedroom, in the rear of the house, featured a window that stood, at the sill, about six feet above the backyard lawn. July in N.J. in 1972 was hot and humid, and despite lack of a screen for that bedroom window, we raised the window’s bottom portion as high as possible. We had put up “curtains” made of a gauzy, see-through, lace-like material. Cinder slept in our bedroom each night. After occupying the house several days, we were lying awake around 10 p.m. when I heard Cinder growl, which was unlike her. 

  

“Be quiet, Cinder,” I said. 

  

She growled again, walked to the open window, placed front paws on the sill and peered out. I rose slowly from the bed and nudged Cinder aside, parted the thin curtains and gazed into the backyard. A distant streetlight allowed me to see most of the narrow-but-deep rear landscape that I scanned from side to side. Then I looked down. There, crouched three feet below our window was a burly, gray-haired man wearing a gray jacket. 

  

“Yeo-o-w!” I yelled, and slammed shut the window. I guess I told Carol there was a man out there. I hardly remember what was said. She donned a robe, snatched up Cinder under one arm, and high-tailed it up the stairs to the Balsigers, who had heard me yell and the window slam. (I’ve wondered, “Why would an ‘obviously pregnant’ woman lug a 30-lb. dog up a staircase? I probably needed that dog down there with me.)

  

I called the police: “What’s that?” I said. “You can’t do anything about a man in our yard unless he’s still in the yard? He’s gray-haired with a spiky hairstyle. He was underneath our bedroom window. My wife’s very upset and she’s pregnant!” 

  

The next day, we learned from neighbors that our “night visitor” was probably our next-door neighbor, an alleged “Peeping Tom.” They said, “We hated to tell you about him.” The accused lived in the house on the other side of those two gravel driveways I earlier described. After work the next day, I knocked on the accused’s door, and he answered. Behind him, about a room away, I saw his two teenage daughters and wife peering in our direction. “Mr. ___,” I said, “I know you were over at our house last night. God loves you and I care about you, but don’t ever set your foot on our property again.” 

He denied he was the guy, but I believed our neighbors. As far as I know, he never again snooped around our landlord’s property during the year we lived there. During that year, when Mr. ___ came out to get into his car and Cinder was anywhere near our back door, the hair on her back would rise up, and sometimes we heard a low growl.

  

Cinder wasn’t always “wonder dog,” in a good sense. During autumn, I planted tulip bulbs, but Cinder dug up those bulbs, playfully flipping them into the air. When my mother and our friend, Janet, journeyed together from the South to visit us, Mother petted Cinder, but Janet, who was not a “pet person,” shunned her. We made a Sunday train trip into New York City. Home alone, Cinder chewed three pairs of new shoes Janet had bought for her trip. Cinder touched none of my mother’s shoes. 

  

For months before our daughter was born, Carol’s feet swelled badly. She rested daily on our couch while Cinder licked those painful appendages. Carol gave birth to Janelle in Feb. 1973, and her feet returned to normal size. When Carol came home from the hospital and reclined on the couch, Cinder looked at Carol’s un-swollen feet and never licked them again.  

  

In July 1973, we moved back to Greenville, S.C., and I returned to Woodmont High to teach art. Janelle, learning to walk, steadied herself by holding onto Cinder. They’d walk along together, and Cinder would look back to see if Janelle was OK; at least that’s the way it seemed to us. Janelle tried (once, that we know of) to eat some of Cinder’s dry dog food. We saw the evidence: Janelle’s cheeks were pooched way out.

  

Five years after Janelle was born, our second and last child, Suzanne, arrived. Cinder became part of Suzanne’s life, too. Cinder was 13 years old when arthritis prompted X-rays. Our vet viewed those pictures with me. He said her hips had deteriorated and he felt it was best to put her to sleep. Janelle drove with me to take Cinder’s body to my grandmother’s farm. We buried Cinder, amid tears, close to the barn where I played as a child. The field had been plowed hundreds of times, and the ground was soft and easy to dig . . . but leaving Cinder’s remains there was hard. Agnes Sligh Turnbull said, “Dogs’ lives are too short. Their only fault, really.” 

My Try at Taxidermy

Living in the rural South as a child in the 1950s, I loved animals. Maybe I was destined to try my hand at taxidermy.

Taxidermy is “the art of preparing, stuffing, and mounting the skins of animals with lifelike effect,” including tanning skins and making rugs. The term comes from the Greek-Latin “taxis” (“to move or arrange”) and “derma” (“skin”).

“Taxidermy began in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries to preserve specimens collected by world-traveling explorers,” says Matt Blitz (Smithsonian.com). Taxidermy, especially of birds, was “popular as Victorian-era home decoration.” Using arsenic in soap to protect specimens, led “to a golden age of taxidermy that spanned from about 1840 through the dawn of World War I.” Today, arsenic is banned in most countries, and “Borax and tanning techniques are often used as alternatives.”
 
In the mid-1950s, I saw a Northwestern School of Taxidermy (NST) advertisement in “Outdoor Life” magazine. I ordered a booklet containing enticements such as this one: 

“BECAUSE REAL GAME CONSERVATION PRACTICES ARE NECESSARY TO PRESERVE OUR WILD-GAME! Unrestricted hunting is the thing of the past. … TAXIDERMY makes up for this restricted shooting. It enables the sportsman to DOUBLE his enjoyment from hunting or fishing, by being able to preserve PERMANENTLY all of his finest trophies. There is no surer way for you to greatly INCREASE your hunting pleasure than to learn TAXIDERMY. … Any average man or boy who takes our course, studies and practices the lessons … is ALMOST CERTAIN to find ways of turning his knowledge into CASH.”
 
I considered sending $10 to order the nine NST “to be sequentially mailed” lessons, and something my parents did helped me decide to “go for it."

My family moved us from our 13-acre farm to nearby Greer, S.C. Before I started 7th grade, my parents bought a mounted gray squirrel from Ford McKinney, who worked in a textile mill but learned taxidermy as a hobby. The squirrel – purchased for $25 or less – held a hickory nut between its front feet and sat upright on a log with its tail curled upward in an “S” shape. That squirrel influenced me to order the lessons.

The NST was located at 1202 Howard St. in Omaha, Nebraska. J.W. Elwood founded the school in 1903. It also sold taxidermy supplies. In the early 1900s, “taxidermy was known to only a few; the methods had been kept secret,” sources say. “But Mr. Elwood believed he could teach it by mail just as effectively as he had done it with his friends in his home.”
 
Stephen Rogers says many who took up taxidermy over 45 years ago “had their beginnings with the old J.W. Elwood Northwestern School of Taxidermy Correspondence School.” Rogers says Elwood “made a ‘killing’ by ‘teaching’ taxidermy to the common folk.” His NST lessons are still offered, at times, on E-bay.
 
I received my first NST booklet; it was about mounting birds. Few illustrations accompanied the black-and-white printed pages. I stayed at my paternal grandparents’ nearby farm for a few days and carried my Red Ryder BB gun. An electric line crossed my grandparents’ pasture, and I spotted an Eastern Meadowlark perched on one of the wires. My shot hit the bird in the chest, and it plummeted. Growing up in farming country and seeing animals processed for food or being “put down,” I didn’t feel many twangs of conscience about that lark’s demise. But I had heard in church that a sparrow did not fall to the ground without God knowing about it, and I thought about that. 

I laid the bird on a newspaper on a table and read something like this from my lesson: “The breast of a bird is bare. This is a great boon to the taxidermist.” I parted feathers covering the meadowlark’s torso. Its breast was, indeed, bare. Per instructions, I made an incision from the top to the bottom of the breast with my X-Acto knife.

I skinned the bird, taking out the body but leaving the skull, plus bones in the wings and feet. Brain tissue had to be removed. I cut tissue from the skull’s exterior and later replaced tissue with clay. The feathers unfortunately gathered moisture during flesh removal. Years later, someone wrote about that lesson: “Mounting small birds calls for a lot more patience and skill than most young boys can muster.”
 
I had ordered supplies from NST and used NST wire to fashion the bird’s skeleton. Wires extended through the feet to a wooden pedestal. Around that wire skeleton, I wrapped something called “Kara-flex,” as I recall. It was an artificial straw-like material. I looped string around the Kara-flex and ordered glass eyes for the meadowlark. Weeks later, my finished product disappointed me – the pitiful meadowlark appeared bedraggled.
  
Lesson two, telling how to stuff a squirrel, arrived, and someone gave me a harvested squirrel. Beginning with an incision down the subject’s front, the skinning progressed over the head and to the nose, which had to stay connected to the skull. I scraped off skull tissue but had no stomach for removing the brain, which was bigger than the bird’s brain I had removed. My grandmother dipped into the skull with a tiny spoon and took out the brain. I skinned the squirrel to his feet and tail. To preserve his skin, I soaked it in an alum solution for a day or two, as I recall.

I procured a log slab with bark intact and planned to position my squirrel as though he were running up the side of a tree but pausing and peering slightly downward, as though looking for danger. I drilled holes in the slab to later receive wires extending from the squirrel’s feet.

I sculpted the replacement body from Kara-flex, wrapping it around wire serving as a skeleton. That wire also ran up inside the tail, parallel to the bone left inside.  

After pulling the skin over the sculpted torso, I stitched it together at the incision site. I think I cemented the glass eyes in place before returning the skin to the skull and filling the squirrel’s mouth with colored NST wax. I laid the squirrel, stomach-down, on the slab and inserted feet wires into drilled holes. I bent the wires on the slab’s backside and covered them with felt. I attached a hanger and hung the trophy on a wall, adjusting the squirrel’s tail to flow downward in a subtle “S” shape. My folks thought my squirrel turned out better than the meadowlark.
 
Someone gave me a hawk, and I tried to stuff it. Mr. Hawk went from “handsome” to appearing underweight and having been, as the old folks used to say, “beat with an ugly stick.”
 
Somebody gave me another squirrel, but after I soaked his hide in alum solution, most of his hair came out. That was my last taxidermy project. I gave someone my nine lessons. All my “trophy mounts” – including my best one, the “squirrel climbing a tree” – ended up in the county dump.
 
After WWI, photography began replacing taxidermy. Museums finished creating most habitat dioramas by the 1940s, sources say, and big game hunting became less socially acceptable after WWII. The Northwestern School of Taxidermy reportedly went out of business around 1980. But now there is a revival of taxidermy, and many women are participating, some say. Pat Morris, author of “A History of Taxidermy: Art, Science, and Bad Taste,” says a “sense of getting back in touch with the physical world is at the core of taxidermy’s rebirth.”
 
According to writer Matt Blitz, Ms. Allis Markham, who worked as Walt Disney Corporation’s director of social media strategy, completed a deer specimen during a 2-week taxidermy school and felt a sense of accomplishment. “It existed in the real world and not on a computer,” Markham said. She quit her job to open a business called “Prey Taxidermy” in Los Angeles. She creates “ethical” pieces, meaning that no animal she works on died solely for taxidermy.
 
I don’t intend to try stuffing any more creatures, despite reports of a taxidermy revival. I admire the art, but if I had to stuff another bird or an animal, I might go a little squirrelly.