Chris Smith: A Pearl Harbor bullet, a big heart and a love story

A woman from the Travel Channel phoned after reading online one of the greatest stories I've ever heard or written about.

The caller asked to get in touch with 97-year-old Alice Darrow of Kelseyville, in Lake County. The Travel Channel was wanting to produce a program about Alice, one of the most delightful people alive, and her late husband's bullet.

I checked with Alice and she wasn't wild about the prospect of being interviewed and taped for television. But she did talk with the Travel Channel lady.

And just days ago, a three-person production crew visited her and shot from every angle the machine gun bullet that 24-year-old sailor Dean Darrow carried home from Pearl Harbor.

In the muscle of his heart.

ABOUT 8 A.M. on Dec. 7, 1941, Fire Controlman 3rd Class Dean Darrow fired an anti-aircraft gun atop the battleship USS West Virginia.

A bomb from a Japanese attack plane exploded near enough to hurl him into the oily water of Pearl Harbor. At the naval hospital, a doctor found a small wound to the left of his spine and concluded shrapnel had struck him and fallen out.

With the West Virginia temporarily sunk, Darrow shipped out aboard the destroyer Porter. He told me in 1991, just before the 50th anniversary of the attack, that for weeks he often was dizzy and palpitated.

LATE IN JANUARY of '42, Darrow fell so miserably ill he was sent back to Pearl Harbor and to the hospital ship Solace. An X-ray revealed his problem: A bullet 1½ inches long had pierced his back and lodged in the muscle of his heart. Soon the hospital at Vallejo's Mare Island buzzed with word that a surgeon would try to remove the slug without killing him.

Smitten with his nurse, Alice Beck, Darrow asked her, “If I ever get through surgery, will you go on liberty with me?”

“Sure,” she replied, thinking that would likely never happen.

The two of them had been married nearly 50 years when Dean died in 1991 at age 74.

Alice promises that when the Travel Channel folks tell her, she'll tell us the broadcast date of the show on Dean and the bullet that's close to her heart.

Chris Smith is at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.