Pearl Harbor vet Herb Louden dies hours before Petaluma Veterans Day Parade

Herb Louden was up early Tuesday, and in uniform.

The Veterans Day parade wouldn’t begin until 1 p.m., only miles from his Petaluma home. Even so, the 97-year-old Louden, one of the region’s most admired combat veterans and the last active vet in Sonoma County’s fraternal organization of survivors of the attack on Pearl Harbor, arose at 6 a.m.

He dressed in the traditional outfit of Pearl Harbor vets: white slacks, Hawaiian shirt, white Pearl Harbor Survivors Association cloth cap. He sat in his favorite living-room chair when, sometime after 10 a.m., his sweetheart of 70 years, Evelyn, told him their son would arrive soon to take him downtown plenty early, so he should collect his coat.

“He didn’t move,” his wife recalled. “I said, ‘Well, it’s up to you.’?”

When next she passed by him, his head had rolled to one side and he didn’t respond to her pleas, “Herb! Herb, answer me!”

Moments later, son Paul, who lives in Windsor, stepped in the door and confirmed what his mother knew: Herb Louden had died on Veterans Day.

As a 24-year-old pharmacist’s mate aboard the hospital ship Solace, he’d responded to the surprise attack that drew the U.S. into World War II. As a sweet-tempered and generous elder, he’d been honored as a local embodiment of the finest traits of the Greatest Generation.

And as a Christian chaplain who had presided over countless military holiday commemorations and funerals for fellow Pearl Harbor survivors, the old sailor had picked a most apropos day to “cross the bar.”

At the parade, coordinator Steve Kemmerle, a neighbor and close friend of Louden, quickly rewrote the script read by announcers along the downtown Petaluma route. Spectators within earshot sighed or dropped their heads at the announcements that Louden, the only Pearl Harbor survivor scheduled to appear in the procession, had died that same morning.

His passing leaves just one veteran active in what was previously the three-county Luther Burbank Chapter, No. 23, of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association. He is 90-year-old Bill Slater of Lakeport.

Louden, a Baptist and a Bible-gifting member of The Gideons International, was a chaplain for the Pearl Harbor association at the local, state and national levels until it disbanded in 2011. Seventy years after the attack, the group’s leaders agreed they were too old and too few to continue running the organization.

With the association dissolved, small pockets of Pearl veterans continue to meet around the country as social clubs. Herb and Evie Louden appeared religiously at Willie Bird’s Restaurant on the third Sunday each month for a lunch meeting of the local group, which called itself Pearl Harbor Survivors, North Bay, and now is made up mostly of widows and admirers of Pearl vets.

Louden belonged also to other veterans organizations, and in recent years he was one of the most-senior vets present at Memorial Day, Veterans Day and other service-related observances. Just last Thursday, he and his wife shared his 97th birthday cake with other guests of the big Tribute to Our Veterans luncheon in Santa Rosa.

Though a proud veteran, he was not a fighter. According to his wife, an aunt admonished the former Michigan farm boy when he joined the Navy in mid-1941, “Don’t carry a gun!”

So Louden requested medical duty. He was assigned to the Solace, which on Dec. 7, 1941, was anchored inside Pearl Harbor, just off Battleship Row.

Shortly after Japanese planes came to rain down bombs and torpedoes, he helped to fish dead or wounded sailors from the oily water.

He said in 2001, “Some claimed they were trained well enough not to be scared, but I was scared to death.

“But I did my work.”

A pharmacist’s mate, he was assigned to treat and watch over a horribly burned young sailor. An officer told Louden sternly, “He has the will to live. Whether he lives or dies depends on the care you give him.”

Louden would grimace when recalling that he had to skin the sailor alive to remove the burnt flesh. For eight days he scarcely left the patient’s bed. He held a vivid memory of the generally unconscious sailor once opening his eyes and telling him, “I hope I can be as good a man as my daddy was.”

Louden spoke of God with the younger man and came to feel a bond with him. He rejoiced when, on March 15, 1942, “That boy walked off the ship.”

As funny as he was reverent, Louden would boast that his ship got off more shots than any other in the war. Penicillin shots, that was. On the white Pearl Harbor Survivors Association jacket that he wore to reunions and meetings, a big button proclaimed, “Hi! I don’t remember your name, either.” He consistently introduced his wife as “my better three-fifths.”

The two of them settled in Petaluma in 1956. Herb Louden worked a long career as an insurance adjuster, and following retirement immersed himself in veterans affairs and activities. He told of feeling honor-bound to pay tribute to his colleagues killed or maimed in battle, and to speak to schoolchildren and others about why America entered the war and did what it did to bring it to a close.

He was a veteran pained to see people remain silent on Pearl Harbor Day but lambaste the U.S. on the anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan.

“I only hope that young people will realize that the war started at Pearl Harbor, not at Hiroshima,” he said in 1996.

“The thing that hurts more than anything else is Americans jumping on us because they think we were wrong in dropping the atomic bombs,” he said. “It wasn’t wrong; it ended the war.”

The old chaplain - he served many years in the role for Petaluma’s Masonic Lodge - also prayed fervently and often for peace. And, speaking in 2007 of what the war taught him, he said, “You realize how fragile life really is.”

In addition to his wife in Petaluma and his son in Windsor, Louden is survived by his daughter, Candy Conrotti of East Point, Ky., and five grandchildren.

A memorial service will be at 10 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 29, at Petaluma Valley Baptist Church.

His family suggests memorial donations to The Gideons International, P.O. Box 2143, Petaluma 94953-2143.

You can reach Staff Writer Chris Smith at 521-5211 or at chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.