Travel Channel to air World War II love story of Lake County couple

Cupid’s Bullet is what the Travel Channel is calling the tale of love and war from Lake County that the ?cable network will tell Thursday night on national TV. The cable network learned of the story from the PD.

As I’ve said before, it’s one of my favorite stories ever.

It stars lovely 97-year-old former nurse Alice Darrow of greater Kelseyville, her late husband the stouthearted survivor of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the large, gouged and ugly machine-gun bullet that brought them together.

The high-caliber love story will take up a few minutes of a new episode of the Travel Channel’s “Mysteries at the Museum.”

It seems all the world is a museum to the program’s host, Don Wildman, who seeks revelations from relics and historical sites and lore and other vestiges of the past.

Check your TV listings, but it appears to me the Travel Channel will air the episode featuring “Cupid’s Bullet” at?10 p.m. on Thursday, at 8 a.m. on Jan. 22 and at 4 p.m. on ?Feb. 2.

In a nutshell: One of the Japanese bomb strikes on the battleship West Virginia on Dec. 7, 1941, blew a fresh-faced sailor named Dean Darrow into the oily water of Pearl Harbor.

Darrow was pulled out and delivered to the hospital ship Solace for treatment of a small wound to his back.

Reassigned to a destroyer, the sailor was often dizzy and early in ’42 couldn’t pull himself from his bunk. X-rays ordered by a doc displayed a shocker: A bullet an inch and a half long was lodged in the muscle of the backside of his heart.

He was shipped to the naval hospital at Vallejo’s Mare Island for a high-risk surgery to remove it.

Smitten with his nurse, Alice Becker, Darrow asked if she’d go out on liberty with him should he come through the operation.

Why, sure, she said.

Darn if Dean Darrow didn’t make it. He and Alice had been married almost 50 years when he died in 1991.

Today the 7.7 mm bullet, scarred from the ricocheting that evidently slowed it enough that it didn’t pierce Dean Darrow’s heart and kill him, couldn’t be more dear to Alice were it made of solid gold.

The “Mysteries at the Museum” episode features also “the magician who challenged Henry Houdini” and something about an invention involving telegraphs and snails.

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LOSING HART: Talented, diligent and delightful, reporter Angela Hart bids farewell to the PD and its readers as she prepares to join The Sacramento Bee.

Angela will bolster the Bee’s Capitol bureau, covering politics and Gavin Newsom’s bid to become governor.

We’ll miss her. The Army veteran, dog lover and deep-digging journalist was here less than three years but shone in her coverage of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors and serious issues, among them substandard housing. All the best to Angela and to the PD’s J.D. Morris, who’ll pick up the county government and politics beat.

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LIKE LUTEFISK? If you haven’t tried the much beloved, much detested Nordic fish dish, here’s a perfect opportunity.

On Jan. 21, the Sons of Norway will host at their Santa Rosa hall a traditional feast of the once dried and lye-treated cod and, as an accompaniment or alternative, some of the best meatballs on Earth.

Check out freyalodge.org and try just a bite.

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