Pearl Harbor survivor closes in on 100

TOWN OF MANLIUS – Ed Stone, a resident of the Brookdale Manlius retirement community, will be turning 100 years old this Labor Day—a stroke of luck, he says, seeing as how his life could’ve been cut short much sooner.
Born in Towanda, Pennsylvania, on Sept. 4, 1923, Stone was raised through the Great Depression the son of a mechanic for a steam engine manufacturer and a woman from a religious farming family.
When the Lehigh Valley Railroad was cutting back because of the economic crisis, his father decided to go out west alone and meet up with Hollywood producer Louis B. Mayer. He would later be spotted as an extra in the 1939 epic film “Gone With the Wind.”
Stone’s mother, Laura, took care of him and his older brother all along and later on her own, but she later passed away from tuberculosis at the age of 48. Stone expresses that he remains baffled as to why he was never infected with the disease himself, having lived in such close quarters with his mother.
“I’m a very lucky person, and there was nobody in my family that even came close to 100,” Stone said. “I’m the only one.”
After high school he joined the United States Navy and trained in Newport, Rhode Island before entering submarine school and commissioning the USS Bumper.
He would later be aboard an ammunition-transporting ship called the USS Pyro when Japanese military planes bombed the Pearl Harbor naval base on Dec. 7, 1941.
“The morning of the attack, I had morning watch in the radio room from 8 to 12, and it was about five minutes to 8 o’clock when the first bomb was dropped on Pearl Harbor,” Stone said. “That was the first time we were ever attacked by an enemy on United States soil.”
There was no serious damage to his ship, at least not to the extent sustained by those in Battleship Row, and so it wasn’t until later that Stone found out just how many of his fellow sailors were killed in the surprise strike.
He said that to this day he holds no ill will toward Japan and remains thankful that the two countries created an alliance, even though he still thinks back and questions what the combination of incremental affronts was that drove Japan to resort to an attack on Pearl Harbor.
Able to transmit close to 35 words a minute through Morse code, Stone went on to have a rating of radioman second class in the Navy and transferred over to the minesweeper the USS Force, but World War II ended before his ship was sent to battle in Japan.
In the years after his service, Stone graduated from the Capitol Radio Engineering Institute in Washington D.C. on the GI Bill before relocating to Syracuse to work for General Electric. He also married his sixth grade sweetheart, Eleanor, and they had two boys and two girls. He and Eleanor had been together 62 years when she passed away in 2006.
In addition to being named the grand marshal of a remembrance parade in Hawaii and giving talks in school classrooms locally, Stone was the secretary in charge of minutes and newsletters for a Pearl Harbor survivors group that met at Central New York American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars posts. Through that group he became close with numerous other veterans, including a local man born the same month as him also named Ed.
That friend of his, Eddie Williams, was three miles away from the Pyro and closer to the destruction as one of the men aboard the light cruiser the USS Raleigh that day of infamy. Williams passed away in 2009, but his daughter, Cynthia, has continued checking up on Stone to make sure he’s well.
“He’s one of the most genuinely kind people I’ve ever known, and he’s part of that Greatest Generation,” said Cynthia Williams, a Jamesville resident. “He’s always taking care of other people.”
Stone is also a lover of big band music, and he enjoys playing the drums. He’s a jokester too: when his doctor advised him to stick to one drink a night, he took advantage of the loophole that it was never mentioned how big the glass could be.
Nearing the century mark, Stone said he still tells recent high school graduates to consider the Navy as a path to take, maintaining that it helped him build himself up as a man and taught him more than he ever thought he would learn.