Status Report October 16, 2006
Bruce:
Thanks to the efforts of Vickie Rodgers, Rhonda Raye, Laura Conley and Mary Bentz we now have located relatives for 88 % of the crew. We have only eight to go. I have had the opportunity to observe the process that these women use and it is truly incredible. They leave no stone unturned.
There has been a lot of interest in the Today Show. I got a email from the producer saying that the production is finished and she expects it to be run in the net couple of weeks. She plans to let me know a day or so beforehand and I will put a note on the site to that effect.
Bruce,
I still seem to have a problem getting my comments posted. I go where everyone else has theirs posted, put in the information and then when I click on submit, ir say it’s directing me to url site.
Anyway, I received a letter from my mom last week and she got a call from the Hartford, (CT), Courant wanting to set up an interview with her. By word of mouth they got wind of her loss on the Grunion. When I get a copy of the article I will attempt to put it in the comment section.
Thanks
Sun still shines on brother’s memory
Fallen sailor’s family returns to old home
Funeral Mass honors man killed in 1942
By Jim Carney
Beacon Journal staff writer
When he was a boy, his big brother, Paul, would sing to him.
The song was You Are My Sunshine.
It was Paul Sullivan’s favorite song, and it became Stanley Sullivan’s favorite song, too.
Stanley Sullivan had polio as a child and was 12 years younger than his brother. Often, Paul would put him into a wagon and pull him up Neptune Avenue in Firestone Park.
Stanley Sullivan was 15 when his brother and 69 other crew members were lost at sea on the USS Grunion, a submarine that disappeared off the Aleutian Islands near Alaska on July 31, 1942.
Stanley later went into the Army and served in World War II in Europe. He came back to Akron after the war and in 1961 moved his wife and six children to California, where the family still lives.
This past summer, a team headed by the sons of the commander of the Grunion found an object underwater with sonar equipment near the spot where the submarine was thought to have gone down.
This past week, Stanley Sullivan, retired from the U.S. Postal Service and American Can, returned to Akron along with five of his children and one grandson to once again see the family’s Firestone Park home.
This is a home where his big brother’s sea trunk is still kept, a home where the current residents, Patti and Fred Christ, and members of their family, believe the spirit of Pharmacist’s Mate 1st Class Paul Sullivan still lives.
On Friday, 16 people, including several members of the Sullivan family, gathered at St. Paul Catholic Church on Brown Street, for a funeral Mass for Paul Sullivan.
At the end of the Mass celebrated by the Rev. Ralph Thomas, Stanley Sullivan, having outlived his parents and two brothers and two sisters, stood with his hands folded in prayer and eyes closed and sang the song once again.
“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine,'’ he sang.
Then he turned to his family, a loving smile on his face and his hands raised high, and continued the song that his big brother once sang to him.
“You make me happy when skies are gray.'’
Jim Carney can be reached at 330-996-3576 or jcarney@thebeaconjournal.com.
I am trying to find out if Curtis L. Vassar was among the crew of the USS Grunion? I am one of his niece’s.