Massachusetts' Last Pearl Harbor Survivor Dies

Born on Oct. 14, 1921, George Hursey grew up with nine siblings on a farm near Durham, North Carolina. They lived in a log cabin and ate homegrown vegetables and livestock raised by their parents, he later told his children.

Hursey excelled as a high school athlete, captaining the football, basketball and baseball teams in his senior year, but failed to secure an athletic scholarship to attend college because of his lanky frame, according to Hursey's son Dennis, a star athlete in his own right.
Weighing in at 150 pounds despite being 5 feet 10 inches tall, Hursey joined the Army in 1939, after a year of struggling to find work following his graduation from high school. Hursey told The Enterprise in 2016 that the Army paid $21 a month, a high wage for someone with his background.
Hursey was eating breakfast one morning in 1941 after his deployment to Honolulu when the roar of low-flying airplanes startled him. He ran outside to find a harbor full of burning ships.
His unit scrambled to move artillery guns into place, but managed to shoot only at the last wave of Japanese bombers leaving Pearl Harbor.
Hursey went on to fight in numerous battles in the Pacific, including a stint on Guadalcanal.