DECEMBER 7th—AND THE FAITH OF OUR FATHERS
By Phill Courtney
In late 1941, at the age of 19, my father was asleep on his navy ship docked in Pearl Harbor. It was a morning in December—December 1st, 1941. By December 7th he and his ship were on their way to San Francisco Bay, so, yes, he missed the attack by just a few days. Seeing the writing on the wall, he’d joined the navy before the war had broken out.
Later, when my two brothers and I would ask him how he felt about missing out on that historic event, his answer was always the same: are you kidding? If I’d been there, I could have been killed, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. As always, as I found out through the years, his response was both rational and honest.
During the rest of the war my dad spent most of his time on supply ships as a storekeeper second class, and the only action he’d see was the day a single Japanese fighter plane swept in to strafe the ship. They’d returned fire, but the pilot headed off before either scored a hit.
After the war, my dad became a lawyer (Norman P. Courtney Attorney-at-Law, as his cards always read), and, for a time, a Republican politician, running for the California State Assembly in 1960, when Nixon ran against Kennedy, and in my study at home I have a huge black and white photo blow-up of Nixon and my dad shaking hands at a political rally.
Both Nixon and my dad lost that year, but, unlike Nixon, Dad never ran again, mostly because Mom found that she’d hated being a politician’s wife; said she never wanted to go through another campaign again; and he respected her wishes, although he later told me that he’d found the “rough and tumble” of politics much to his liking.
But, looking back on it, there’s little doubt that today’s Republican party would run him out of town on a rail. For starters, he was opposed to guns and wouldn’t have any in our house because he’d seen the statistics showing that the presence of guns in a home greatly increases the odds of someone there dying by one.
He also didn’t have any problem with gay people. Two of the welcomed guests in our home were two men who lived and ran a restaurant together, whom my parents had met through my dad’s mother, who was an artist. (They loved her work). He also supported a woman’s right to choose; and opposed executions. (Again, he’d read the research and had decided that the death penalty, for so many reasons, made no sense.)
It was basically the only issue during our over 35-plus years of discussing so many, on which he’d turned me completely around. I was 13 years old, and I remember my age then because it was the year Richard Speck had raped and butchered eight student nurses in Chicago, and a classmate had challenged me to defend why even he should be spared. Before my discussions with Dad, killing someone who’d killed someone made perfect sense to me.
The one issue on which I was trying until the last year of his life to turn him around concerned our nation’s foreign policy. In a way it’s all quite understandable. During World War II my dad had been a part of defeating (as President George W. would say) some of history’s worst “evil doers,” so it was difficult for him to believe that the U.S. wasn’t always on the side of the “good guys.”
Yet, despite his unwavering support for the war in Vietnam, and the need to bomb Afghanistan after 9/11, I was beginning to see some cracks in that mindset during the final year of his life. After I’d given him a column I’d written about the so-called “War on Terror,” he called and said that he’d agreed with about “60 percent” of it. I joked and said I was relieved. I’d though he might say 40 percent.
Finally, these days Dad would not be considered a “respectable Republican” for another reason as well because he’d never in his life embraced fundamentalist Christianity, which, he maintained, has lain a facade of fables over the life of Jesus, which often smothers what he considered to be the essence of Christianity: Christ’s teachings, which Dad did his best to live out (he was the most honest lawyer I’ve ever known), and for that I both admired and respected him.
Like one of our nation’s founders, Thomas Jefferson, who’d eliminated in his version of the Bible all the mythic miracles, my dad was rational when it came to religion. During one of our last conversations, we had a “meeting of minds” (once again) over the truthful conclusion that we simply can’t know if humans have an afterlife, at a time when, at the age of 80, he was facing head-on that question himself.
Although Dad always dismissed national news reporter Tom Brokaw’s description of my dad’s as “the greatest generation,” I’ve leave that to the historians. However, I have no problem at all saying that Norman P. Courtney was a great father.

Phill Courtney has been a high school English teacher and, like his father, a politician himself, having campaigned for Congress twice with the Green party. He is also a board member at the Redlands Center for the Realization of Spirit, where Science of Mind, founded by Ernest Holmes some 100 years ago, is taught, and Jesus, in the words of the great psychologist, Carl Jung, is seen not as the great “exception,” but, as the great “example.” Holmes also taught that there’s a power for good in the universe and you can use it.
In the early 1980’s, after Phill learned about Science of Mind through a friend’s aunt, he reacquainted his dad with the teachings, after which he and Phill’s mom also became followers for the remainder of their lives. Phill’s email is: pjcourtney1311@gmail.com and uses that “power for good” every morning to get out of bed.