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On his 100th birthday Thursday, USS Arizona survivor Ken Potts, one of just two men still alive from the ill-fated battleship, was feted with an Army Black Hawk helicopter ride, a meet-up with a Navy F-18 Super Hornet and crew, and a parade of well-wishers who drove past his Provo, Utah, home.
The car parade was led by the Provo Fire and Police departments and followed by dozens of cars and trucks flying American flags and honking horns, with occupants offering birthday wishes.
One vehicle stopped in the street, and two men got out and saluted Potts as he sat in a chair on the driveway of his modest home with family and friends.
“Ken is an American hero who never asked to be recognized but deserved to be recognized,” said Nikki Stratton, who helped organize the party with the Navy.
Stratton knows Potts because her grandfather was Don Stratton, a well-known Arizona crew member who died in 2020 at the age of 97.
Navy personnel in dress whites did a birthday shout-out to Potts from the Pearl Harbor National Memorial.
Both Potts and Lou Conter, a California resident and the other remaining survivor of the Arizona, are expected at Pearl Harbor for the 80th anniversary of the surprise Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Oahu. Conter turns 100 in September.
A total of 1,177 of their shipmates died on the Arizona, with more than 900 still entombed on the sunken battleship.
“I have the feeling that it’s the last salute from them. They understand that and it’s the 80th anniversary,” said Daniel Martinez, chief historian for the Pearl Harbor National Memorial.
A third Pearl Harbor centenarian, a Honolulu resident, is expected for the big anniversary.
Sterling Cale, a former Navy pharmacist mate turning 100 in November, retrieved 46 people from the waters of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. He and 10 other men were detailed to recover the dead on the Arizona, and he recalled seeing ashes blowing off the ship that he realized had been men.
Potts was a crane operator on the Arizona, he told the American Veterans Center in a video interview in late 2020.
“I was ashore. I stayed overnight the night before,” he said. “There was horns honking and sirens going and everything, and I turned the radio on — it said, all Navy personnel get back to their ships.”
When he got back to Pearl Harbor “the whole harbor was afire,” and he and others helped rescue men who were struggling to keep their heads above the oil-soaked waters.
“Sirens for a long time, even after I got out of the Navy, if I was out in the open and heard a siren, I’d shake,” Potts recalled.
As he was pushed in a wheelchair to see the parked Navy Super Hornet at Provo Airport, Potts was asked whether he was ready to get in and go for a ride. “Yeah!” he responded enthusiastically.
Potts posed with Nikki Stratton for a photo with a model of the new USS
Arizona, an attack submarine. In late 2019 the Navy announced that the USS Arizona and USS Oklahoma would be returning to active duty in the form of Virginia-class submarines.
“Unreal history right here. Mr. Ken Potts, the oldest survivor, holding the first-ever model of the (submarine) USS Arizona, SSN-803. Truly humbled to be with Mr. Potts for his 100th birthday,” Stratton posted to Facebook.
She later added, “My hope is to have Ken at the commissioning of the new USS Arizona in four years!! In Hawaii!”
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