When the Japanese assaulted Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt was right - it was a day that would live in infamy.

On that Sunday afternoon, Adrian College students joined the entire nation at their radio sets to hear the news. Not all of it made sense right away; many in those days didn't know where Hawaii was, let alone Pearl Harbor. Yet two things were clear: the nation had been bombed, and it was almost certain to go to war.

Days like that are hard to forget. Here is some of what Adrian alumni remember:

Allen Heininger '45 was a freshman at Adrian and living with his grandfather in a house near the College. As soon as he heard the news, he remembers jumping on a bicycle and speeding off to campus to see how his classmates' would react.

"It was clear to all of us that our lives would change substantially and that pretty soon we'd be in the war," he said.

Since Heininger had entered college early and was only 16, he didn't get involved as soon as many of his classmates. However, he enlisted in the Navy about six months shy of his eighteenth birthday, and he went on active duty when he reached the legal age. He later served in the Pacific.

"Pearl Harbor was such a shock, but it left no question to the people of my generation that the United States needed to get involved in the war," he said. "It galvanized the entire nation in a way that nothing else could have, even though the war in Europe had been going on for two years."

Lyle "Cub" Powers '44 and his wife Joyce were hazy on the actual spot of the attack.

"When I heard Pearl Harbor was attacked, I said, 'Pearl Harbor? Where's that?'" Joyce explains. "Hawaii wasn't even a state then, and Pearl Harbor wasn't locked in history yet. Its affect on us was more than most people could gather in at that time."

First the neighbors told them. Then they heard it on the radio. Wherever Lynn '42 and Jean Welsh Schultz '45 went that day, the heavy news of the tragedy was right there.

"That night we went on a double-date with another couple from Adrian College down to Toledo to see a movie, and it's a very vivid memory coming out of the theatre and hearing the newsboys say, 'Extra! Extra! The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor.'"

"It was very devastating to know that our country had been bombed," she said. However, at that time, Pearl Harbor itself was unknown to them.

"All we knew was that it was in Hawaii. And of course Hawaii hadn't received statehood from the United States at that time.

"The next morning-that was Monday, Dec. 8-we were on campus," Jean said. "Patriotism, of course, was quite a virtue in those days, and many, many of the male students were all ready to go to enlist in their preferred branch of service."

War soon changed life for the Schultzes. They were married March 1943 (former Adrian Dean H.K. Fox performed the service), and then were separated when Lynn left to serve in the Pacific in August 1943. He returned to Adrian after the war to finish his degree.

"I was working at the phone company and was going to college," Carolyn Ott Heffron '44 said. "On that day, the lines got very busy, and after I left, I found out why."

"It was hard to believe it had happened." Harold Boyse '45 said. He was in the dormitory in former South Hall when he heard the news on the radio.

"I was in the basement, where I helped fire the furnace. It was Dec. 7, so we had the furnace going," he said.

"I was downtown Adrian," Robert Freligh '44 said. "I was with one of my classmates or something, and we said to each other, 'Where's Pearl Harbor?' But I think we probably knew we would be in the war before long."

He and a friend had already enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force. "At that young age, we probably thought they needed us to win the war," he said. But the U.S. entered the conflict the next day, and so Canada soon notified them that Americans could no longer be accepted.

"We got a really nice letter from some sort of royalty," he said.

Shortly after that, Freligh enlisted in the Navy, where he was a pilot in the Pacific.

He was shot down in the Philippines and was eventually rescued.