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Ted Tupper, Pearl Harbor veteran, dies at 87

BY CARL MACGOWAN | carl.macgowan@newsday.com

April 25, 2008

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On Dec. 7, 1941, Seaman Ted Tupper was dressing for Sunday morning Mass when Japanese war planes assaulted Pearl Harbor.

Still wearing his dress whites, Tupper, 21, stood on the deck of the cruiser San Francisco, firing a World War I-era Springfield rifle at planes flying overhead. He watched helplessly as the battleships Arizona and Oklahoma sank in the harbor.

"All of us are pretty lucky to be around today," he told Newsday in 1991, 50 years after the attack.

Tupper, of Massapequa, who served as president of the Nassau-Suffolk chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, died March 23 of a heart attack at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset. He was 87.

Tupper, who received a Purple Heart after being wounded during the battle of Guadalcanal, worked for 37 years for the U.S. Postal Service in Rockville Centre, said his wife, Joyce.

He was a member of the American Legion post in Massapequa, marched frequently in parades, and attended Pearl Harbor anniversary ceremonies in Hawaii, Joyce Tupper said.

"He was very veteran-oriented," she said. "We used to go to reunions all the time."

Tupper was born in Brooklyn on April 20, 1920, and graduated from Oceanside High School. He enlisted in the Navy on Sept. 12, 1940.

The San Francisco was undergoing repairs in Pearl Harbor and remained defenseless as Japanese planes swooped overhead.

"All ammunition had been offloaded and none of our guns were working," Tupper wrote in a two-page memoir of his wartime experiences. Someone gave him the Springfield, a bolt-action rifle.

"It was useless," he told Newsday in 1989. "First, they gave me a Browning automatic, and I didn't even know how to use it."

A year later, on Friday, Nov. 13, 1942, Tupper was on the San Francisco during an attack on Japanese naval forces at Guadalcanal. Tupper, an electrician's mate, received shrapnel wounds to his shoulder, arm and hand. He was grateful that he survived.

"To this day," he wrote, "I consider Friday the 13th my lucky day."

He was discharged on Dec. 6, 1945.

Mike Montelione, 89, of Farmingdale, said he and Tupper attended several ceremonies in Pearl Harbor, including events marking the 50th anniversary in 1991.

"He was a very quiet man," said Montelione, an Army veteran who worked as a radio operator in the Schofield Barracks at Pearl Harbor. "I never saw him get excited or get angry about anything. He was a very well-liked guy."

Joyce Tupper said she and her husband were married on Oct. 9, 1983. It was the second marriage for both, she said.

"He was just the nicest man you could find," she said.

Tupper is survived by his wife. Burial was March 28 at Pinelawn Memorial Park in Farmingdale.