Earl Tilford
Guest Columnist
On the evening of Aug. 16, 1945, my father, my eight-months-pregnant mother and my grandfather went to the Municipal Pier in St. Petersburg, Fla., to dance in celebration of the news that Japan had agreed to surrender.
My father, a Merchant Marine officer, after surviving four years of running Nazi submarine gauntlets in the Atlantic, had orders to report to San Diego by mid-September to take command of a transport vessel…