Mark Ferris, 82; Pearl Harbor Survivor Co-Founded Group

Mark Ferris, 82, co-founder of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Assn. and the group’s first president, died Dec. 28 of a heart attack at a hospital in Sacramento.

Born in Decatur, Ill., Ferris joined the Army in 1940. An aerial gunner with a bomber crew, Ferris was in his barracks at Hickam Field on Oahu when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Ferris spent much of the war in the Pacific theater, as an army reporter.

Following the war, Ferris came to California where he worked as a reporter with the Los Angeles Examiner and later the Gardena Tribune, where he was an editor.

In 1957, he assigned a reporter to ask people in the street the meaning of Dec. 7. Of 42 people questioned, none knew the answer. Ferris wrote a column reflecting on the fact that the national consciousness had faded just 12 years after the end of the war. He encouraged Pearl Harbor survivors to contact him.

A year later, he and 10 other survivors founded the Pearl Harbor Survivors Assn. At one time the group numbered 18,000, but time and mortality have shrunk its membership to about 7,000.