Kennedy Library displays tokens of war story
Islands ‘money’ recalls PT-109
By Martin Finucane, Globe Staff | August 5, 2009
A simple, unadorned cream-colored piece of shell now on display at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum is a token of a dramatic story from long ago and across the world.
The bracelet-shaped “custom money’’ from the Solomon Islands came from Eroni Kumana, one of two islanders who helped save Kennedy and his crew after Kennedy’s boat, PT-109, had been rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer in World War II.
Kumana, who encountered Kennedy and his crew 66 years ago today, asked an American who visited him last year if the item could be laid on Kennedy’s grave. It was, in November, in a ceremony attended by members of the Kennedy family, and now it’s part of the collection at the Boston museum.
Also in the display case: the Navy and Marine Corps Medal and Purple Heart Kennedy received, a model of the boat, a picture of young Jack at the helm, and a picture of Kumana holding a bust of the president.
Without Kumana and his fellow Allied scout, Biuku Gasa, who died in 2005, museum officials say, the future president might not have made it back from the war to make his mark on history.
But museum curator Stacey Bredhoff said yesterday that the gift of the custom money shows the incident also had an effect on Kumana. One traditional use of custom money, which is carved from a fossilized giant clam shell, is to lay it on a chief’s grave.
“You sense there is some really deep, profound human connection that he felt toward President Kennedy,’’ Bredhoff said.
The story of the shell “would just bring the tears to your eyes, I think . . . the bond between them over the short time that they met,’’ said Mike Friel, a 54-year-old civil servant from County Donegal, Ireland, who was checking out the display containing the custom money yesterday afternoon.
The destroyer smashed into the small boat in the early morning hours of Aug. 2, 1943. Two crewmen died.
Kennedy, then 26, led his remaining 10 crew members in a weeklong fight for survival, swimming to a series of tiny deserted islands.
Kumana and Gasa found the men, who had been surviving on coconuts. They took a message from Kennedy written on a coconut husk (an item also on display at the museum) to the nearest Allied base 35 miles away. A rescue was launched.
When JFK was asked how he became a war hero, the exhibit noted, he would reply, “It was involuntary. They sank my boat.’’
© Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
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