Exactly seven decades ago Wednesday, about lunchtime for people in Fort Wayne, Clarence Cook was relaxing.

He was in the Navy, and it was a Sunday, his only day off. So after breakfast he had taken off his shoes and laid down in his tiny bunk below deck for a nap.

Then, a fire alarm went off, so Cook, as a member of a fire and rescue party that morning, grabbed a fire extinguisher and went on deck to see what was going on.

He needed more than a fire extinguisher.

At that moment he saw a plane fly by at eye level, not 50 feet away. He could see the moustache on the pilot, and the big red rising sun on the side of the plane. The plane was making a torpedo run for the USS Oklahoma.

“I thought, ‘Uh oh,’ and ran right up to the gun,” referring to a 5-inch gun he was trained to shoot.

From his ship, the destroyer USS Aylwin 355, he could see other ships burning.

Within moments the Aylwin, with only a partial crew and some junior officers on board, had dropped its anchor and chain altogether and started to steam out of the harbor where it would spend the next five days hunting for Japanese submarines and the fleet that attacked Pearl Harbor.

That was Cook’s view of the start of World War II and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which took place 70 years ago Wednesday.

Today, there aren’t many people left who were at Pearl Harbor when it was attacked, and every day there are even fewer people who were alive when the attack took place.

For decades, though, the date of the attack was burned into the American memory, just as 9/11 is today. The attack killed thousands, crippled America’s Pacific fleet, and took people like Cook, who had joined the Navy at 17 to see the world, and showed them a world of fury and destruction that they could never have imagined.

Marking the anniversary of the attack is still something that is done every year, and the media, fond of nice round numbers like 70, will probably pay a little more attention than it did, say, last year.

The anniversary is worth remembering, but as time passes, and as Dec. 7, 1941, becomes more and more distant, fewer and fewer people even remember it.

Time was, people like Cook would be called to schools or other events to talk about the, “date which will live in infamy.” But the veterans are getting older, and the calls are fewer.

Cook, for one, laments that the attack, which led to a lengthy war that cost hundreds of thousands of American lives, is slowly being forgotten. Some young people aren’t familiar with it.

Maybe it’s just the march of history. Today people in their 20s remember Sept. 11; people in their 60s remember Vietnam, and people in their late 80s and 90s remember Pearl Harbor.

The date is worth commemorating. There are still people who survived the attack, and there are almost certainly surviving children and widows of people who were killed in the attack.

How many people remember the date of “the shot heard round the world,” or even what it was, or the date Fort Sumter was fired on, launching the Civil War?

We do tend to forget. Maybe our brains are too clogged with passwords and blog addresses to be troubled with history.

At the least, though, we should remember our recent history, if nothing else to honor the people who made it.