Lois Dusenbery was 29 years old and living near Honolulu when Pearl Harbor was attacked on Dec. 7, 1941, “a date which will live in infamy.”

Dusenbery, now 104 and the oldest resident at Mercer Island’s Covenant Shores retirement home, was an eyewitness to the attack that brought the U.S. into World War II. She still has a few vivid memories of that day.

“I almost got killed three times that morning,” she said. “You don’t forget that.”

She and her late husband, George Dudley Dambacher, lived in military housing at Hickam Field, on the Air Force base that borders Pearl Harbor. She said she was still in bed when the bombings started that morning.

“There was a horrendous noise,” she said. “I had never heard anything as loud.”

Her husband jokingly told her to “go back to sleep, it’s the Japanese.”

“He was kidding,” she said, but he was right.

Dusenbery got dressed and went downstairs, and noticed that the windows had been blown out. Luckily, her Venetian blinds were down, and the glass had shattered against those instead of blowing into her house.

She then went outside and stood with her neighbors, watching the airplanes overhead. She said she wasn’t really scared or afraid, though she said she could hear bullets whistling by her and saw a lot of black smoke.

“It’s amazing how calm I was,” she recalled.

Later, she found that her family back home in Kansas had been extremely worried about her. About 2,400 Americans were killed in the attack. Eight U.S. Navy battleships were damaged or sunk, including the USS Arizona, which is now a war memorial.

Dusenbery said that she doesn’t remember much about the war, except that it “lasted for a long time.”

Lois and George lived in Hawaii for about 50 years before retiring in Mercer Island. He died in 2003, and she was remarried in 2008, to Earl Dusenbery.

Another Covenant Shores resident has a personal connection to Pearl Harbor, though his was formed years after the attack. John Kneepkens said he remembered hearing President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speech about the infamous day on the radio on Dec. 8, but that it didn’t really affect him until he was drafted in February 1942, a few months later.

He was 22 and a student at the time, but ended up spending much of his career in the military. He delayed entering the Army until after his graduation, then worked in army hospitals in the U.S. During the Korean War, he was stationed in Austria for three years.

The Army helped him earn an advanced degree in healthcare administration, he said.

Kneepkens was stationed at Tripler Hospital, right next to Pearl Harbor, during the Vietnam War, from 1961 to 1965. He said the U.S. military had 70,000 troops in Hawaii at the time.

Kneepkens went on to become the administrator of Stanford Medical Center before also retiring in Mercer Island.

The local Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) Post 1760 honors Pearl Harbor Day on Dec. 7, according to its website.

“Some of our local veterans were personally impacted by this event, due either to their Japanese-American heritage or later voluntary service in the Pacific or European theaters of war,” it states. “As with many other remembrance days throughout the year, look for our flag at half-mast outside the Keewaydin Clubhouse.”

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. For more, see www.pearlharbor75thanniversary.com.