Memorial Day will always bring back memories to Kathy Hughes of her childhood in Hiroshima, the first of two Japanese cities to endure the detonation of an atomic bomb.
      “I was in the sixth grade. We looked out the window and saw this big mushroom cloud with light coming through,” Hughes said Wednesday. “We were told  that it couldn’t be light.”
     Shortly after the explosion and appearance of the iconic mushroom Hughes and her classmates heard the “loud noise” as the aftermath of the blast sent shockwaves through the area.
     “A lot of the students started running around outside. I got under my desk,” she recalled. “We were told not to touch anything because it was probably contaminated and we could get burned.”
     Hughes said had her father not sold his grocery store in the heart of Hiroshima and moved his family to the outskirts of the large city, “We would probably have been killed.”
     Hughes said her mother lost a sister from the explosion at Nagasaki. Her great-uncle, who ran a seafood place in Hiroshima, sustained radiation burns from the explosion. His clothing had to be peeled off of him, Hughes said. She figured the radiation ultimately claimed his life.
     The good fortune that came out of the tragedy of World War II for Hughes was meeting her future husband Willie Hughes.
     “He was in the Navy and was stationed at a naval base in Japan after the war,” Hughes said.  After they married the couple moved to a number of naval bases before he retired from the Navy with the rank of chief petty officer in 1974.
      Hughes said her husband was reluctant at first to move back to his native Phillips County. A job offer that he couldn’t turn down changed his plans.
     “Willie got an offer to be the training director at the River Academy,” Hughes said. The couple raised one child, a daughter named Nickey. Nickey Savage, a nurse at Northwest Regional Medical Center in Clarksdale, Miss., still lives in Helena-West Helena.
     Hughes said the American military leader who did the most to assist the recovery of Japan after WWII was General Douglas MacArthur.
     “He did a lot for the people of Japan,” Hughes said. “He understood the Japanese, our culture and how the war hurt so many innocent people.”