John Cummings Clirehugh

John Cummings Clirehugh
John Cummings Clirehugh died March 12, 2010 at age 90. He had lived in Pennsylvania, in New Milford and before that Steven's Point, since about 1960. He was a retired electrical engineer and farmer. John was born in 1919 in Hillside, New Jersey, the first of two children to John Alexander Clirehugh and Marion Hawkins Gray. Both parents were of Scottish and German ancestry. His was the fourth generation of Clirehughs in America. John joined the U.S. Navy in 1939. He served on three submarines before retiring from active duty in 1948: USS O-7 SS68, USS Pollack SS180, and USS Tautog SS199. He was in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and was onboard the docked Tautog when the Japanese planes arrived. John, an electricians mate, was below decks passing up the ammunition to those sailors manning the machine gun, shooting down at least one Japanese war plane. He was a Pearl Harbor Survivor and was awarded the Bronze Star "for heroism in action against the Japanese in Pacific waters." John was a member of several submariner groups including The Southern Tier Chapter of Submarine Veterans of WWII, The United States Submarine Veterans Inc. Southern Tier NY Base, and The Pearl Harbor Survivors Association. John was interested in motors and electronics from childhood. After World War II he attended the University of Pennsylvania where he studied electrical engineering. In 1953 he authored, along with GC Ring, MJ Oppenheimer, and Arnold J. Lee of the Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia, an article titled "Automatic Calibration of Electrokymograph Cardiac Densograms" which was published in the Journal of Applied Physiology and is currently available on the National Library of Medicine's website PubMed. In the mid 1950s he worked for Philco in France, setting up a microwave communication system. Upon returning from France he settled in Pennsylvania and worked for Link Aviation (Singer-Link after 1968) in Binghamton, NY on its famous Link Trainer, a flight simulator used to train pilots. John is predeceased by his wife, Doris (Roesener) Clirehugh, who died in 2000; and his sister, Marion Gray (Clirehugh) Dorey, who died in 2004. John is survived by two nieces, Susan Dorey and Martha (Dorey) Bakonyi.
A memorial service is scheduled at Tuttle-Yeisley Funeral Home, 25 Susquehanna Avenue, Hallstead, PA at 11 a.m. on Wednesday, May 19, 2010.