STANLEY, N.D. - As he had done hundreds of times before - year after year in this small prairie town of cold winds and rugged sensibilities - Floyd "Happy" Graff stopped in at the Scandia American bank and exchanged pleasantries with its affable, blue-jeaned owner, Gary Nelson.

While a generation apart, the two men had known each other for decades. Their families had been intertwined - Graff's wife, Joyce, taught acrobatics and "song and dance personality" to Nelson's daughter, Ann. And as is the case in many a small town where secrets are as rare as entertainment, there is little they did not know about one another.

Usually, their hellos - sometimes just a nod - lasted only seconds. Graff is a man of few words. But this time, a few days after the one-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, banker Nelson tried to draw out his elderly friend, to coax this gentle man whose now-quivering hands plied a craft most of his 86 years into telling him about a part of his life he almost never spoke of.

Nelson, for his part, had spent the past year researching every detail of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. The 61-year-old banker had boxes and boxes of facts - down to the seating chart on the trading floor at Cantor Fitzgerald where his only daughter, an adventurous spirit who was his soul mate of sorts, worked as a bond trader and was killed at age 30.

So much information. But the still-grieving, silver-haired father sought more. He thought Graff might have some meaningful thoughts about 9/11, about an assault on America of such magnitude, about a day that would rattle a nation to its core. A day like none other.

Except, perhaps, one.

Sixty-one years ago, Marine Sergeant Graff was at Pearl Harbor.

Few outside Happy Graff's immediate family knew that beneath his long-sleeved undershirt, sprawled across his upper right arm, was a large Pearl Harbor tattoo in blurred and faded blue, a memento he proudly acquired days after the surprise attack on America when the date 12/7/41 was etched above an impressive 15 1/2 -inch bicep.

Although he is among only about a dozen Pearl Harbor survivors left in North Dakota, and about 7,000 in the country, few here ever knew that this retired electrician, a man who has installed the wiring or fixed an outlet in nearly everyone's house, had been present when the Japanese attacked the military base on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, killing nearly 2,400 Americans and drawing the United States into World War II.

He never joined the state chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, never attended reunions or made a pilgrimage to Hawaii.

Like much of his generation, he never compared notes with the other World War II veterans in town such as Judson Boyd Jr., a seaman who had been on the doomed USS Arizona until July 1941.

Wanted to forget

"It hurt so much for many, many years," says Graff, sitting in an old rocker with mismatched cushions in the modest rancher he built more than a half-century ago. "I just hated to think about it, and I didn't want to talk about it. I just wanted to get it out of my mind."

Unassuming and self-reliant, Graff is much like the austere town where he made his home.

In this rural community of 1,200 people in the northwestern part of the state, the only place to eat dinner out is the former American Legion hall. The only motel, the Prairie Host, stocks its rooms not with shampoo, but rags for cleaning guns and knives. Main Street is so quiet and sparse that loudspeakers on the lamp posts pipe in country music or Christmas carols to provide some signs of life.

There is little to keep young people here these days.

But like towns all over America where residents leave their doors unlocked and their keys in their cars and walk to the post office to pick up their mail, this remote piece of the prairie is a breeding ground for deep patriotism and, occasionally, a place where world events have a profound impact.

Events live on here

In the past year, the twin tragedies of Pearl Harbor and Sept. 11 have been endlessly compared and contrasted, studied in academia and analyzed by experts as bookends of modern American history. But here in the middle of America, in a town so intimate there is no need for street addresses, both events live on - side by side and crossing paths every day.

"You think things don't happen in a small town," says Steve Springan, the town funeral director and furniture dealer, "but there's a little bit of everybody's history here."

Graff never imagined he would have a place in history.

He had grown up on a farm near Donnybrook, N.D., the 10th of 15 children. He was a smiling baby - hence, the nickname Happy that somehow stuck.

His mother, pregnant with her 16th child, died when he was 11. Altha Graff had meant so much to young Happy that he promised her he would never drink or smoke, and to this day, he says, he never has.

His father was a taskmaster, and Graff says he "worked like a man" even before he was a teen, plowing, milking the cows, driving horses - all before school started in the morning - and driving a school bus in the afternoons before returning to chores on the farm.

At 14, after two years of high school, Happy left home and picked up work wherever he could in exchange for room and board. At 18, he hopped a freight train headed west, making his way to Snohomish, Wash., where he worked for several years for a logging company.

"Boy, did I get muscle," he says, recalling how he climbed 75- to 100-foot trees and cut off the treetops with a short saw. "You earned every penny you got."

In November 1939, he headed to San Diego to join the Marines. Thanks to his work on the farm and in the woods, the strapping 5-foot-10-inch private proved to be handy with machinery.

As part of the 2nd Marine Division assigned to the 2nd Engineer Battalion, he was put in charge of heavy equipment, operating bulldozers, maintainers for leveling the ground and overhead loaders.

His battalion, which later would become the 18th Marines, was sent to Pearl Harbor a month before the attack to construct a Marine camp. Graff, who built roads there, adored his life in the service - it was the first real home he'd had since he was a child - and especially life in the glamorous tropical city.

In the early hours of Dec. 7, a strangely still Sunday morning, he was walking out of the mess hall after breakfast when he heard a screeching roar. He and his buddies looked up and froze. They could see the red circles, the rising sun insignia, on the planes. Japanese dive bombers and fighter planes were headed their way.

Like so many at Pearl Harbor, Graff's company had rifles, but no ammunition.

"We didn't know what to do with ourselves," he says. "I never had any fear going into the service. At Pearl Harbor, I had fear."

He saw bombs dropped, explosions, black smoke everywhere, even the faces of the Japanese pilots as they flew low across the water and airfields. "They were so low and so close, you could just about touch them. They'd drive by and they'd look out at you. I could even see, I think, they were smiling. We were just plain scared."

He was so close to some of the bombing that, with shards flying, there were holes in his tent.

Of all the memories, though, the most vivid and horrifying - the one that haunted him for years after the war and still does today - was the sea of bodies floating in the oily water.

"You can't believe the bodies I saw - thousands of them floating in the water. Charred. Sickening. That was the hardest part. After I got home, I wouldn't talk to anybody about this. I still don't like to talk about it. When I think about some of my buddies I lost. ... "

Graff stayed on at Pearl Harbor for a time as part of the cleanup. He would go on to spend more than three years in the Pacific, participating in the bloody battles on Guadalcanal, Tarawa and, finally, Iwo Jima, losing good friends along the way.

After the war, he settled in Stanley, where his wife, the granddaughter of town founder George W. Wilson, a Baltimore native, had grown up at her family's Wilson Hotel. Graff built the robin's egg-blue house the couple still lives in - with lumber from his old schoolhouse that he bought and tore down - raised six children, worked night and day as an electrician, coached baseball, taught his kids to hunt and to swim and fish on Lake Sakakawea.

"He just kept busy, busy, busy all the time," says his wife.

Even now, thinner and slower, with wisps of soft white hair atop his head and a nervousness he says he's had since the war, he still repairs his roof, clears his yard, climbs up in trees to prune them.

Like much of the World War II generation, he lived a modest but productive life, keeping his war stories to himself and his feelings in check - dedicating himself to making a living, accepting whatever his neighbors felt like paying him for his work.

"I don't think we realized all these years what he went through," says his daughter, Jean Swenson, 47, who lives in town. "He didn't think of himself as a hero or anyone special. He just wondered: Why? Why some people had to go, and he was allowed to come out scot-free."

His children and grandchildren never pushed him to talk about the war or Pearl Harbor, knowing it was a painful subject. They knew, too, not to set off firecrackers in his presence because it startled him.

Dressed for parade

But they also knew he was proud.

When the town historian asked whether he would donate his Marine dress uniform to a display of local artifacts, he said, "No way." In what appears to be his only nod to his war experience, Graff puts on his uniform - the same one he was married in 60 years ago - for Stanley's Memorial Day parade each year.

"A lot of us have caps," says Q. R. "Kink" Schulte, a World War II veteran and former Stanley state's attorney. "Happy is the only vet in this community who comes in full regalia."

It was at the 50-year anniversary of Pearl Harbor, after Graff and the state's other remaining survivors were given a medal by the governor, that he allowed himself to start thinking back to his time in the war. Still, he made sure he was otherwise occupied when a newspaper reporter from nearby Minot wanted to interview him.

Then came Sept. 11. Like everyone else, he thought about the thousands of innocent young lives lost, the sneak attack, the United States unprepared, the fear and grief that gripped the nation. There were many differences from Pearl Harbor, he thought, especially that the victims of 9/11 were civilians. But in the breadth of the death and destruction and tragedy, and the questions afterward about missed signals, there were similarities.

Friends and family started asking him about Dec. 7, 1941, stirring his memories. And finally, he found, with the whole town grieving and waving its flags - and with 60 years of distance - he could talk a little more easily about what he had experienced in Hawaii so long ago, when his hair was thick and brown and his light-blue eyes were seared by scenes of death.

He hung a large American flag from the corner of his home that has been waving there ever since. He started hankering to get back to Pearl Harbor, although he knows he could never afford such a trip.

Soon, he would share with Gary Nelson a peek at his Pearl Harbor 50-year medal, his few souvenirs from the war and his memories. He told him what he knew to be true - and what he imagined would be even truer for someone who lost a child in such a horrific attack.

"Eventually, it might get a little easier," Graff said. "But it's going to be hard for a long time."

Extraordinary woman

Among the hundreds of photos that crowd the walls, doors and tabletops in the Graff home are several of young Annie Nelson when, at 5 years old with long blond hair and a vivacious smile, she was one of Joyce Graff's star dance pupils.

"She was just like one of my own," says Graff's 80-year-old wife, who is as loquacious as he is reserved.

By all accounts, Ann Nicole Nelson was an extraordinary young woman. She excelled at everything she did - and she did nearly everything one could find to do in this part of the country, where the soda machines dispense live bait and the liveliest spot in town is the pool hall.

She skied; played tennis, basketball and soccer; shot billiards; swam and fished; water-skied; hunted; ran track; taught herself about wine; studied languages and traveled extensively.

At 15, convinced she wasn't getting as good an education in Stanley as she might somewhere else, she persuaded her parents to let her go 850 miles away to an academy in Beaver Dam, Wis., to finish high school.

After studying political science and economics at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. - including semesters abroad in England and China - she worked in the financial world in Minneapolis and Chicago.

In the fall of 2000, she took a break from the working world and embarked on a five-week backpacking tour of Peru by herself, "in search of some meaning that these people somehow represented," her father tries to explain.

In January 2001, soon after her return and four months shy of her 30th birthday, the independent, green-eyed girl from North Dakota was hired as a bond trader by Cantor Fitzgerald, with headquarters on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center - Tower One.

She was the only North Dakotan killed in the Sept. 11 attacks.

A year and several months later, Gary Nelson, the last of 11 children whose father, A.H. Nelson, moved his bank to Stanley in 1933, surrounds himself with reminders of his daughter. It seems to be his oxygen.

Surrounded by photos

He wears a button with her photo every waking moment. He wears a silver MIA-POW-style bracelet with her name on it. He has photos of his daughter propped up against his computer screen, an etching of her on his wall, a poster with the names of the 9/11 victims in the lobby of his bank.

With a click of his mouse, he listens to a haunting Irish ballad based on Stephen Foster's "Gentle Annie." He talks frequently with the families of the other Cantor employees killed and with his daughter's friends, searching for information about Ann's last conversations and her life in New York. He saves and compiles everything - even three ghoulish Internet postings from Sept. 11 that erroneously listed Ann Nelson as alive and OK.

His purple Ford pickup truck is unmistakable - its license plate is 091101.

"I think I try to keep Ann pretty much forefront in everything I do," he acknowledges, "no matter where I go."

His wife, Jenette, 62, a teacher at Stanley's middle and high school, seems to deal with her grief in a more introspective way. She says that something happened to her Sept. 11, sitting on the edge of her bed and seeing the gaping black hole in the building where her daughter worked. She went numb. All over.

When a dentist recently worked on a tooth she had broken, she says that, although she once had sensitive teeth, she felt no pain, nothing. "I just don't have much feeling," she says softly, on the brink of tears as she often appears, "except sometimes I just feel an aching all over."

Although she is an art teacher, she has expressed her grief through poetry, heart-wrenching verses she started writing soon after the attack when she would wake up during the night at 1, 3 and 5 with tears streaming down her face, an aching in her chest and words in her head that, to her surprise, came out in rhyme.

"Softly drifts the snow, on the evergreens.

Softly bleeds my heart as it pines and keens."

Both Nelsons find much comfort in their son's five young children. "They remind me of her so much," Jenette Nelson says, as 7-year-old Brooke falls asleep in her arms.

But perhaps more than anything, they say that putting their daughter's death in a larger, historical context - viewing it as another sort of Pearl Harbor, for instance, or as part of destiny, a plan that will eventually lead to a more peaceful world - helps ease the pain.

"By taking the big view of it - somehow that calms me," says Jenette Nelson.

She started teaching a class this year on "peaceful conflict resolution," talking to seventh-graders about ways to settle grievances in a nonviolent way. And, although it is difficult for her, she occasionally speaks to groups about living better lives and seeking ways of peace.

She says she wants to make her daughter's death - and all of the more than 3,000 deaths of Sept. 11 - count for something. "If nothing happens because of it," she says, "it would be a waste. And that would be wrong."

In designing the large granite memorial for his daughter, which sits alone in a corner of the town cemetery, Gary Nelson wanted to make sure observers knew his daughter didn't die in a ski accident or car wreck. On one side of the grave is a rendering of the World Trade Center towers and New York skyline, on the other side, the Brooklyn Bridge.

"It was an attack on perhaps the one physical building in America that represents something our forefathers fought for - independence, democracy and capitalism," he says. "People need to be reminded of what happened on that day. It's no different from what happened at Pearl Harbor - the individual soldier is only unique and special to the family and comrades. The incident is a national one. What happened to our country on that date had not happened since December 7, 1941."

Especially precious to him is a flag, sent to the family in the past year by a Navy veteran in Minnesota, which flew atop the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. The memorial marks the spot where 1,177 crewmen of the Arizona were killed on that day of infamy, more than 900 of them still entombed aboard their sunken battleship. Nelson plans to take the flag to his cabin at Lake Metigoshe on the Canadian border, where Ann used to fish and water-ski in her bare feet.

"Those people on the Arizona - as well as those people in the trade [center] towers - they didn't get out," he says.

Some connected to the two events, especially veterans of Pearl Harbor, bristle at any comparisons, believing the attack on the American military by a known and mighty enemy - an attack that catapulted the United States into a world war and brought the nation together for a single purpose - bears little resemblance to a terrorist attack on innocent civilians by a network of stateless religious zealots.

And indeed, both the Nelsons and the Graffs believe there are more differences than similarities in the two events.

A bond of loss

But Jenette Nelson says she feels a certain bond with mothers who have lost children to war.

"This has been going on so long, mothers losing their children to war. It's a terrible, terrible thing."

She says she always worried that her son, Scott, who lined up her curlers to play soldier when he was a child, would join the military. "I was so afraid of the idea of losing him to war," she says as her voice loses its battle with her tears. "And now we lose our daughter."

On the edge of town, a grove of 150 evergreen trees, a dozen just planted recently, honors local veterans who have died. It is one of the many ways in which Stanley continues to pay tribute to those who have served their country.

"This is a veterans' town," says Laila Schulte, whose husband is a former state American Legion commander.

Memorial Day, with its parade to the cemetery for a five-gun salute, is nearly as big a holiday as Christmas.

But patriotism runs deep here all year round. One of the town's claims to fame is its "Parade of Patriots," its quirky fire hydrants painted to depict historical figures such as Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln (as well as famous North Dakotans, such as Lawrence Welk and Roger Maris).

Residents like Schulte have been known to call up their neighborhood establishments, including the Nelson bank, with a stern admonition - "Tell Gary to put his flag out!" - should there be a lapse.

Proud Americans

Since Sept. 11, such patriotism has only swelled.

American flags are all over. At the luncheonette on Main Street, where the waitresses and owner, a Korean War veteran, always wore aprons that bore flags, the window now glows with a large star, American flag and red, white and blue ribbon, all in neon.

Quilts, artwork, cards have poured in to the Nelsons. Two pool tournaments in Ann Nelson's honor raised money for Jenette Nelson's conflict-resolution class. More than $50,000 has been contributed to a fund in her name that goes to such causes as the local hospital.

"What we've seen has not been matched in this community since World War II with the outpouring of emotion and support," says Gary Nelson.

The support still comes, nearly every day. The Nelsons can hear it in their neighbors' sincere greetings of "How are you doing?"

They can feel it when a group of children from a nearby Indian reservation sends drawings of butterflies, a symbol of life after death.

And they can see it in the eyes of some, such as Floyd Graff, who are still mending from the enemy attack that forever changed the nation - and the world - before Gary Nelson was a year old.

"With Floyd, you don't have to explain the grief you're going through," Gary Nelson says of his longtime friend. "I know that Floyd is with me. It's a complete, empathetic understanding. When you have that, you don't have to say too much.

"Sometimes that's the best."