THE TOWN THAT DOES NOT FORGET MEMORIAL DAY

By Frank Brookhauser
The Sunday Bulletin, Philadelphia, PA, May 29, 1960

            Another Memorial Day is here and all I have been reading about is what a nice long holiday weekend it provides and how crowded the highways are for all of the people in swift pursuit of pleasure and everything that is being offered to make certain that they are properly entertained.
            There is one thing I am beginning to realize about this special day, in fact, and it is simply that those who have been killed in our wars are being short changed by most of the people in America.These men in dirty uniforms (men do not die in parade dress) whether they had any choice in the matter or not, thought it meant something to give up their lives and they hoped they would be remembered. After all, a guy can’t give much more than his life.
           But the lives they gave, it has developed increasingly in recent years, serve merely as an excuse for a longer siege of fun and frolic in a nation grown cynical, hard boiled, uncaring and unsentimental.
            That is why I am impressed and heartened by what is done each year in my hometown. There is nothing fancy about Ford City, Pennsylvania, but it knows the true meaning of Memorial Day. Other communities, I realize, have their special ceremonies, but let me tell you about the one in Ford City…
            It is a little factory town in the Allegheny River Valley, bordered on both sides by mountain foothills which grow pretty in the Springtime.
            A gentleman named S. Peter Fundyga, a veteran who got back from the war, lives in the town and a half dozen years ago had an idea which he presented to the Lions Club. They call it the Memorial Day Candlelight Services now, and nobody in the town forgets the young men who didn’t come back to look at those pretty hills in the Springtime.
            Several days before Memorial Day, members of the Lions Club distribute candles to every home in town. The day before, veterans of World War One and World War Two and the Korean Conflict go to the cemetery which is on one of the hills and out the road a piece from town. They place a flag and flowers on the graves of all of the men who never returned. Then they are ready for the evening and the night and the sad remembering.
Precisely at 10 o’clock, the bells of all the churches begin to toll, the sounds reverberating through the valley. As the bells peal out, both the night and total darkness cover the homes and buildings and the factories. All of the lights in every home, in every store are turned out. Every street light is switched off. All automobiles come to a halt, their lights go off. Even the nightly freight train, if it is busy, ceases its clanging. There is nothing but stillness and darkness in the town. Then the candles are lighted by the people and they step on to their front porch, their front lawn, the street.
            From on top the hill overlooking the town comes first a prayer, spoken each year by a different clergyman, so that all the churches, all faiths are represented. Piped through that section of the valley by loudspeakers, it is heard by everyone. When the prayer is ended, there are rifle salutes, given by uniformed gun squads of the service organizations. As the gunshots fade away, the sorrowful notes of Taps are blown, soaring into the sky and through the still of the night. Finally, the Lord’s Prayer is sung and with this the services, lasting about ten minutes, come to an end. The candles have burned low. The people of the town extinguish them. They return to their chairs, their swings. The lights go on. The cars begin to move on the streets. Life resumes it normal course. But for ten minutes at least in our busy world, the people in my hometown have told the boys who were killed that they are not forgotten.
            They are not a lot of people, some 6,000 or so. But they sent a high percentage of young men to the European Theater of Operation and the Pacific and Korea, because Ford City is a factory town and its families are large ones. A high percentage, too, of the young men who went away did not come back. And the town doesn’t want to forget them and the way they lived it and what it meant to it. This is simply its way of saying that they are missed, still. And that, after all, is why we have Memorial Day in our land.