In honor of Memorial Day – and all those poor kids who have been killed or maimed in Iraq and Afghanistan – I’m revisiting a piece that first ran in 1994. The ceremony referred to at Lincoln School in Oak Park still takes place. It will be held this Friday around 8:15 a.m. OPRF High School also holds a Memorial Day gathering in the football stadium on Thursday from 9:40 to 10:30 a.m. (with a rain date on Friday).
They are overlooked and ignored by most of us, which is ironic since they were intended as reminders, but we have seen our war memorials so often, we look right past them.
With the exception of “Peace Triumphant,” the oversized monument at the top of the hill in Scoville Park, they are less than imposing structures. At Longfellow, Barrie, Carroll, Field, Andersen and Stevenson parks or playgrounds, you will find oddly shaped boulders to which a plaque has been affixed by the American Legion, listing, in most instances, the names of Oak Park residents who served and/or gave their lives in The Great War, i.e. World War I. Though most were likely boys, the names are listed as “Gold Star Men of the World War.” Back then, they didn’t include the numeral because no one knew there would be a II.
At Carroll Playground and Ridgeland Common, larger memorials can be found, rectangular stones with more visible plaques. Ridgeland Commons’ commemorates “the men who served in the Spanish American War, Phillipine [sic] Insurrection, Boxer Uprising in China.” At Carroll Playground, behind Lincoln School, the stone sits on a little island in the center of a cul-de-sac next to the Gold Star boulder. Beneath the bronze eagle is the “Honor Roll” scroll, green and tarnished with age, with 120 names listed so “That the memory of the boys of this community who gave their lives and their services in defense of their country and to perpetuate its ideals, shall live as an inspiration to courage and patriotism.”
Among the 120 honorees are two Arnolds, Baers, Blumenthals, Dowlings, Greens, Harnachs, Heruskas, Houhas, Jacobses, Johnsons, Kiels, Levys, Louttits, Martins, Nelsons, Pankes, Powers, and Wallaces. The sacrifices in the “Great War” were likewise great.
The stone is hollowed out in back, which park district board member [the late] Bud Corry says once supported a drinking fountain. The stone was moved from the north side of the park in 1958 when they vacated Kenilworth Avenue and connected the rec center to the school grounds. Corry said they hired a monument mover from Forest Park to do the job.
A number of the park boulders have been moved over the years, he said, when the parks were remodeled. At Longfellow Park a couple of years ago, employees discovered that kids were trying to pry the plaque off the stone, so the park district asked Spannuth Boiler Co. in Oak Park to reset it.
There’s a small amount of graffiti visible on the star above names like Adams, Capps, Cranmer, Flodin, Jauch, Mayo, Pardee, Taggart and Vaughan, who served in such disparate units as the 131st Infantry, the Medical Corps, the 6th Marines, and the SATC. Even the Quartermaster Corps wasn’t immune to casualties.
I played on and around this rock when I was a kid and occasionally wondered about the names engraved there, wondered if their families still lived in the area, what kind of men they were, how they died. These are the kinds of meanderings, of course, that memorials are meant to elicit. No doubt some kids today still wonder the same things.
The memorials may not inspire “courage and patriotism”–as the South Side Improvement Club of Oak Park hoped for back in 1924 when they erected the large Carroll Playground stone–but the names are not completely forgotten. Every year, weather permitting, on the Friday before Memorial Day, parents, teachers and every student at Lincoln School gather at the cul-de-sac just after 8 a.m. for an old-fashioned remembrance (OPRF High School students gather at the football stadium).
This year a band comprised of Lincoln sixth graders and Emerson [now Brooks] seventh graders played solemn music while students filed out and surrounded the two monuments in a silent semicircle. Some carried flags; others held flowers. Parents gripped cameras and minicams.
At the microphone, well-dressed boys and girls came forward to recite poetry by heart or explain the history of the monuments. The pledge of allegiance led to a choral rendition of “O beautiful for spacious skies …,” followed by a recitation of “In Flanders Field where the poppies grow, between the crosses row on row …;” the singing of a 1960s anti-war anthem, “One Tin Soldier;” and the reading of a poem written by an anonymous Vietnam soldier.
Classroom by classroom, those bearing flowers placed them in vases–irises, roses, peonies, carnations, and appropriately, a single poppy. The service ended with the playing of Taps.
Those who believe the old ways are dead and those who gave their last full measure of devotion are forgotten, would do well to attend this ceremony where a community’s memory is preserved and passed on.