It was few Memorial Days ago that Anthony Buccino looked at the names of the young men on the Nutley memorial and felt ashamed that he didn’t know anything about them.
He has since made sure that no one else in town has to wonder about the stories of the fallen.
Along with his daughter Andrea, Buccino assembled an online honor roll–complete with full biographies and photos– for servicemen from Nutley and Belleville who died serving their country, some dating back to the American Revolution. Both are also available in book form, which you can get from Buccino’s main website .
“All these guys were just names on a monument and then all of a sudden it felt like they were in the room,” says Buccino, a writer/poet/blogger who lives in Nutley, but grew up in Belleville.
The honor rolls are an ongoing project, as new information continues to trickle in from family members. But Buccino hopes he won’t have to add any more names to the list.
“I was scared to write ‘Nutley hasn’t lost anyone in service in 40 years,’” he says. ” I don’t want that to change.”
Today, he’ll be following the Veterans Council of Nutley bus tour, which starts at 8 am and stops at the town’s dozen war memorials, before taking in the parade, which starts at 11:00 at the Nutley Park Oval on Franklin Avenue.
“I try to remember what the day is really about,” Buccino says. “It’s not about picnics.”
Well, there will be a few picnics around Baristaville today– at the Elks Lodge in Bloomfield and Hurrell Field in Glen Ridge– but also plenty of opportunities to remember why you have the day off.
The parade in Glen Ridge will start at 11 am from the corner of Sherman and Baldwin, while Bloomfield’s parade sets off at 9:30 am from Brookside Park and continues down Broad Street.
And Montclair will hold its Memorial Day tribute at Edgemont Park, starting at 9:45 am, featuring music from members of the Montclair Community Band, and a presentation from Pauline Davis, the widow of local poet John Clifton Davis.
In Belleville, services begin with a laying of a wreath for naval and maritime war dead at the Passaic River, followed by an event honoring police and firefighters at the Town Hall at 10:30 am and finally a service at the memorial monument on Union Avenue at 11 am.
Erik White, a jounalism professor at Cambrian College in Sudbury, Ontario, is pitching in at Baristanet this week.
Thanks for the info Erik, I couldn’t find any Montclair Memorial Day info and was getting rather HOT this morning.
(Not sure if we needed a pix of Buccino, I’d rather see something keeping in tune with the day….)
It’s nice to see some recognition of veterans and their service to this country. Particularly on a website where so few posters seem to have had comparable service.
But with the good prof, I think the photo of Buccino was unnecessary. An image of the American flag would have sufficed nicely.
What bothers me more as a traditionalist is that this Monday is not “Memorial Day,” which shall always be May 30. Instead, it is a convenient construct for realtors and operators of shore-area businesses, who can therefore claim another “summer” weekend as a means of raising prices. That we cannot even celebrate Memorial Day on its true day of celebration, and sacrifice that nicety to the creation of yet another long weekend, doesn’t say much about us as a society.
I’ll also ask the visiting Canadian here, would you feel similarly disposed, sir, to move Remembrance Day from November 11 for the prospect of a three-day weekend?
(Leave it to the Montclair Town website to offer the info about its own Memorial Day service about an hour before it started….. Oh, way to go Montclair….)
The service, however was respectful.
And reading the names on the monument, the little prof and I counted about 160 names from WWII.
I can only imagine what this town (and others) must of felt….
God bless all of those men and women who have given their life in service to our country.
Cathar,
at least Memorial day, IMO is not as abused as President’s day, which seems to be pretty much about sales at Macy’s and Kohl’s.
At least May 30th was not an actual event which a day was tied to, then moved. I can understand there was 100 years of tradition of the remembrance on May 30th though.
For as long as I can remember, realhawker, what were then known as “Washington’s Birthday” and “Lincoln’s Birthday” were in fact excuses for stores to have sales. In particular, Washington, DC merchants were famously good at capitalizing on these dates back in the 50′s and 60′s. The combining of the two “holidays” into an excuse for ski and Caribbean resorts to charge special rates came somewhat later, of course.
Only by looking “Memorial Day” up was I reminded, however, that it was formerly called “Decoration Day,” and that the commemoration has its roots in the aftermath of the Civil War. One of the worst days I ever spent down in South Carolina was on “Confederate Memorial Day, when all the overblown talk from both locals and the Charleston daily about “brave Southern sons” made this gentle reader want to “fwow up.”
That noted, I still consider the calendrical reasssignment of Memorial Day, which this week came an entire week earlier and thus did encourage gouging by shore businesses and realtors, to be shameful. Happily, however, the honoroed glory in which veterans supposedly rest is immanent and calendar-proof.
Actually Cathar, Remembrance Day isn’t even a day off in Ontario, although it is in other provinces, like Manitoba and British Columbia. Apparently it used to be, but the government was worried that schoolkids weren’t attending the memorial services and it’s easier to force them when they’re in school.