A day to honor those who gave their lives

CORNWALL — Memorial Day here begins with a tradition that dates back 180 years: The decorating of veterans’ graves at the North Cornwall Cemetery. 

About 50 people, many of them children, arrived with baskets of freshly picked flowers for the simple and lovely tribute. It was led by Virginia Gold, who is taking over for her father, Charlie Gold, who died in January. She is the fifth generation to do so.

“I am very honored,” she said. “The tradition started with my great-great-grandfather, Theodore Sedgwick Gold. I will continue to tell stories of each veteran as we visit their graves.”

The gnats had arrived, and the wildflowers were late this year. Lilac and other spring tree blooms were in abundance. One participant shrugged and said, “rhubarb” as she placed a cluster of flowers on a grave.

Later in the morning, in between the celebratory parade and the old-fashioned children’s carnival, it was time for the solemnity of remembering those who gave their lives in wars that date back to the very beginning of the nation, and those who carried on.

Denny Frost was awarded the 2015 VFW Citizenship Award. In accepting, he gave thanks to “all the people who make Cornwall what it is.”

Friend and VFW member Huntington Williams spoke of Frost taking the opportunity as a young man to travel to foreign lands, “touring parts of Germany for two years on an all-expense-paid group tour that he looked upon as an opportunity that couldn’t be turned down.”

Back in his hometown, he served a total of more than 50 years on various boards and commissions. He also served his town in more subtle ways. 

After the 1989 tornado, for example, one of the first sounds in the eerie quiet that followed was Frost’s bulldozer, as he made his way to the village to help.

For years, he has missed the parade and ceremony because he’s been busy cooking the burgers and hot dogs for the carnival that follows.

In a different vein, Lisa Lansing Simont spoke of her memories during wartime, when Cornwall was a community mostly of women living their quiet version of the war: farming to supplement war rations — and always waiting for the mail.

“I was 3 years old by the end of the war, but even as a toddler, I could sense the tension in all that waiting.” 

She remembered her father coming home occasionally on leave, tall and handsome in his uniform. She remembers when she and her mother, City Lansing, would take the train from West Cornwall to New York City to meet her father when he was docked at the Brooklyn Navy yard and could come ashore for a few hours.

“It was very exciting, but after my father returned to his ship, and we were back home in Cornwall, my mother cried and cried and hugged me very hard. I remember that.”

Simont still has the hundreds of letters her parents exchanged during the war years.

“They were full of affection and funny stories that masked the loneliness my mother felt, and the danger my father was often near.”

Those whose names did not end up on the memorial plaque on the village Green were beginning to return 70 years ago.

“This is what they had longed for: To get back on the tractor, bring in the hay and have supper with the family. Just the ordinary events of living, precious to them because they could have lost it all far away in some place whose name you couldn’t even pronounce.”

The ceremony ended with a three-gun salute, the playing of taps and the reading of the role call of veterans lost in the last year. They are Donald Craig Behn, U.S. Army, World War II; Charles L. Gold, U.S. Army reserves, Vietnam; and William N. Vitalis, U.S. Marine Corps, Korea.