American Legion Post 38 members and representatives placing flags that symbolize each of the country’s wars at the Memorial Day service.
Haddonfield and American Legion Post 38 marked Memorial Day with a parade and service on May 26 in remembrance of the country’s fallen.
The American Legion is America’s largest veterans organization, providing those who served and their families with personal assistance, guidance and advocacy. Post 38 is the borough’s local legion chapter.
The holiday parade proceeded down Kings Highway, beginning at Chestnut Street and ending at the war memorial in front of Haddonfield Memorial High School. Several Legion members led the parade, holding the organization’s flag, the flag for prisoners of war and those missing in action, the U.S. flag and New Jersey’s flag.
They were followed by several more uniformed veterans in a white convertible who waved to the crowd or held small American flags. Besides Post 38, representatives of other community groups marched behind them, including Boy Scout troops 64 and 65, the Haddonfield and Cherry Hill Girl Scouts, the borough’s ambulance association and its police department and fire company.
Music was provided by the high-school marching band. At the parade’s end, American Legion Commander Rodney Thomas began a ceremony at the war memorial with the Pledge of Allegiance and the national anthem. Veteran Stephen Pecorelli then placed a POW/ MIA flag over an empty chair, a ceremonial act called for at all Legion meetings as a symbol of the thousands of POWs and unaccounted-for soldiers in the country’s history.
“A reminder for all of us to spare no effort to secure the release of any American prisoners from captivity,” Thomas noted, “the repatriation of the remains of those who died bravely in defense of liberty, and a full accounting of all those missing.”
All three borough commissioners were in attendance for the service, and new mayor Dave Siedell offered remarks on the importance of Memorial Day.
“We stand on hallowed ground,” he observed. “Our very own Haddonfield Memorial High School bears the name memorial to honor those from our community who fell during World War 1. Their legacy is etched not only in the stone, but in the hearts of all who have walked these halls.”
Siedell went on to tell the story of his uncle, France Cook – a veteran of World War II and the wars in Korea and Vietnam – who taught himself later in life to paint the faces of his fallen comrades
“He once told me this lasting gift to them was preserving their image as he had remembered them,” the mayor recounted, “ensuring the version of themselves that lived in his mind would live on through his art. He kept their memory alive, allowing others to see them as he did.”
Thomas then led the laying of flags. Vice Commander Sam Romanelli passed the flags to veterans and representatives of each war as they walked up to place nine of them at the memorial.
“Our purpose here today is to honor all those who have given their lives so that we may live in peace and freedom, in remembrance of our fallen veterans,” Thomas stated.
After the flag ceremony, John McCrae’s World War I poem, “In Flanders Fields,” was recited by Legion member and veteran Joe McElroy. Thomas then acknowledged that the significance of the holiday didn’t really hit him until he visited the World War II military cemetery in Normandy, France, where the dead from D-Day lay.
“Altogether, we lost 73,000 Allied soldiers in Normandy,” he explained of that day, June 6, 1944. “Generations were wiped out. I walked the grave sites of this cemetery with the rows and rows of meticulously laid gravestones, each with a white marble cross and a Jewish star of David.”
Seeing those graves, Thomas recalled, knowing that most of the dead were under 20 years old and that their blood turned ocean waves red that day, truly impacted him for the first time.
A rifle squad at the ceremony then fired a salute for the fallen. The holiday was Itir Cole’s first as a borough commissioner,and she took the opportunity to address the crowd.
“I often find comfort in the words of the greats,” Cole observed, “and sometimes the best we can do is to borrow their wisdom rather than try to outdo it ourselves.”
She went on to quote Abraham Lincoln, addressing the duty of the living to ensure the dead did not die in vain by upholding American ideals.
“It truly is something I mean from the heart,” Cole said, “that it is now our responsibility to carry on that unfinished work, so we have to be engaged participants in our democracy and to uphold those ideals of our American values.
“And so the work is not done.”
