We look forward to the Memorial Day weekend as our first warm-weather, three-day holiday of the year. But there is more to the story of this day, and it goes back to the U.S. Civil War.
So many were killed then – estimates vary from half a million soldiers to as many as 800,000 – that the war set a grisly record still not met in any other American conflict. With the U.S. population only at 32 million, grief touched nearly everyone.
Because of that, cities and towns began to set aside days to decorate the graves of the fallen, which explains the holiday’s early designation as Decoration Day. After the war, May 30 became the official holiday in the North, while states in the South honored their own days of remembrance.
In 1967 Congress officially named the federal holiday Memorial Day, since veterans’ groups thought Decoration Day sounded a little too frivolous. A year later, Congress moved the holiday to the last Monday in May. By then there were a century more of fallen heroes to remember.
In the years since, it has sometimes seemed as if the meaning of Memorial Day has been forgotten, or at least put away in the back of a closet like an old uniform. I asked three friends who lost loved ones in war for their thoughts.
Bernardo Ferrari, the well-known surgeon from Los Altos Hills, now retired, is named after an uncle he never had a chance to meet – his father’s brother who was killed in World War II. The first Bernardo was a navigator on a B-24 during the Battle of the Bulge. He died when his bomber was hit by German flak over Liège, Belgium, and went down on Christmas Eve, 1944.
“Christmas was never the same for the Ferrari family,” Bernardo recalled.
Marie Pence of Palo Alto – married to a classmate of mine from Los Altos High – also lost an uncle in wartime, and he too was a World War II aviator. Pence recently learned her uncle died on one of the deadliest Allied bombing runs of the war. Known as the Kassel Mission, the 445th Bomb Group lost most of its aircraft over Germany on September 27, 1944, when the lead American B-24 changed course unexpectedly and the bombers were separated from their fighter air cover. Of the 35 aircraft that flew that day from England, only four returned.
“I think about him and all the brave men who gave their lives in World War II, on Memorial Day and other days as well,” she told me.
My childhood friend Socrates Peter Manoukian, now a Superior Court judge, lives with a more recent loss. His son, Marine Raider Captain Matthew Patrick Manoukian, died with two other Marines on August 10, 2012, as he served in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. Matthew was 29 years old and had just been accepted to law school. “I think about him every day,” his father told me.
How can we possibly honor them enough on Memorial Day? Judge Manoukian said this: “If you want, have a hot dog or a party. But remember: you are enjoying a freedom for which others worked.” Ferrari said, “We can fly flags, lay wreaths and attend memorial services, but understanding individual service members and their stories will allow a more profound understanding into what they sacrificed.” Pence likes to tell her friends about her uncle: “He was just 24 years old and his name was John D. Dent.”
How each of us honors this day is a choice – a freedom we exercise thanks to those who died. I’ll end by quoting Martin Greif, the author of “The Holiday Book,” which I found at a Friends of the Library sale in Los Altos. He wrote this about Memorial Day: “It is no joyous 4th of July celebration, but neither is it a morose occasion. Memorial Day was and is a day of mourning and remembering, of reconciling the past and present and of hoping for a better future.”
Robin Chapman is a longtime journalist, a Los Altos native, and the author of three books about California. She is the daughter of World War II veteran, the late William Ashley Chapman.
