Rejoice with me, on May First I marked the fortieth anniversary of the start of my jogging/running career. On that morning I went to the old cinder track at Depew Park and walked fifty paces, jogged fifty paces for a mile and one?half. I nearly died. I was in dreadful condition and hadn’t done much physical exertion, except for an occasional round of golf, since I had gotten out of the Army 21 years earlier. I stuck to it, however and got into such good shape that I was able to Marathon a couple of times, and probably have rolled up more than 50,000 miles in those forty years. This seems like a lot but isn’t really when you faithfully get out on a nearly daily basis.

I have made a lot of good friends because of my running and I have run in many races and I am really happy that I started on that May Day in 1968. I no longer am able to run far or fast; the legs have a lot of years and a lot of miles on them. So my style and effort is something less than it used to be. I get out usually on Saturday and Sunday for two or three leisurely miles and perhaps a couple of times during the week. There are still four of the Peekskill Marathon Team functioning, none of us in tip?top racing form but we manage to solve most of the problems of the day as we have our tea and graham crackers after the run. Depew Park is still one of the prettiest places around and has changed very little since we were young. Chauncey M. Depew really had foresight.

The month was, as I remember, chilly and cloudy much of the time. The Tampa Bay Rays, I told my daughter, Amy early in May, have a fine young team, and she scoffed at the thought. Look who is in first place on June 1! And those Cubbies are looking very good as well. Wouldn’t that be a fine match?up for October? Jerry Desmond’s Red Sox have made the breakthrough; perhaps this is Charley DeChristopher’s year. Charley and I have been good friends since he borrowed my good baseball bat in 1938 and broke it; he was a Cubs fan then, as I remember. I did not put the curse on the Cubs because of the bat. He also tried to teach me the responses to the old Latin Mass, which didn’t work out all that well.

We ended the month with the usual Memorial Day service at Monument Park and John “Pete” Donohue was the master of ceremonies and asked if I would make the usual speech in honor of the day. After a short show of modest apprehension I agreed and I am about to inflict it upon the readers of this space. The loudspeakers didn’t work very well and much of the gathering had trouble hearing what I had to say. It was preserved for posterity by the television crew. I have been waiting for an agent to call to sign me up. They must have the wrong number.

In any event I may have something to say about June in a few weeks. In the meantime, be very good to each other, you’ve only got each other.

MEMORIAL DAY, 2008

Memorial Day is, and should be, a solemn occasion. We come together, as people have been doingfor many years, to honor the memories of those who have served the United States faithfully and well.

When I was a child, seven years old or so, Decoration Day, the forerunner of this holiday, a really large parade wound through the streets of Peekskill. I can remember two very old veterans of the Civil War riding in an open touring car; there was a sizable contingent of veterans of the Spanish?American War and a much larger group of young men in white shirts and ties, who were veterans of World War 1. This was only 14 or 15 years following the Armistice of November 11, 1918 which marked the end of World War 1. Each if these generations, all of them now gone, had a fair claim to be called, “The Greatest Generation.” In those days members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars wandered through the crowd, dispensing small red paper poppies in memory of those who died in World War 1. We would see these poppies worn for several weeks. The tradition seems to have gotten lost here.

When I was in the Ninth, Grade at Peekskill High School, about the age of the members of the PHS band with us this morning, just before the beginning of World War 11, I went out for the track team. Peekskill High School was a member of the Hudson River League in those days, which consisted of Peekskill, North Tarrytown, Washington Irving and Hastings. We had a really fine track team in 1939. I was a mediocre dash man, about eleven seconds for the 100 yard dash. Sheldon Craddock, Donald MacCrea, and Dickie Lent, were all faster than I was; Shel lived with his mother in that tiny house just down the hill on Hudson Avenue, around the comer from Washington Street, he was her only child and her pride and joy; Donald lived, as I remember, in Finktown, on Park Street. Dickie Lent lived on Harrison Avenue. John Walsh, called, “Shagger”, came from Putnam Valley and was a really fine half?mile runner; (his sister Priscilla, is marriedto former Mayor Fred J. Bianco) Thomas Roe was our red?headed miler; Billy Stem and Dave Kiley put the shot. Billy had the highest IQ in my High School Class of 1943. Dave and I started Kindergarten together at the Guardian. None of them came home.

Shel Craddock died in New Guinea; Donald McCrea died in Italy; Dickie Lent’s “Lucky Destroyer” was hit by a Karnikazi suicide plane and went down with all hands in the Western Pacific; Shagger Walsh died in the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium; Red Roe died in the European fighting as well; Billy Stem was a member of the crew of a submarine which was sunk in one if the Fjords in the Aleutian Islands just off Alaska; Dave Kiley was a Marine who was last seen storming an island beach in the South Pacific. Five members of my High School Class died during the Second World War, out of about 85 boys in our class

.

A few years ago, Tom Brokaw, one of those talented people who read the news on television, published a book, “The Greatest Generation”, which is about the World War 11 Generation. MY generation, and the generation of many of the gray?haired people surrounding us this morning. Of course, it’s flattering that he has such a high opinion of us. I hope that he wouldn’t mind if I disagreed with him.

I believe that the greatest generation was the very first generation to call itself “American”, those who, with much courage and through great hardships wrested a nation from the clutches of the English monarchy. Those who fought and managed the American Revolution were a remarkable group of people.

It is fitting that our ceremony today be held on a, spot which once heard the whistle of enemy shot flying overhead; a spot which once heard the tread of enemy boots as well as the tattered boots of the Continental Army; a spot which once heard the hoof beats of the horses of General George Washington, of Alexander Hamilton, of the Marquis De Lafayette, of General Seth Pomeroy, of Israel Putnam and other leaders; also, probably, those of the arch?traitor Benedict Arnold.

The road just behind the Band was once known as the King’s Highway; it was the road Washington and the members of his staff rode upon nearly every day from the VanCortlandt Upper Manor house a couple of miles up this road where he lived with that Patriotic Family, to his headquarters at the Birdsall House on Main Street, which was located on that small, bare, patch of land right next to Kathleen’s Tearoom. Washington knew that it was absolutely necessary that the Hudson Highlands be the barrier blocking the progress of the British Redcoats and their mercenary’s plan to ravage the Valley and meet with British forces descending from Canada in order to sever the New England States from the rest of the nation on the south, which would have probably meant the collapse of the rebellion. If this plan of attack were to succeed the portrait of the English Queen might be on our postage stamps and coins.

In 1777, as part of that effort of King George III to subdue the rebels, a landing force of British troops came ashore at Lent’s Cove, that inlet of the Hudson separating the Bertoline Warehouse on John Walsh Boulevard from Indian Point. (Incidentally, the Bertolines are marking their 75th Anniversary in business with an appearance of the Budwieser Clydesdale horses on June 6 in downtown Peekskill.) In those days, what we now know as Lower South Street was part of the King’s Highway, the only road leading from New York to Albany and it wound through Peekskill to Continental Village and beyond.

That roadway just behind the Peekskill High School Band was part of that King’s Highway. The hill to our left, known as Fort Hill Park, was occupied by Continental Army troops and Continental Village was a major storehouse for the revolution. The British rapidly placed four light artillery pieces at Drum Hill and aimed volleys across the valley toward Fort Hill and in this direction. One of those shots aimed in this direction sailed out this road; a young American solider was taking a drink of water from a spring next to the road and was struck by one of the cannon balls and badly injured. Nathan Brown was taken to Fishkill where he became one of the first fatalities of the fighting. Historian Emma L. Patterson places that spring at about Phoenix Avenue and others camped at the site of the reservoir of the Peekskill Water system on Frost Lane.

Where we now stand is known as Monument Park for obvious reasons. In the early 1900′s the people of Peekskill and Cortlandt erected the impressive granite monument just behind me to honor the memories of those who fought at the many battles inscribed upon the monument. Those lifelike statues show the men who then served in their uniforms of the day. Just to the north of me is a plaque with all of the names of those who served in World War One; there are probably close to a thousand names, including those of my uncles James and Joseph Dugan, both of whom died as a result of that war; they were my mother’s brothers; James was a regular army man who had been part of the punitive expedition against Pancho Villa along the Mexican border and was stationed at Fort Benning , Georgia as a member of the training cadre when he fell victim to the vicious influenza epidemic which killed many millions of people all over the world. Joseph Dugan was part of the fighting in France, was gassed and died as a result just after I was born in 1925.

Another monument contains the names of all of those who died in World War One and then immediately adjacent is a list if those who died in World War Two, and a list of those lost in Korea. The Viet Nam casualties include the names of William Dorsey, Jr. whose family has operated that funeral home just up Cortlandt Street for many years; it has the name of Lawrence Osborne, whose family lived just down the street on Paulding Street; the name of Oliver Chase, Junior, and Bart Creed are there. They were both airmen and were shot down. The body of Lt Chase was recently identified and brought home for burial at Custer Nat ional Cemetery; no trace of Creed has ever been found.

We of the so?called “Greatest Generation” are fast fading away; I saw recently that 1600 World War Two veterans die each day. Twenty years from now, which must seem a lifetime to the young people in the band, we almost surely will all have gone (a sobering thought).

We hope that those now active in the services and others will be on hand to keep these ceremonies going. Twenty years from now you people in the band and your contemporaries will be in your productive years, taking on the responsibilities of maturity in our society. You may be here on some future Memorial Day with your children, you may be taking your turns on the school board, on the Common Council, as police officers, as members of Congress, you may be scientists , authors, jurists, it will be your time to shine, you will be staking your claim to be called “The Greatest Generation.”

When I was a child, someone always read at these ceremonies a famous poem of the day “In Flanders Fields.” Flanders is just across the English channel from England, where France and Belgium meet and is part of each of those two countries; in 1914 and 1915 there was vicious trench warfare in Flanders and the English and their Empire forces suffered very heavy casualties in a relatively short time. Colonel John McCrea was a physician in the Canadian Army and he wrote this poem in 1914, it was first published in 1915 and quickly caught favor. Colonel. McCrea caught pneumonia and died in 1918.

In Flanders Field

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That marks our place; and in the sky

The Larks, still bravely singing,

fly Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe;

To you with failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

This poem was taken from “Best Remembered Poems” by Martin Gardner and published by Dover Publications, Inc.

The poem, I think can be read in a couple of ways; as a prayer to the God of War for victory over the foe or as a prayer that the peace and tranquility that reigned just before that awful war might return.

Thank you all for coming out on this pretty spring morning to help us remember.

(speech delivered by Jack Burns, Memorial Park, Memorial Day 2008)