Here are two pieces I wrote more than a quarter century ago. Both are about the meaning and substance of Memorial Day. Not just another holiday, long weekend or a time for garden equipment sales. It is a day to honor and remember who we are as a nation and the sacrifices that helped define and defend our democracy.
“A day to ask: Who were they?”
May 31, 1998
The Boston Globe
At the intersection of VFW Parkway and LaGrange Street in West Roxbury there is a sign that stands like a silent sentry reminding us of a proud past filled with a quiet sadness that lingers still across all the years even though the American memory seems to have less and less capacity to recall the cruel and true costs of war. It is a memorial to brothers -- Thomas and Gerald Keenan -- who died in 1944.
Each day, thousands pass through the busy crossroads. And, each day, the sign is there, nearly invisible to those idling in autos: "Keenan Memorial Square," the top line reads. "Thomas W. Jr. -- US Marines, 1920-1944." And, right beside the brief reference to that young man, "Gerald J. -- US Navy, 1925-1944. Brothers who gave the supreme sacrifice for their country."
For a long time I wondered about those brave boys. Who were they? Where did they live? When did they die? Who -- and what -- did they leave behind?
The other day along LaGrange, nobody seemed to know. It's understandable; too much time has passed. People come, people go. Families move, taking local lore or the treasure of stories spawned on city streets to new ZIP codes and suburban destinations where the past is homogenized, packed away or even forgotten, like relics in an attic.
Fifty-four years ago, the United States was a different country. The dimension, the scope and the staggering casualties of a great war fought on two fronts had reached into every household. The Depression had been defeated. D-Day sent a coast-to-coast current of electric euphoria that was offset only by the continual drumroll and the sound of "Taps" that echoed in graveyards of small towns as well as big cities where so many families were touched with the tears and the toll of burying their heroic dead.
St. Joseph's Cemetery is just a quarter-mile from the sign. And there, in a lovely grotto surrounded by the shade of a mature elm, a flat, stone marker was discovered in freshly cut grass. This is where Thomas and Gerald came after being brought home from their war.
Shut your eyes and you can see them still -- and you can sense the society that mourned them after they lost their lives in battles that helped deliver the gift of liberty we open each morning. They returned to a place where self-pity was a stranger, where neighbors knew each other, where people actually volunteered for duty and willingly went without staples like sugar or gas because the cause was greater than any individual need, the collective will stronger than the smug selfishness that often sets us apart today.
But who were they? And what did they leave behind?
"I think you need to talk to my uncle," said the young man who answered the door at the house where both boys grew up. "They know the story. And it's still sad to talk about."
Thomas and Helen Keenan had 10 children, seven boys and three girls. The father was a Boston firefighter. The family lived in West Roxbury. After Pearl Harbor, the oldest, Tom Jr., joined the Marine Corps. A few months later, his brother Gerald enlisted in the Navy after Roslindale High.
"Thomas died in the battle for Tinian Island," his brother Joe, 71, recalled yesterday. "He died July 14, 1944. A priest came to the house with the fellow from Western Union. That's how we were told: a telegram.
"Two weeks later, Gerald died when the Japs torpedoed his ship, the Canberra. Funny thing is, I helped build that boat at the Charlestown Navy Yard. It was a very difficult time. My parents never got over it."
Both brothers came back to Boston together in death. They were waked at the old Legion Post in West Roxbury, blocks from their boyhood home, and buried side-by-side on Aug. 28, 1944.
Less than a year later, World War II was over. Germany surrendered the following spring. The Japanese conceded defeat in late summer, all because so many brave young men swallowed their fear and delivered their lives to a common cause not often recalled all these years later.
Thomas Keenan was 23. His brother Gerald was 19. And yesterday -- Memorial Day -- was all about them.
“Sorrow etched in stone”
May 29, 1994
The Boston Globe
Along the shadowed paths of Forest Hills Cemetery early yesterday, a soft and peaceful breeze snapped all the small flags to attention as they stood sentry on row after row of headstones of the fallen dead. The warming sun began to dry a dew that glistened like permanent tears on handsomely cropped acres of green carpet above those buried beneath the grass.
The main gate opened at 7:30 and a few witnesses to war's most crushing truth arrived in order to plant flowers, pray or simply observe a moment of silence by the grave of someone dear, long since gone. There are so many stories here, so many quiet tales of pride, courage and loss that no single moment like Memorial Day can ever do justice to what has passed: A cemetery is the accumulated history of a lost America -- who we were and what we did for others.
Among the proud lessons of these mute markers, there is no discrimination, no petty hatreds, no bickering, no race, creed, or envy. Politics do not matter. And prejudice is a stranger.
Fifty years after D-Day, the litany of loss is numbered by the hand of stonemasons who chipped the names of heroes into granite and marble memorials of those killed half a century ago: MacCauley, Kelly, Flanagan, DeMarco, Chin, Brown, Griffin, White, Schwartz, Johnson, Green -- American boys forever young due to the call and cause of freedom.
Walking a cemetery on such a solemn occasion is to mingle with that past and converse with history. You wonder about their dreams and what they left behind. You can almost envision a Western Union courier knocking at the door of three-deckers in Roxbury and Dorchester, the South End and Charlestown with the telegram whose first sentence remains familiar to every family ever affected: "The Secretary of War regrets to inform you . . ."
Alongside a spray of elms yesterday was the grave of Peter A. Lalooses. The story in stone was: September 19, 1924 - August 31, 1944, Killed in France.
"My brother was a freshman at Harvard," his sister Helen Gianoulis was saying later in the day. "He left school to join the Army. Back then, all the boys did. We were at war."
Back then. Oh God, it was so long ago. It was an age of relative innocence when our country was capable of being united in common cause. It was before cable, call-waiting, microwave ovens, laptop computers and sneakers kids literally kill for. It was before Elvis, the Beatles, Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, Charles Whitman, Richard Speck, Charles Manson, Ivan Boesky, Madonna, Watergate, Vietnam, drive-by shootings, school prayer bans, special interests and the sure, steady slide of our spirit.
"My sister and I were home when the telegram came. Our mother had died the year before. We called my father at the store and told him," Helen Gianoulis said. "He cried and cried. We all did. It was so sad.
"A year after the war ended, my father had Peter's body brought back here for burial. He didn't want him so far away from home. My brother was his only son."
The Lalooseses lived in Dorchester. The father, Arthur, had come to America from Greece. All his life, he worked long hours in his own variety store to push his family forward and in that turbulent spring of 1944 the immigrant had a child at Harvard, a boy who left to serve with the Rangers who climbed Pointe DuHoc to help liberate a whole continent of people, unselfishly giving up his life at the age of 19.
"Peter was killed in Caen. They were on the way to Paris," his sister recalled. "He was a wonderful boy. He was a wonderful brother. I still think of him all the time."
The father's store was called "Lalooses' Spa" and stood for 59 years directly across from Holy Cross Cathedral in the South End. The house where his only boy played and dreamed and worked alongside his parents is on Humphreys Street in Dorchester.
Today, a Cape Verdean family lives there with a Haitian family upstairs. Across the street, there is a Cambodian family and they have black neighbors: A different time with different faces pursuing the same, small hopes of the Lalooseses but in a country perhaps permanently altered by an inward selfishness and a fear unheard of 50 years ago when all those young men served.
Now, the long row of graves in Forest Hills Cemetery is a dim reminder of an American fiber that, sadly, has become a mere memory. But the flags flap quietly, and relatives still cry for what was lost and what is too often forgotten and Peter Lalooses is at home among heroes who reside this morning in the shade of city sycamores.