Most people don’t know that Holy Name actually began life in 1917, but it was a short-lived existence. World War I was just beginning, and the first members of Holy Name were needed elsewhere. So the corps was disbanded, and our young predecessors went off to foreign lands to defend the world againsty tyranny, some never to return.

I saw a photo not too long ago of the Cadets from the early 1940s posed on the steps of The Church of the Most Holy Name in Garfield. All the Cadets in the photo were very, very young. I had seen this photo before, but somehow I had always missed the flag centered in the very top row of Cadets. It had a blue star with the number 70 on it. During World War II if you had a member of your family in the military you had a small flag you placed in the front window of your house. One blue star for each family member. If the star was gold you knew that someone in that house had made the supreme sacrifice. I don’t know why I remember that one detail from my youngest years relative to the war. Probably because in my Grandparent’s house, in their front window, there was a flag with four blue stars on it.

The young Cadets in the photo I had seen so many times were young because the older Cadets had gone off to fight for America in foreign lands against the evils of fascism, some never to return. The 70 on that flag represented 70 Cadets. 70 members of our Cadet family. 70 of us! I don’t know why it took me so long to notice it, or to understand it. But I do now.

Those thoughts bring back so many memories of Cadets I knew and marched with. Cadets that after their years in maroon and gold, donned the uniforms of the Army, the Navy, the Marines, the Air Force, or the Coast Guard. Some of those too went off to fight in foreign lands on far continents, some never to return. I think of them often. I knew them. I shared a part of my life with them. My devotion to them, my feelings for them, my pride in what they did has always touched my soul. On Memorial Day though it becomes something larger. It makes me swell with pride. It helps me to understand in a different way the many reasons for my very deep and very personal feelings for The Cadets, both the ones I knew and the ones I didn’t.

I will be heading to Hawthorne in a few weeks to watch their annual Memorial Day Parade, and to participate in the pizza party the alumni has planned after the parade for the 2010 Cadets. I will open my lawn chair and sit in the shade surrounded by Cadet Alumni, and Caballero Alumni, and Skyliner Alumni, and Blessed Sac and Bridgemen Alumni…and many, many others. All of them could be writing these words about friends and family members who are, and forever will be, a part of that great fraternity known as American military veterans.

It is a great parade organized by Cadet Alumnus Doug Tenis. It gets better every year. I will look to my left from where I'm seated as I do each year, and moving up the street I will see the new young 2010 Cadets, the inheritors of the great gift passed onto them by the Cadets of the 1917 WWI corps, and the Cadets of the 1940s WWII corps, and the Cadets who fought in Korea, and Vietnam, and Afghanistan, and Iraq, and Haiti, and Panama, and Country after Country. The Cadets who were commissioned as officers at West Point, and Annapolis, and The Air Force Academy; at V.M.I., The Citadel, and Valley Forge.

They will march under a maroon banner streched across the parade route that reads:

THE CADETS SALUTE
OUR AMERICAN MILITARY VETERANS
GOD BLESS AMERICA

Leading them up the street will be DM Ben Pouncey, wearing the white and gold uniform of so many legendary Cadet Drum Majors before him. As the Cadets pass in front of me I will see the Holy Name Cadet patches on their tunic sleeves, and I will be reminded once again of the importance of the threads of life that bind us one to another, Cadet to Cadet.

Following the parade Cadet Alumni and the 2010 marching Cadets will join together at the Hawthorne American Legion Post #199 to share refreshments and restrengthen the bond that began so many, many years ago. The alumni will distribute the baseball caps to the Cadets as a symbolic gesture of our pride and solidarity. Then, in our tradition, the alumni will move up onto the stage and sing in tribute to our newest Cadets, Our Holy Name Hymn. The alumni on the stage will represent 75 years of Cadets who have gone before. They will represent those 1917 Cadets, and those 1940s Cadets, and all the other Cadets who have brought us so much honor in the way in which they lived their lives and the way in which so many served their country when called to the colors.

So that’s how I will spend my Memorial Day; remembering, and honoring my past, and the reason why that past , and all of our pasts, were and are, and always will be, important.

For Holy Name shall always be…

GOD BLESS AMERICA