La Crescenta Memorial Day event honors James Bauder, a lieutenant commander who went missing in 1966
Almost 40 years after James Bauder, a U.S. Navy lieutenant commander, went missing while flying his plane over North Vietnam, Jane Bauder Castellani, who hadn’t seen her father since she was 4, got an email.
“I do hope this email reaches you,” read the message from the head of the Navy’s POW/MIA Branch. “Please call me, I have some very important information regarding your father.”
The branch, responsible for identifying, searching for and recovering the Navy’s prisoners of war and those missing in action, found a femur that matched James Bauder’s DNA last fall. Castellani was stunned.
James Bauder, who was a La Cañada resident, was one of the fallen soldiers honored at La Crescenta’s Two Strike Park on Monday. The small ceremony highlighted those who remain lost after serving the country.
Though Bauder’s family could not attend the event, organizers took time to properly honor the fallen hero near his onetime Southern California home on Oceanview Boulevard.
After opening remarks by retired Lt. Col. Dave Worley, U.S. Air Force, and renditions of the national anthem and “America the Beautiful” by the Hot Topic Quartet, keynote speaker Ralph Peter Scaffidi, a retired U.S. Navy Reserve captain, read aloud the story of Bauder and his daughter’s reaction upon hearing her father’s remains had finally been found.
“It’s been decades of wondering and hoping, and not hoping, then hoping again — like a yo-yo,” she told the La Cañada Valley Sun in October. “When the news finally came, I didn’t know how to feel about it. I didn’t cry. I wasn’t happy. I was just kind of stoic.”
Scaffidi then introduced a group of veterans from the U.S. Army and Navy who carried a neatly folded American flag. The veterans extended the flag and slowly refolded it, reciting for the audience the symbolism of each fold.
Worley reassured guests that Scaffidi would give the flag to the remaining family members of James Bauder — Castellani and a cousin. Bauder’s widow died in 2011 and his sister died just days before Castellani received the email from the POW/MIA branch.
Bauder is one of few who are found, but there are still an estimated 82,000 people who remain missing after fighting overseas, Scaffidi told the audience. Monday’s event honored them with a POW/MIA table ceremony, executed by a group of Crescenta Valley High School ROTC members.
The ceremony involves placing several materials on a round table covered by a white table cloth, such as a single yellow candle to symbolize the frailty of a lone soldier and a plate with lemon and salt that signifies the bitter fate of the soldiers who don’t return home and their families’ tears.
In his closing remarks, Scaffidi read an excerpt of President Ronald Reagan’s 1982 Memorial Day address:
“As we honor their memory today, let us pledge that their lives, their sacrifices, their valor shall be justified and remembered for as long as God gives life to this nation,” he read aloud. “And let us also pledge to do our utmost to carry out what must have been their wish: that no other generation of young men will every have to share their experiences and repeat their sacrifice.”
alejandra.reyesvelarde@latimes.com
Twitter: @r_valejandra
