La Cañada Memorial Day service to salute the fallen

This Memorial Day — while residents partake in some Fiesta Day fun — a group of patriotic youth and adults will present a service to honor those who served, and died for, their country and the freedoms Americans enjoy today.

On Monday morning at 9 a.m., La Cañada’s Memorial Park plays host to a Memorial Day service, a longstanding tradition run almost entirely by local youth. The event includes songs, military traditions as well as the recitation of poems and letters written by soldiers in combat.

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Scouts will lead the audience in the Pledge of Allegiance and present the 48-star flag that flew at the northern gun battery on the day Pearl Harbor Day was attacked, Dec. 7, 1941. Student Maggie MacKenzie will sing the national anthem and will join a group of commemorative singers and members of the La Cañada High School marching band in several patriotic songs.

Organizer Joe Puglia, a veteran and columnist for the Valley Sun, said getting youth involved in the remembrance is a powerful way to waken in them a sense of civic responsibility.

“I tell all the kids we’re doing our best job for the soldiers,” said Puglia, who served in the 1st Battalion 9th Marines, an infantry division that earned the grim moniker “Walking Dead” for its high rate of casualties. “On this day, we live for them — we reach down deep and do the best we can for their memory.”

When servicemen or women with ties to the La Cañada community are killed while serving, the city of La Cañada Flintridge honors them by adding their name to a bronze plaque on a wall of the park’s gazebo at the corner of Foothill and La Cañada boulevards, facing the American flag. The plaques indicate the war or conflict in which the person served.

Among the more recent individuals remembered in the tradition were Army Staff Sgt. Scott Studenmund, a 2008 Flintridge Preparatory School graduate who was killed on June 9, 2014, and Army Spec. Carla Stewart, who died on Jan. 26, 2007 when her vehicle overturned in Tallil, Iraq.

On Monday, officials will recognize the addition of another life lost — Sgt. Joseph Stifter, with the U.S. Army 1st Battalion, 7th Field Artillery Regiment, who was killed on Jan. 30 when the Humvee he was riding rolled over at the Al Asad Airbase in Iraq’s Anbar province. A Glendale native, Stifter was a graduate of St. Francis High School.

“A lot of wonderful human beings never made it home,” Puglia said. “By doing this (service), we don’t make it right, but we somehow honor them.”

Jack MacKenzie, Maggie’s father and co-organizer of the service, called the event a fitting way to celebrate the meaning behind the holiday in which so many of us delight. Seeing young people and older war veterans together, he said, brings everything full circle.

“I’d love to see the park as full for the ceremony as it is for the music and movies,” MacKenzie added, referring to the other events planned for Memorial Park during the three-day Fiesta Days schedule. “Because the ceremony represents why the music and movies are possible.”

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Sara Cardine, sara.cardine@latimes.com

Twitter: @SaraCardine

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