A 51st Year of Flags, Crosses, Remembering

The youth band never showed up. And when the somber-faced color detail from Fullerton High School’s Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps raised the American flag to half-staff, it twisted and stuck and had to be hoisted again.

But minor snafus were beside the point for the more than 200 people who proudly ushered in Memorial Day at Fullerton’s Loma Vista Memorial Park with patriotic songs, prayers, speeches and, at the close of Monday’s 75-minute ceremony, a deafening rifle salute.

It was the 51st year of the service--and the 51st year that Fullerton residents had placed a small flag and a white wooden cross beside the grave of every military man or woman buried in the memorial park, said Fullerton City Councilman A.B. (Buck) Catlin, who was master of ceremonies.

5,000 Flags and Wooden Crosses

Resplendent in a red, white and blue striped tie, Catlin spoke against a dramatic backdrop of 5,000 flags and wooden crosses that dotted the wide green cemetery lawn.

“Tradition is what all these things are like,” he said. “And Fullerton in north Orange County is definitely traditional Orange County.”

Certainly the style of this Memorial Day

ceremony was traditional.

Soloist Delores Brown led the crowd in several choruses of the National Anthem and “God Bless America.”

Msgr. John Sammon of the Diocese of Orange prayed for freedom and warned that “we cannot take (liberty) for granted.”

And Rear Adm. Robert B. Halder, commander of the Naval Medical Command Southwest Region in San Diego, gave the keynote speech honoring “a special American--the military medic.”

Working out of modern hospitals, MASH units and submarines, military medics perform vital and “altruistic” services every day, he said.

Not only have thousands of medics “paid the final price for our freedom,” Halder said, but “a medic’s comforting arms were the last memory of many of those who rest in peace here today.”

After Halder’s speech, the crowd was silent as Kiwanis Club leader Carl Goodman and Bette Freeman of the Santa Ana chapter of American Gold Star Mothers read names of some “departed veterans.”

Then men and women representing 19 local groups stepped forward for the annual placement of the wreaths. Escorted by a young Marine Corps officer, each walked slowly to a gray concrete obelisk commemorating fallen veterans, then stooped and gently placed their flowers at the base of the column.

The names of organizations participating in this ritual read like a list of patriots. Gold Star Wives of America were there. So were officials from the American Legion Auxiliary, the Air Force Sergeants Assn., the B-17 Combat Crewmen and Wingmen and 15 other groups.

After another prayer by Sammon, half a dozen Fullerton police officers pointed their rifles at the sky for a final salute, and the program was over.

‘See You Next Year’

“Thank you very much for coming,” Catlin said. “We’ll see you next year.”

All in all, it was a great Memorial Day observance, Sharline McDaniel said. “I love it, I love it,” she exclaimed as she paused to photograph a veterans’ plaque.

But with the service over, McDaniel said, her work was about to begin. In several days, she and other volunteers from a patriotic group called the Fullerton Emblem Club plan to visit the cemetery again and pick up 2,300 flags.

They will cart the flags to a member’s home, bring along several ironing boards and then “we’ll go and press every one of them,” McDaniel said.

When the ironing is done and the flags are rolled and put away for next year, this Memorial Day will truly be over, McDaniel said.