A SPECIAL REPORT: MEMORIAL DAY

REMEMBERING STEPHEN: When the men and women who gave their lives for their country are honored at a ceremony at 9:30 this morning at Glendale City Hall, Nora Golsh will be remembering son Stephen. He was killed while on patrol in Vietnam in 1970. He was 23. By next Memorial Day, Golsh hopes, Glendale will have a new monument honoring all its fallen military by name. The city is seeking the names of all residents who died in action since its 1906 incorporation.

HIGHEST HONOR: Audie Murphy, the most decorated U. S. soldier of World War II, had been living in the East Valley when he died in a plane crash in Virginia in 1971. Murphy won the Medal of Honor for saving his company by single-handedly holding off six German tanks. Later, he starred in his own film biography, “To Hell and Back” (1955). Murphy is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

VA PICNIC: The Sepulveda VA Medical Center sponsors a Memorial Day barbecue today at 11:30 for the 120 residents of its nursing home unit and veterans who made some 300,000 outpatient visits to the Plummer Street facility this year. The most venerable is World War I vet Joseph Benedick, 98. The senior woman is Barbara Horning, above, 90, who served in World War II.

THOUSANDS OF FLAGS: According to Dick Fisher, a spokesman for Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, an unknown number of veterans and war dead are among the 300,000 interred there. He does know that Memorial Day is, along with Easter, the cemetery’s busiest. About 20,000 people will visit this weekend, many to leave flags and flowers, five times the usual number.

VALLEY VETS: According to the 1990 U. S. census, about 109,000 veterans call the Valley home. Almost 37,000 served in World War II, 17,000 in Korea, 30,000 in Vietnam. More than 200 heard reveille during the Great War of 1914-1918.