Memorial Day was a big deal in the village in which I grew up, Liberty, NY. And thinking about the difference between the Memorial Day celebrations of my youth, and the non-celebration of this holiday today, makes me not so much nostalgic for the past but concerned about our future.
Liberty was, for eight months a year, a pretty sleepy rural village of about 5000 people nestled in a valley through which a small creek flowed. It was distinguished two things. First, Liberty had a higher than percentage of Jews than most of rural New York, Jews who had come to the area in the early 20th century to escape New York and who had created Borscht Belt of Jewish Resort Hotels. And, second, we were only an hour and a half by car to New York City–which was why we became a major resort area–and were brought closer by the New York newspapers we read and New York television stations we watched on cable starting in the early 1960s. (When I was fifteen, I started reading the Village Voice religiously.) So we were in many ways a bit more sophisticated than the usual rural small town.
Four months a year, during the resort season, the population of village, and even more the surrounding Town, also called Liberty, grew substantially. The rest of the year, the village and town were fairly quiet. For the first eighteen years of my life—up through the early 1970s, when the village went into a long downward spiral as businesses moved to strip malls closer to the highway, State Route 17—the village was fairly prosperous, with a busy main street with many shops of all kinds. It had an excellent deli—Singers—and bakery—Katz's—a toy story called the Brownie Shop, a few clothing stores fo rmen and women—Town and Country, Seikin's, Marcia's—and the corner store run by one of the nicest people I've ever met, Lou Newman, where we bought newspapers, candy, including the chocolate licorice my father brought home most Friday nights, and toys.
For about five years, from 7th to 11th grade, I marched through the town twice a year with the Liberty Central High School Marching Band. In October was the Halloween parade, when we marched at night in street clothes and winter coats, to sometimes funky street beats and played some off-beat tunes. Except for the challenge of trying to keep my trumpet mouthpiece warm in the often cold October evenings, that parade was pure fun.
The other parade, on Memorial Day, was serious. We dressed in our red and white band uniforms complete with shakos, our high small-brimmed hats. We marched carefully and solemnly down Main Street, looking right to stay in line and in step, playing patriotic songs and Sousa. And then we marched up to cemetery on the hill that looked down on the village. There we lined up in front of a speaker's rostrum, where we heard a few patriotic speeches that powerfully reminded us of all we owed the men (and a few women) who had fought and often died for us in wartime.
And then, after the speeches, two trumpeters would play taps. One would stand next to the speaker's rostrum. The other would be hidden in the woods above the cemetery and echo the lead trumpeter below. We thought that it was a great honor to be picked to be one of the trumpeters and I remember being very grateful for the opportunity to play the echo part when I was a sophomore or junior.
I took these events seriously. And, remember, not only was I a teenager and not inclined to take anything seriously—which is why I spent a lot of time in the office of the Liberty Central High School Principal—but these parades took place during the height of the Vietnam War, when these kinds of patriotic moments were quite suspect among opponents of the war in much of the country. And that certainly included most of my friends and our parents in this small, rural, yet politically sophisticated village. (My Dad turned against the war before I did. I was pretty hawkish up through sometime in late 1968 or 1969 if I remember correctly.)
But, in a small town like the one in which I grew up, you could take part in a patriotic ceremony—and do so with pride—and also protest the Vietnam War. And you could think the war was not only a disaster but immoral and still sing the national anthem with some fervor, if not necessarily in tune, as my father and I always did when we went to see the Yankees, Mets or Knicks play.
In our small town, the patriotic ceremonies we took part in were real to us, because they were performed not by distant political figures but by people who were friends and neighbors. I remember two of my father's friends, Judge Robert Williams and Town Supervisor Stretch Hanofee, giving powerful and moving speeches at these Memorial Day ceremonies. Were they really great speeches? I think so, because my Dad always talked about Judge Williams being a good speaker and he would know, being one himself. But whether they were really powerful or not, they meant something to me and moved me because I respected both men as my Dad did.
Patriotic ceremonies in a small town transcended political disputes because the connections we had to one another transcended politics. I was connected to most of the people in my hometown in an organic many-sided way. I knew the people from whom we bought goods and services as real people, who were fathers and mothers to my friends or members of our synagogue or participants in some other part of our civic life.
Joe Gold wasn't just the man who filled our prescriptions, he was someone I had known almost my whole life; someone who joked with me, who gave me lollipops and who everyone once in a while would say to my mother, "I better call Archie (our family doctor Archie Reisenberg) to remind him you are taking another drug that might cause a problem for this one he wants you to take now."
I know from my study of American politics, that the partisan and ideological disputes we have today are nothing new. Politics throughout the 19th century was often as bitterly partisan as it is today.
But I do worry that in the 19th century these disputes were often tempered by the connections that people with opposing views had with one another. We rarely have those connections today.
And I worry that, living as most of do in anonymous cities and suburbs, in which our political leaders and our fellow citizens are unknown and distant from most of us, it's hard to find, let alone take seriously, political ceremonies that connect us, in a non-partisan way, not just to the brave men and women who died to create and preserve our country in the past, but to fellow citizens who share our common lives today.