Derby and Shelton held their annual Memorial Day veterans service Sunday, a ceremony that has taken place every year since 1888.
“For the next hour let us remember the brave men and women who gallantly gave up their lives so we could be free,” said Shelton Police Chief Joel Hurliman at the opening of the ceremony.
Between 300 and 400 residents gathered at the Shelton High School auditorium for the solemn event, which featured the reading of the names of the war dead from Derby and Shelton.
The names of surviving veterans of the armed forces from peacetime and war who had died since last year ceremony were also read. Relatives of those men and women were asked to stand when their names were read and girl scouts stood by to give them red carnations in honor of their lost loved ones.
The ceremony, which is organized by the uniformed services and veterans organizations of the two cities, is always held on the evening prior to the Derby-Shelton Memorial Day parade, which this year started in Derby and ended in Shelton.
The Shelton High School band started the ceremony with selections of patriotic songs, including the anthems of the nation’s four military services, “Anchors Aweigh,” “The Army Goes Rolling Along,” the Marine Corps Hymn and the Air Force Song (“Off We Go Into The Wild Blue Yonder”).
Other selections included “God Bless America” and “It’s a Grand Old Flag.” The band concluded the ceremony introduction with “The Star Spangled Banner,” and singer Amy LaReau-Battaglia reprised “God Bless America” later in the program, inviting the audience to sing along.
LaReau-Battaglia added her special singing gifts at other points in the program, including a rendition of the National Anthem immediately following the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance by Ian Tyler of Boy Scout Troop 28.
But the focus of the ceremony was on the true meaning of Memorial Day, which was officially created in 1868 by a proclamation by General John A. Logan, leader of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union Army veterans organization, calling for a “Decoration Day” to be observed annually when the Civil War dead could be remembered.
May 30 was chosen for the first Memorial Day so that flowers would be in bloom to use to decorate the graves of the dead.
In 1967, a federal law made Memorial Day a national holiday on the last Monday in May.
In his invocation at the ceremony Sunday, Pastor Doug Steeves of the Huntington Chapel asked God to ensure that Americans do not forget that Memorial Day is “not just a day off.”
“Guide us this day that we remember the cost of freedom,” he said.
Then James S. Connery, portraying Col. William Burr Wooster of Derby, commander of the 20th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry in the battles of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, read Gen. Logan’s Decoration Day proclamation.
Jason Coppola of the Military Order of the Purple Heart organization read Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn’s Sermon at the Iwo Jima Cemetery, which honored the American dead in the Battle of Iwo Jima, one of the bloodiest battles of World War II.
Anthony Bartholomew of Boy Scout Troop 3 read the legend of the history of “Taps,” followed by a performance of “Taps” by two members of the Shelton High band.
Emily Tarini of Girl Scout Troop 60396 read the poem “In Flanders Fields” by Canadian Army physician John McCrae after the Battle of Ypres, and Jiline Cole of Girl Scout Troop 60487 read the accompanying poem “America’s Answer to Flanders Fields,” published in the New York Evening Post after McCrae’s death in January 1918.
