Ending 2021 on a Positive Note 

By Dorian de Wind
via The Moderate Voice web site 

December 31, 2021 — It is good to be able to close out this “annus horribilis” on a positive note.

Up to the beginning of this year, while there are several local and state monuments and memorials commemorating the more than four million Americans who served in World War I, there was no true “national” monument.

Finally, in January 2013, Congress established the World War One Centennial Commission “to ensure a suitable observance of the centennial of World War I, to provide for the designation of memorials to the service of members of the United States Armed Forces in World War I…” and in December 2014, Congress designated Pershing Park as the site for the memorial.

On April 16 of this year, more than a century after the “Great War” ended, the long-awaited memorial rightfully joined the three other national memorials honoring those who served and sacrificed in the three other major wars the U.S. fought in the 20th century: World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.

The image below – a screen shot from the WW Centennial organization – shows the memorial.

The 60-foot long, 12-foot-tall bas-relief sculpture, “A Soldier’s Journey,” is scheduled to be installed in 2024. For now, a canvas with sketches of the sculpture stands in its place.

Of the more than 3,550 Medal of Honor recipients to date, 126 served in World War I, 92 receiving the award posthumously.

In addition, “Congress awarded six Medals of Honor to unknown, unidentified soldiers of Belgium, France, Great Britain, Italy, Rumania, and the United States to pay tribute to each country’s unknown dead.”

Like the World War I monuments and memorials, there are several state monuments, memorials and museums honoring those who received our nation’s highest military award for valor in combat, but no national monument exists.

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Connecticut's 1st State Troubadour Connects To World War I  

By Tom Callinan, Connecticut's 1st Official State Troubadour
Special to the Doughboy Foundation web site

As background to my formative years, my parents met at a barn-dance in Middletown, CT, my mother's hometown, in the early 1940s. My father, Joe, was the sixth of seven children, born in New Haven to Irish immigrant parents, who eked out a living until my grandfather succumbed to the Spanish Flu, when my dad was only five. His widowed mother was left with six at home, and another one who had gone to Ireland to live with his maternal grandparents, and helped tend to their meager farm. With flaming, red hair and a muscular build, Dad was a scrappy kid, as were many of the poor, fatherless, Depression-Era boys. To help his mother, Dad dropped out of high school to join the Civilian Conservation Corps to earn $30 a month, $25 of which was sent home. In addition to being a boxer, Dad was a born entertainer, who had performed in minstrel shows and on street corners during the 1930s as an amateur barbershop-quartet singer.

Ann Coleman and Joe Callihan, Tom Callinan's parents, during World War II. Joe served with the Army's 83rd Infantry Division in the European Theater of Operations, while Ann served as the secretary of the local Draft Board.When WWII erupted, Dad served with the Army's 83rd Infantry Division in the European Theater of Operations, while my mother, Ann Coleman, an only child, had grown up in a middle-class family, and graduated high school in 1940 with a commercial diploma. During the war she served as the secretary of the Draft Board in Middletown.

Before Mom was born, her late-uncle, Jeremiah J. Coleman served with the 107th Regiment of the 77th Division (National Army) in The Great War. He was killed in action at Chateau Thierry, France in late-August, 1918, and other than seeing his photo when we paid frequent visits to my Aunt Mary (Uncle Jerry's sister), I knew little about him, except that he is interred in St. John's Cemetery in Middletown; he's listed on the WWI memorial obelisk on the Washington Terrace Green; and one of the trees planted in memory of Middletown's fallen was planted in his honor.

In the late 1960s, I was an English major/Music minor at Central Connecticut State College (now University), with eyes toward becoming a teacher. However, a number of factors caused my life to spiral out of control, and as a result, I dropped out of school. Pretty much rudderless, I bounced-around from job-to-job, trying to deal with my free-fall with too much alcohol, and too little self-control. In the first draft lottery of 1970, I received number 29, so I decided to turn my life around by enlisting in the Marine Corps. As luck would have it, while being processed for deployment to Vietnam, the Marine directly ahead of me in line was the last 0311 (rifleman) in the quota for DaNang, so I was diverted to Camp Pendleton, CA, and never got out of the country.

After my Honorable Discharge, I returned to CCSC to resume my academic studies, and graduated with a B.S. in Secondary Education in 1973. That led to a junior high school teaching job, and a serendipitous meeting with two musicians who had a weekly gig at a pub in Hartford, performing Irish music and sea chanteys. Since my musical proclivities ran parallel to those genres, they asked me to sit-in, and in late-1973 I became the third member of The Morgans, which became known as "Connecticut' Premier Irish and Sea Songs Ensemble."