Some years ago Chris Brown, who was then superintendent of schools in Hammondsport, commissioned me to develop an athletics hall of fame and a lifetime achievements hall of fame to honor alumni. I agreed to do so, but added, “Chris, you also need a gold star memorial.” He instantly agreed.
During the two World Wars, families with someone in the service could display a blue star; families who had lost someone displayed a gold, or at least had the right to. Chris and I decided on the spot that we needed to honor former students (whether graduates or not) who had given their lives in the line of duty.
It then became my job to figure out who they were, for there was no central listing. I had read through the entire run of the Hammondsport Herald for the World War I years, and hadn’t seen any mention of war dead from the immediate Hammondsport area. (We agreed we’d recognize anyone who had attended any school in what’s now the Hammondsport Central School District.) As director of the Curtiss Museum I had also read enough papers to be pretty confident that the town had lost no dead in the Spanish-American War of 1898.
A Steuben County company went to California for the Mexican War, but saw no action. Some three dozen from Urbana alone died in the Civil War, but we had no hope at all of ascertaining their schooling.
So that left us with World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and later. And there we KNEW we’d find names. Checking with some folks who’d been around the school system for some time… people like Jim Conklin, Dick McCandless, and Milt von Hagn… we were pretty sure about the good news that there had been no deaths in Vietnam or later.
The Legion didn’t have much information on historic stuff.  But for World War II I checked with Joe Meade, himself a naval veteran of that war, and Richard “Patche” Brady, who’d still been in school during those years. I also studied the monument on Pulteney Square in the village. I read through the internal magazine published by Mercury Aircraft, and I went through yearbooks.
This became a grim task, looking again and again at pictures of boys like Reggie Wood – boys who were never going to be more than boys. They’re mugging at the camera, or gathering with their clubs and teams, or trying to look serious and grown-up. They don’t know what I know, thank God. They don’t know what horror lies ahead of them.
Finally the list emerged – 13 Hammondsport School dead in the Second World War. Considering that the school was probably only graduating about 40 people a year – meaning maybe 20 boys – and that these soldiers were mostly of an age, that’s a horrendous loss for a small community.
If anything it gets worse when you study the timing of their deaths. Corporal Reuben Shettler was the first, passing away in a Japanese prison camp in June of 1942. Corporal Charles Stone was killed in the invasion of Sicily 15 months later.
Up to this time US deaths had been mostly aviators or naval personnel, or men fallen in battles that were constrained by geography – the Philippines, North Africa, Pacific islands, Sicily, Italy. But after June of 1944 in addition to Italy we would be in major battles across the plains of northern Europe, in the Philippines, at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. We were hammering now on the inner defensive walls of our enemies.
Suddenly it seemed as though the hemorrhage was uncontrollable. Two deaths on June 14; one on June 28; another September 18 (in Italy); December 4; December 28; February 22; February 24; April 7; April 26; May 11 (in the Pacific). With the exception of Reuben Shettler’s death in a prison camp, and Reggie Wood’s being lost in an accidental plane crash, all the deaths were from battle causes. And excepting Shettler and Charles Stone, they all came within eleven months.
Imagine how that hammered the community. When we had an unveiling for the finished memorial, a woman told me about the father she had never met. Knowing he was due to be sent home, her mother had been thrilled to see a car pull in, with a man in uniform inside. She rushed outside excitedly, only to be brought up short at the sight of an officer getting out of the car. Then she knew he would never come home at all.
That was 13 for World War II. Patche Brady is a veteran of the Korean War era, and he helped us identify two more from that conflict – Captain Raymond J. Bennett and PFC Paul H. Stone.
Patche also told us about Stephen Carrassas, who was in the band playing the national anthem when he was blown off the USS Honolulu by attacking Japanese planes at Pearl Harbor. Later the USS Helena went down under him, leaving him bobbing in the water by night in the crossfire of a major sea battle. He survived the war by three years, passing away in 1948, but Patche testified to how deeply he had suffered from his horrifying experiences. Judging that he too was a casualty of the war, we added him as well.
So today, at the front entrance and outside the administration office of a school they never saw, are 16 plaques for former students. Each bears the student’s name and his photograph… in every case but one, in uniform. Each has his unit, a brief note of the place and circumstances of his death. Each has a gold star. Just about every student, every staff member, every visitor passes their memorial every day.
In one of his books the military historian John Keegan quotes the old song about how old soldiers never die, they just fade away. But armies, he points out, are not made up of OLD soldiers. They’re made of YOUNG soldiers, and they die in their millions. Keegan observes that we’ve spent over 10,000 years perfecting war, and challenges us to spend the next 10,000 finding better ways to solve our problems. We’re glad to say that that wall by the office honors and preserves the memories of these boys. We’re sad to say that the wall has space for more.