Belleville Sons Honor Roll

Nutley Sons Honor Roll

A place of honor and remembrance for the sons and brothers, uncles and friends who proved freedom is not free. Remembering our war dead

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Fine Print

By Anthony Buccino

From a talk delivered on Veterans Day  2007

Please bear with me as I use notes – I’m a writer, not a speaker…

My family and I believe that everything happens for a reason. We have seen God’s hand in our lives. We are witnesses to many occurrences which can only be attributed to God’s control. Even finding this church for our spiritual home is the perfect example of things happening for a reason.

The stain glass windows behind me are a war memorial. If you’ve ever been up this close, perhaps you’ve read the fine print: to honor those who made the supreme sacrifice and the high cause which they served.

My personal story is another example of just such an event.

I am a writer. It is my vocation and my avocation. It’s what I do both professionally and as a hobby if you will.

Several years ago, while attending a dedication to a restored World War II memorial on Veteran’s Day, I looked at the 90 names and started to wonder about who all these guys were, these names on stone monuments – these men from my town who gave their lives for our country.

That thought began to grow into a project which is the basis for this whole tale.

I didn’t know why I felt that I had to put this project together. It felt like the right thing to do. I didn’t question what was leading me to this decision. I had faith that maybe some good would come out of it.

And so I began to research and put together a book to honor and memorialize the men from Nutley who died in service to our country. My count came to 138 in the last century alone. You live in a town 30 years and there’s so much you don’t know.

It started as a hobby, something I did in my free time. It ultimately took on a life of its own. It took four years to finish. Andrea helped with the research on her breaks from college. Dawn helped me edit each new version. It started out as a modest web site.

Then we duplicated the idea with the Belleville version, because Dawn and I grew up in Belleville. We found that 154 Belleville sons died while in service.

I printed them myself, distributed them myself. It was a daunting undertaking.

Finally the books were printed and distributed. I donated books to the local libraries and historical societies.

And then we began to see the reason for my doing this work.

People began to contact me –

You have the only photo of my uncle that I have ever seen…

The book you have written has connected me to a grandfather I never got to meet….

You have my father’s middle initial wrong…

Here’s a photo of me with my husband when he got his pilot wings …

Thank you for keeping my father’s memory alive….

I put together what I thought would be a nice tribute and memorial.

But it took on a whole new meaning. My books seem to connect families to their lost loved ones. I was introducing people to their long dead relatives.

One of my first talks about the book was at the AMVETS hall. As the old men flipped through the book, they saw the young men they played baseball with, played in the garage band with, who lived across the street, dated their sister. Those long gone young men were present in that room.

You see, everything happens for a reason.

These books were written now at a time when folks could Google their family name and find the books and the stories of their soldiers and sailors and Marines. I could not have written this book and gotten the same response 10 years ago. My books gave people a new insight into their own families.

I dedicated the books to my father. My father was in the Army in World War II. He was a quiet man who never talked about his war experience. I knew only 2 details from my father’s time in service:

1 – that he served with Americal in Guadalcanal – something he revealed at the end of a Guadalcanal Diary the movie on our old Motorola. “That’s where I was,” was all he said.

And 2 – that he got malaria.

Other than those 2 facts, my father did not open up about his days with Uncle Sam.

My father died 27 years ago. He never got to see Andrea, nor did he get to see his name in my books. And he never talked about the war.

After the books first came out, I was contacted by the daughter of a friend of my father. Her father passed away, and they cleaned out his house in order to sell it. She said she found something in her house that she thought I might want.

And she gave me nineteen letters that my father had written to her father when they both were in service – a bundle of letters in my father’s handwriting telling of his days in the Fiji Islands and Guadalcanal and his hopes for the end to the war and a quick return home.

Handwritten letters, pages and pages, from a man who never even wrote a quick –

“I am running to the store/be right back” note in the years I could remember.

He wrote of the rumor that they would be home for Christmas. That was April of 1942 – he was away 3 more years after that letter was sent.

He wrote of it being a good decision not to get married before he went overseas. Then he wrote that he wished he had gotten married before he left.

He wrote of coming home to marry a girl I called Mom.

He wrote of never ever leaving home again once he got back.

He wrote of settling down in California except that he wanted to be with his folks here in Jersey.

It was amazing. 

It was enlightening.

Here I was, 27 years after his death, hearing in his own voice from a 20 something year old guy all the war stories he never could bring himself to speak out loud to me as I was growing up.

I learned about his likes and dislikes. I learned why our family never took a vacation in my childhood. I always thought we were too poor to go away. I never realized that my father’s forced time away from home during the war made him keep that promise to never go away ever again.

He wrote of getting bushels of mail from home. He wrote of finding a pack of Charms candy in a package and longing to be close to the factory in Bloomfield again.

Those letters did for me what my book had done for so many others. It connected me to my father in a time and place where I never knew him.

And, as for this church, it turns out that long ago a young man from Belleville perished in the South Pacific. At his memorial service in a small Belleville church, a young girl played the organ. We know her as Ann Lewis.

I still get letters on a regular basis from people who have relatives in the book, even after these years since the books were first released. Sometimes they seem angry that I know something about their relatives that they never knew. Other times they share information I don’t have.

They still write about how my writing touched their lives and reconnected them to someone in their past.

I know exactly what they mean – you see – everything happens for a reason.

Old Man - a poem by Anthony Buccino

Union Congregational Church

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