City parade recalls solemn reason for observing day
Butler celebrated Memorial Day with a parade full of big brass music and girls in white skirts throwing colorful pom-poms. But Monday's parade commenced with a quiet trot of a horse-drawn carriage bearing a funeral casket with a flag draped over it to mark the holiday's original intention.
“This is fantastic. Memorial Day is all about giving back to your country,” Patrick Gannon, 75, of Butler said on Monday. Gannon remembered his military service in Vietnam between 1966 and 1967.
“I was 21 when I was drafted. I didn't know anything. I learned a lot. Thank God I came home. A lot of my friends didn't,” Gannon said as the sound of Butler High School's Golden Tornado Marching Band passed by him on Main Street.
Hundreds of people packed both sides of Main Street to watch a cavalcade of veterans, JROTC cadets, students, firetrucks and vintage, Butler-made vehicles parade through the city to observe Memorial Day.
“The parade was good. I was sweating out there in my uniform,” said Alex Scarborough, 15, a member of Butler Intermediate High School's JROTC. “I felt proud. But I couldn't show any emotion or reaction because we have to keep a straight face. I almost broke it at one point when someone started dancing the Floss.”People came from out of the area too to watch the parade. Carla Sanchez drove up from Pittsburgh with her husband, Guillermo, and their two kids to watch Carla's father drive an Austin Bantam 1939 milk truck in the parade.“I was raised in Butler. It's fun to bring the little kids up here,” Carla said. “They like to watch the parades and see the marching band.”When the last members of the parade left, the city's Memorial Day Committee held a tribute with the American Legion Post 117 in Diamond Park.“You don't have to wait until this day to thank a veteran,” said LeRoy Bunyan, the master of the ceremonies.A Marine recited General John A. Logan's orders from May 30, 1868, which were the original impetus for the creation of Memorial Day. It was originally called Decoration Day, when Americans took time to decorate the graves of soldiers who died in the American Civil War, or the “late rebellion,” as Logan, a Union general, termed it. Scott McNeil read Logan's order to “guard their graves with sacred vigilance” so that “no wanton foot tread rudely on such hallowed grounds.”
McNeil continued reading the order, “What can aid more to assure this result than by cherishing tenderly the memory of our heroic dead, who made their breasts a barricade between our country and its foe? Their soldier lives were the reveille of freedom to a race in chains, and their death a tattoo of rebellious tyranny in arms.”The order from Logan was also a plea for people to not forget “the cost of a free and undivided republic.”Keeping with the theme of the “late rebellion,” Bill Wilson, a member of the committee, read President Abraham Lincoln's Gettsyburg Address, which was given in 1863 in a sundered nation's battlefield.Wilson read from the speech “that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.”And with that, the American Legion Riders placed wreaths at the memorial in Diamond Park.
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