thirty i'm joanna ju willis i am senior multimedia journalist for the belmont citizen herald and with good local belmont dot com today we're going to talk about the veterans memorial project and with me to do that is angelo frenzy the president of the veterans memorial committee committee and bill mcavoy a member of the committee both of them grew up in belmont there they're both they both served  angelo has served in the army reserves bill mcavoy served in the army is now retired from the corporate world where he was president and c e o of adaptive instruments corporation he lived i said as i said all his life in belmont he raised his three sons here he served as a selectman from two thousand and four to two thousand and twelve and his wife vega and he married like fifty plus years now as it is officially fifty fifty years congratulations and she taught at belmont high school for many years bill you are retired massachusetts district court magistrate but you're still working and you're still working part time at dedham district court you served in the in the u s army as i said and you are an active veteran you volunteer you've been volunteering for the past eight years for no veteran dies alone you spent time with dying veterans and you are member of the veterans memorial committee angelo just tell us about the veterans who while project about four or five years ago now believe french approached me he was  there really wasn't a memorial in billie was was thinking that you know we really don't have anywhere in town where you know the vietnam war was was that was true was recognized we have to the world war one memorial in front of the lion's club we have the the memorial library right but most of those plaques and there goes on to all of the people that have died in the various was and in fact both teddy and and dani's names are on that  wall but that building is close on that race day it's close to memorial day and so you really can't you really can't use it so billy talked to me he wanted to see if he could get something going to see if we could do something in terms of building a memorial cleaned i had been painted in it was it was really a pretty bad shape and so through that group the veterans memorial committee was formed and the first thing we wanted to do was try to get the borough one memorial back anyway we started searching around town to see where we could we could put a site and it came to our attention most of us most people when aware of it but at the corner of underwood and common street there's a flagpole most people see the flag but they don't realize that that was a memorial that was done in  ideas where they came back with some ideas and we decided to move ahead with that project we originally figured we needed between one hundred one hundred fifty thousand dollars it's now closer to by the time we get done with everything and probably closer to three hundred thousand dollars for the entire project we have raised quite a bit of money belmont savings bank foundation has stepped up a very big way and has agreed to match the first hundred thousand dollars  is and we also realized that the existing memorial was in pretty bad shape and needed to be refurbished because we don't want to tear that went down but i don't know why we want to use that as a base and then put the new  so yeah we have a web site if you want to take a look at the dry was that we have you can go to the web site which is the belmont that's dot com i understand that you can buy a brick yes one of the ways that  we wanted to use to try and raise funds was to sell bricks you can buy a single brick for one hundred dollars you get three lines of text on that bridge with twenty brick twenty characters per line or you can get double brick for hundred seventy five dollars and can get up to six lines of text on that  we've sold the above two hundred fifty bill bill just got the bill just ended up doing that we've got about two hundred fifty sold already you know and we still have a ton of people that are talking to us we're getting we're getting because every day so that's that's a very very exciting part and we are the bricks can be anything they can be the bricks going on a veterans they can you know typically would be a veteran branch of service and dates of his service might be on the brick the veterans will all be grouped together and then people can get memorial breaks just say whatever they want and those will be those will be around the outside the really the veterans committee is going to  update we one of the things that we wanted to do was to make this memorial a living memorial and active memorial so we're going to have a web site tied into the memorial and on that web site you can there will be all of the information that builds put together relative to the graves of almost one thousand nine hundred veterans that are buried in belmont we did the interviews and you sure you want to be talking about that  second but all of the interviews will be will be on the on the web site there will be descriptions of each of the battles and more and what belmont involvement was with world war two with  forth so so it's going to be an ongoing project that's going to be it's not you know here it is it's done work right it's something that we continue to put we plan on continuing a long term basis yeah tell me about your role on this project and what you you know what you did with those great said that sounds like a lot of work well in early march bill scully who's belmont high class of sixty six i was class of sixty seven so i know i knew billy back then and  he and i worked on the combine high school reunions oh really for twenty years we weren't getting the numbers so we combine both classes so we got very close and you call me up and and probably like my work ethic and asked me if i'd help on that so i got  the committee but what i did is i i i've been doing historic research projects for twenty years and more so in eight years since i retired and i do a large scale research projects and historical projects as well as grave grave sites but that a lot of it was with walking around basically i'm used to walking and so many some of them were there was a period of time when they want being added to the list and they'd be some type of rank on there was some type of government stone but anyway i found them i walked every inch probably ten times of everything made sure they were flying whole as they are and that there were flags on the graves took a picture of every headstone best i could and i put up a website called find a grave dot com which of people out there in the genealogy it is one hundred  sixty seven million graves out there across the country people have taken pictures of graves and it's by cemetery you can go on that site and look up belmont or or highland meadows and you'll see everything in there and it's a live it's a living it's a living virtual summit area if you want to visit a grave and leave flowers virtual flowers you can still cost a willingness you can put down a sentiment or what have you so that's why it took it turned into a runaway scope it started out small and you know four months later it was it but all of that work will be tied into the veterans memorial as well so right through this through the website so bill what does this project mea i was think it's kind of my getting back to belmont again i grew up here my mother was born the house i was raised in and belmont street moved up in seventy four to newton because real estate was so much cheaper at that time than belmont and i would've loved to have that i felt i needed attention i think my youngest son is a naval academy graduate and a still in the navy he just as a commander in the in the navy just celebrated seventeen years and his wife also was a commander all members of the committee and so we've been working pretty hard at it but let's talk about the belmont veterans remember film and there's about forty veterans that were interviewed it is a project that started in april of this year it's called belmont veterans remember belmont high school history department meyer this project bill you interviewed several of the very interesting community in the sense that you've got both extremes of political interest covered feeling really well and so in fact one of the one of the things that i say when i was a selected no matter what decision i made i go after that you know it's just a question of you know absolutely this half one time in this after the other time but it was you know that was there was there was no way that you're going to satisfy everybody in town but but this is a way to bring the entire town together working together a very very closely on this project and she's been doing yeoman's job that she's a great marketeer she's the one that came up with the idea of the film showing ok in the put the effort together and she said well let's see if we can figure out a way to involve the school and we had been talking i've been talking with all my savings bank about trying to get them to contribute and they were just came up with the idea of actually doing something with high school to try and tie it in with the high school rate we talked up with talked with alan about that now and said why don't we do the interviews and so it just sort of it just sort of snowball goes you know one idea coming from here one idea they go in and out but you know that it's not the entire interview it's what i find from this line one line from another part and it's extremely well done jeremy from the belmont media center in julian so for the people here the media center has done the editing on it and they've done a phenomenal job i i've watched it probably three or four times now and it's getting a little bit improved each day so the showing on the week from sunday november fifth yeah we  we it'll it'll be it'll be done it'll be a bit will be a fantastic show it will be a fantastic well we actually have a brief clip that way and a show to preview the film ok for everybody and we're going to be cutting to that cli nothing but tattoo parlors so out to the town they were all over the place well at the end of the war i got three ribbons one of them was the will war two victory ribbon everybody got out and then i had another stars i got for that on that ribbon but then i got another one that was an american theater ribbon i've never been able to figure out what that was for because i didn't have any duty on the atlantic coast or the pacific coast or anywhere else and finally i figured it out that's because i got through newport rhode island basic trying it without getting a ta i was working in the springfield last know and i got drafted and i was in the war materials word she was i could be deferred i chose not to be deferred so i went down to i been in proving ground working on guns and then they should me to california now there are several ways that a soldier can die they sent me to the first one in california out in the desert training what do you think is out in the desert scorpions rattlers and coral snakes so i had to get back in the troop train and  i says my god what the hell am i doing here i should be home my mother is just about ready to serve the seven fishes for christmas eve but anyway we get to camp good in georgia four o'clock in the for christmas dinner and some of them were too tired to even go to dinner exhausted from all the traveling but anyway we started the next day we started danced infantry training and basically was there was sleep on the ground in the woods in the rain in the red georgia mud which is like so if you're going up a little incline you take one step forward and two back so you slide back down i know you were part of this you are one of the interviewers as well as one of the interviewees tell us what the experience was like to be part of this project or was all a lie and if you mr young mr for ari here in the studio and it was it was wonderful i somehow i think picked up a skill of talking with veterans of all eras by working up and that at the v a i work hospice and a lot of people on hospice for quite a long time and i even chat with people if i'm walking down the hallway i don't i say hi everyone i chat up people and what have you but in over five hundred people being in there as as patient president veterans i get a lot of chance to talk with people i love things pent up that have never been disclosed and i think there's kind of a skill required especially where i am a hospice is when you're talking with somebody who has trust issues don't know me from anything  interview when it's time to move on and i think the knowledge of history is good because i you know every pretty much battle from war to on more than the folks my age i'm able to basically i can i can move on a little bit easier and that's what i with the v a there's so many want to talk and especially when being interviewed for the first time and you know most most people are going after their father mothers died the children will say why and why they never spoke about the war never told me a thing about the war and but people do like to talk and they'll talk with somebody that they'll trust and i might my theory is that you get back your mom your dad just sitting at the dinner table after war two you don't want to have to tell your children what you had to do to be sitting with them you don't want to put secondary trauma on them dance dad mom's mom you want to you know moment home dad at home and i think that's the one you want to project and i think it's probably a good way to go but but people at some time in the joining would like to talk with somebody and it's so i mean i really i really get a lot of seeing these people one of them one of those things it's amazing as to talk to some of the high school students who actually did the interviews as well and in fact they'll be a couple of them speaking at the at the showing of the filming on right on the fifth of november they talk about what what their experiences were and the things that they learned from doing the interviews themselves and and that was a phenomenal part of the whole process as well as it is is to get you know this intergenerational high school children high school kids in this case they were soft boys and you know world war two veterans have been talking so important for them to share their stories and i'm glad that they're having the opportunity to do it there with this because this is going to be a project that will continue it's an ongoing project we want to continue doing the interviews  and hopefully we can we can do you know one of two days an interview each of these views each year there's a bunch of people that we had talked to for this first series that we were not able to get into the schedule and so forth so we'll be doing those as well once we get over the hump of the of the nov fifth eleven member fifth event we'll start doing we'll start doing some of the interviews again and so if anybody out there would like to be interviewed or email address is angelo dot our dot for renzi g mail dot com just send me an e mail and we'll get something i say one thing about that for people who might want to be on the edge of being interviewed or not i take people know where that they don't want to go i'm saying it's not it's not got your television that's basically there were no they basically determine where the interview is going to go if they want to they want to talk about nothing having to d with the war itself and talk about the pre and the afterlife that's that's fine people should be comfortable and willing to come in and that's that's where cause and there are questions that the interviewee asks you know i get questions i go i'm pretty much off script i go by i have five or six questions here but i'm so used to talking to veterans i basically i can't go into a veteran with a script i mean associates to see take people as they are and say are minimal start with the beginnings but but certainly movie will be about an hour where the whole event should be and it's free it's free the whole event should be about an hour and a half maybe an hour and forty five minutes we will that does if people want to make a donation we'll certainly accept them we'll have so if you haven't ordered your brick yet you can stop by and pick up the form and fill it out and give us a check and we can we can get that done if you want to make a larger donation we'll certainly accept that we've had one person actually make a donation for ben bench that was ten thousand dollars we've had many twenty twenty five thousand dollar donations so we were getting some significant donations we've gotten a number of five thousand dollars donations so but the majority of them the you know the hundred hundred seventy five to five hundred dollars donations so i'm really excited to see this film and get more people to see it it's a great way to commemorate these veterans and it's timely with veterans day coming up so november fifth everyone should carve out an hour of their time four o'clock and go to the town hall auditorium in nov fifth there's also the patriots by we shows please email me at belmont that would give local dot com and visit