the following podcast is produced or sponsored by a community member the content views and opinions expressed are those of the participants and do not reflect those of b m c or the town of belmont b a m c welcomes your comments call us at six one seven four eight four two four four three or email us at access at belmont media dot org hello everyone welcome to community conversations i'm your host roger coulton just a week ago held its annual memorial day ceremony despite not the greatest of weather people their kids their dogs lined the parade route to pay  tribute to the men and women of belmont and beyond who served to protect our freedoms there's a new effort in town today however to prepare a new memorial to belmont residents who have served our country in the military and that's what we're going to talk about today how can we ensure that delma will never forget the sacrifices that have been bit that have been made and will continue to be made accordingly for today's show we're going to talk with mr angela frenzy angelo is the president of the belmont veterans memorial committee we're going to talk not only about the new memorial but about a number of things that belmont is doing elsewise to remember veterans angela thanks for coming over and taking time this morning to talk with us thank you barger for inviting me it's a pleasure to be here and i get to talk about something that i care deeply about so thank you very much angela let's start to live in italy for six months with my grandfather i didn't want to go to college at that point and wasn't quite sure what i was going to do so my father sent me off to italy which was one of those life changing events for me because while i was over there i realized the opportunities we have in this country and i was just wasting them so i came back a couple of days after i came back i met my present wife at our house in belmont where we live which is the house i grew up in was with the pressure instrumentation company for many years in that up as president of one of the operating divisions and when i left that started my own business for a couple of years and then went back with one of my clients as a d was at sigonella naval air station in sicily and we went over to visit him and we were thinking about building a host over there at the time on some property that my father had left us and got a call that emery moni was resigning and what i consider running for selectman and i said we kidding me i know it you know i said well why would i do that why would i want to do that i just retired had retired for about six weeks but anyway i said let me think about it i'll be home in a couple weeks we'll talk about it and as soon as i get back i thought about it was at thought it was a way to get back to the community that it's good had given me so much and we you know it was a selection for eight years i really enjoyed it was very very busy time for me and it was a great way to transition from from retirement to continue working actually but so that's the screen that show and let's jump right into the new veterans memorial that's really what i would like to talk a lot about today there is a veterans committee that turns memorial committee and it is charged  with developing a call it a new memorial but it's an expansion of a memorial over near the high school by clay pot if we take a step back actually about five years ago four or five years ago b vietnam i think it was the second i can't believe i can't think of it they wanted to erect a small memorial the vietnam memorial in belmont and had talked to me about the possibility of doing that maybe we could do something at  in restoring the memorial the world war one memorial in front of the lions club and so i put the two of them together and they started the belmont veterans memorial committee and as a first effort they appl funds and got money to clean up the memorial in just outside of alliance of audience club which was completed a couple of years ago we actually applied for a c p a funds we end up getting about sixty thousand dollars it cost us just over thirty five thousand to return them while and we ended up returning twenty thousand to twenty five thousand dollars to the town so and that memorial has been completely restored completely done over they did a beautiful job on it and then after that we decided to try and find a way of  recognizing the vietnam veterans that and the two belmont citizens that had died so we looked at all the memorial some town and there were tons of them some people may remember  front of town hall many years ago there was a name of every veteran from one too that was it was a bore down there that was had to be twenty twenty five feet long and was four or five sections in the names of every veteran it was a  was killed in the second world war that building was named after him we had the belmont veterans memorial library and at the time that the sign was taken down at the town hall they decided that the the library would be a  veterans memorial and they have the names in there of all of the people that had died in the various wars but it's inside the building and you can't use it veterans day when morial bake it's close just so people can know the world war one memorial is at the lions club right and then when you go into the library i'm in the library all the time and i didn't know that was there where and and it was you know it was interesting because i just recently found out the team of the library had been changed it had been the belmont veterans memorial library of veterans library memorial library it's now just the belmont public library  memorial building i don't know how that got changed or why i could change but it in a way it got changed and so we looked around to try and find a spot that would be suitable for the new monument and what we decided that we wanted to make an all inclusive monument a money at that remembered veterans from all wars sense since belmont was found it so we you know stop with the with the with the civil war when the war of eight hundred twelve and right so we at the same time the community passed group was was working with a design of the beta group to redo the pathway around clay pit point and so we citizens who served in the united states in war and that's a it's on a stone that's a flag pole there that's the stone there's a plaque on the plaque it's all beat up kids with learning rocks at it it's cetera but it's there and so we decided to talk to beta group about incorporating a veterans memorial into that particular location and they came up with some plenary plans we had raised about three thousand dollars at that point we contracted with them to come up with simpler repellents which all of us really liked because we wanted to be a not a big show week kind of memorial but a place where people could go and sit and contemplate in think you know you've got the pond there and so forth so  essentially what we're going to do is have individual stones for each of the wars all around the outside edge be a pathway in the middle the pathway will have bricks we are funding this effort through our fundraising efforts and  so we're selling the bricks for one hundred dollars we've sold close to one hundred bricks so far and there's a bunch more people out there that are that are going to be doing it you can get a double brick if you want that's one hundred seventy five dollars and so we have raised today just about fifty thousand dollars now and we are going to be contracting with bated to complete the design and as soon as that's available then we obviously will make it public that to it's a we were let me just say the plan is to repeal the walk in the in the wall and replace the flagpole that's down there and prove the price leading to and around the site individual granite stones noting each of the wars around the site and memorial benches and scribe bricks commemorating veterans who served in the country country's war conflicts will also be included and people that just want to buy bricks for donations or in memory of  somebody is going to be a couple of sections it'll be a section for all of the veterans and then there'll be a section for you know non veterans that just wanted to contribute and so forth it's one of the things that we hope to be able to do is to hope we plan on doing it is to make the site interactive so they'll be a web site which will include a lot of information we've done about fifty twenty minute interviews with with veterans that just tell us their story you know to try and and i realize i found your actions interesting in that you are working with the high school and the american history curriculum exactly to do that so are the kids doing the kids actually did we set up a series of four days ahead of us three three days with the kids and one day here at the belmont media center and we did i think about forty interviews and that in that process with the kids came in in teams of two or three and they interviewed the veterans and it was it's fascinating we're going to be putting together copies of the individual interview so that by name you can look up john smith and find out you know his his story we're also going to be editing about a thirty or thirty five minute video which will be  a an overview of the various of the various in my interviews my concern with something like that always is that people once all this work has gone into doing that people can't get to it so it'll be on your website it'll be on the website and the website is we don't have a web address for it yet but the web site will will be there's a ton of information that's going to be on the website too and that's one of the things that we actually need if we get anybody out there that wants to volunteer to help us develop this website we'll be doing in conjunction with the high school with the belmont media center the interviews will be on there we have a fellow on our committee bill mcavoy who was a vietnam vet and a graduate one nine hundred sixty six graduate of belmont high school he's embarked upon a project to photograph each and every veterans grave in belmont both the belmont cemetery  highland meadow some of terry there was an eagle scout the did a project to identify all of those graves and these two things were happening contemporaneously but neither one knew of the sect of eighty we put them together  and so we will be able to they will be a list the website list of every veteran in belmont that is buried in belmont be able to click on that website go to his grave site etc and it will be on the our web site as well as a national register of veterans so that will be on there they'll be excerpts of each of the war so for example if you go to the the vietnam war you can go to the web site click on the vietnam war and you can get all of the information relative to belmont and the v a in the vietnam war who the veterans were who were killed in action and so forth so can we back up for a minute you're using you used the word we about six weeks ago when he left belmont left the kennedy school and up moving to upstate new hampshire and is now out of the out of the loop although i talked with him yesterday he called all excited about such a check that he had received ten thousand dollars from a resident donation i got this check and it was sent to his old address but anyway so i talked to him yesterday and you know he's still very involved but he's just not he just can't be around same side of the political issue in all the years that i've known it but we're working with marvelous leaders together she's she's a tremendous asset to the committee and has helped set up the interviews with the with the high school with the high school students some of the history we can talk about actually for the first time today because we just signed the agreement with belmont savings bank belmont savings gram bank has stepped up the belmont savings bank foundation has stepped up and awarded one hundred thousand dollar matching grant donation to the project which is very very sizable and they will match us dollar for dollar for all the donations we receive up till up until twelve thirty one of this year and we're going to be working with them to try and raise the the we need to raise a total of two hundred fifty thousand two hundred sixty thousand dollars and with the belmont savings bank if we raise one hundred they give us  hundred will be fifty still fifty short but part of the project is to redo the existing memorial so we're going to be applying for c p a funds for i'm not sure exactly the right amount of around sixty five thousand dollars to redo the wall a flagpole and that sort of thing the entrance wall at the top and again to locate that for folks when you say the existing memorial the existing memorial revolutionary war veteran oh ok and concluded belmont didn't exist as a town so we really can't exclude them but but there were people living in belmont then that participated the revolutionary war so so i don't names of all the people who have yet have been at the cemetery at the cemetery and there's about one hundred fifty names i think of all of those people in all of those people also will be will be recognized as well in the congressional medal of honor i think he was a three star general and recently retired he's so they'll be some stone a member insists on thing to him as well we also will have a circle donation a thousand for civil circle try that again silver silver circle twenty five hundred gold circle five thousand dollars for platinum circle and ten thousand dollars will get you a  important aspect very important i mean that's what's that's what's that's what's going to make this happen or not but you won't have problems raising it's always it's always easy when you talk about it but you need let's say a quarter million dollars and savings has agreed to a matching grant of one hundred one hundred thousand right and you've already raised about fifty  year whatever one hundred fifty is your sixty percent right of the way and we expect we fully expect to be able to raise the other fifty between now and november eleventh of this year ok and so that we will be looking for you know for donations we've got a lot of donations for thousand dollar donations a number of them an anonymous like i said we've got a couple of one ten thousand dollars donations so far but we you know we're working on a number of others of those so we should get there be able to get there pretty quick there's also grants available from from organizations v f w type organizations and we you know got an effort to try to apply for as many of hundred one c three organization so all donations are one hundred percent tax deductible and that was one of the first things that we did was to go get that so i'd like to back up for a minute when we talk about the veterans memorial committee and i just find this interesting because you and i were having a recent conversation about this not everybody who people like me gee i know my uncle was in the war i would like to find out information about of contact us we give it to ken to lenny and he digs out all the information when he was there what's what branch of the service he was in and so forth is a real stickler for details have to be a veteran you've got to have left the service they died while they were in the service of their veterans so so you've got a lot of those kinds of details you have there were people many people that were asking somebody off yeah and if you leave somebody off then you've got all sorts of problems yes but i was in the u s reserves for six years boston i mean basin you know month six did six months or four months actually four half months of active duty service and then  five and a half years of weekly meetings and two weeks in the summer and so forth theoretically i'm not considered a veteran because i was a reservist and although i was prepared to do whatever i had to do whatever  the company was ordered to do i would have done but theoretically i'm not a veteran to be to be a veteran according to the federal guidelines for veterans you have had to have served you you would have had to serve one year of active duty none training ok so after training you have to served at least a full year ok and then that would give you the veteran status according to the to the official us federal so that record so leave leads me to my it's not really a concern well it is a concern and that is that often times we get so wrapped up in the what of what we're doing you know we need to raise x number of dollars we're going to design it and then morial and such in such a way that we forget that the why of what we're doing it and the why of why we're doing this memorial where any other memorial is not because somebody served a year of active duty the you know the why is because there are individual i mean i preach here for a minute and i understand that i'm preaching to the wrong person but  individuals and there are families who have made sacrifices for us to do podcasts like we're doing right now and what one of the one of the things that the committee was unanimous in its it factory working on the war effort so i mean in his contribution was significant and people need to think about that and recognize that and so we want to include people like that you know rosie the riveter the women that that i mean just everybody was was contributing in some way ok during the war effort and so it's important that we recognize that it's important that we think about it it's important that we meditate about it and  so and this is what the memorial hopefully will provide will be location where people can go down sit down relax look at the monuments the stones and they're not like i say they're not going to be big memorial stones they're just going to be very simple you know world war two the great war whatever whatever you know we end up putting on each of those stones but just having people reflect about the price people have paid for us to be able to sit down and talk in be free in and do all of the things that we so many of us take for granted the moment yeah the word you used was reflected and i think that that place too to reflect and there is the old adage that we shall never forget and that's when one of the purposes of this is to never forget the sacrifices that individuals  and i always think that it's not just individuals as individuals and families and indeed communities as a whole but individuals and families have made for this  two that sort of started billy thinking and got billy going and getting everybody heading in the right direction so well my my congratulations not only on the project itself but on in valving the high school and just one community group after another you guys you folks it's not all guys you folks have an incredible belmont veterans memorial committee p o box seven nine zero two four belmont mass two four seven nine thank you thank you and thanks for representing the people  who can't be here thank you thank you for the opportunity to talk about a project well we are out of time this is community conversations i'm your host roger called and i would like to thank angelo frenzy of the president of the veterans memorial committee for being with us this morning and i would like to thank you the listeners for tuning in you can access community conversations on the b m c podcast network at the belmont media website belmont media dot org you can also access community conversations through i  searching for the b m c podcast network you've been listening to community conversations i'm your host roger coulton i'll talk to you again in two weeks