My mother, Barbara Vaughan Woodward Garside, was born in Whitman, Massachusetts in 1913, and she often spoke and wrote about Decoration Day (Memorial Day) as a serious rite of spring.
Planning and preparing for decorating graves, marching in the parade and helping at the picnic were the center of discussion two weeks before the day.
She remembered her neighbor Gardiner Penniman, who returned from France after World War I with shellshock (we now call this PTSD). She observed it was awful to see him shake. Her father explained, with a kind of reverence, what had happened to Gardiner.
When the day finally arrived, all the flags were raised and then lowered to half-staff. While many of the graves had been decorated earlier, a few were saved for that morning when bunches of lilacs were placed on each one, along with a new flag. Since many of the buried were familiar to the townspeople, they were very careful not to step on the ground of the actual grave.
On the morning of the parade, my great-uncle and my great-grandfather rode in elegant open cars, since both were Civil War veterans. My grandfather served as one of the marshals. As the parade wound its way through town, all but the smallest children stood at attention. They then marched to each cemetery, where the town officials both fired rifles and played taps.
At noon, flags were raised to full staff, and my mother observed how some of the sadness seemed to lift with them. It was time for a picnic and an afternoon of games and baseball.
In 1937, my mother married Barclay Jefferis Woodward III, and she became a proud Navy wife, who never missed an Army-Navy game and who said unrepeatable things about Douglas MacArthur. During World War II, my father was assigned to the USS Trinity, which was stationed in Sangley Point, Manila Bay, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. In 1953, at age 42, he died from war-related causes.
Decades later, I attended a Lookouts game with my mother at Engel Stadium. When it was time to stand for the American flag, a young man, kind of a slouch, stood up and kept his baseball cap on. My mother, age 84, not so delicately flipped it off the top of his head. He turned around and gazed at her, soon recognizing that he was in the presence of a superior force.
Both my mother and my father (World War II) are buried at Arlington National Cemetery, and my stepfather, Kenneth Garside, died on Memorial Day in 1987. The day holds a wide variety of emotions and meaning for me.
Michael V. Woodward is the former Howard H. Baker Jr. Chair of American History at McCallie School.
