Several hundred people attended the annual Memorial Day tribute at Veteran’s Park on Monday. The ceremony, which included a keynote address by Mayor Mike Gin and remarks from special guest Col. Arnold Streland from the Los Angeles Air Force Base, concluded with members from each branch of military service laying poppies along the memorial.
Lt. Col. Tom Lasser, a retired U.S. Army helicopter pilot who was one of the key leaders in establishing the new memorial, explained the significance of the poppies. In France following WWII, millions blood-red poppies sprung to life atop battlefields in Flanders where thousands of war dead were buried.
“Poppies would pop up in the blood-soaked ground,” Lasser said.
A Canadian solider named John McCrae penned a poem called “In Flanders Field” in 1915, the day after watching a 22-year-old friend day before. John Simpson, a Redondo resident who served in the Korean War as a Marine, read the poem aloud near the end of Monday’s ceremony. Simpson, another of the men responsible for rallying public support (and fundraising) for the memorial, spends most of his days in a motorized wheel chair. He stood and walked the podium in order to read “In Flanders Field”:
“In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.”
