Flags flutter on veterans' graves at local cemeteries thanks to volunteer efforts, including new flag holders

Flags –  with crisp red and white stripes and white stars on a blue background -- dress the graves of veterans at five local cemeteries today, Memorial Day.

 Who put them there, and why?

“I do it because I respect the flag, fought for the flag,” Henry “Hank” Falvey said Friday morning on his way to Calvary Cemetery for his fourth year with fellow members of American Legion Post 101 to place US flags on veterans’ graves.

 “I go there to pay (veterans) homage,” he said. Falvey served in Vietnam.

 “Where else,” asked Vietnam veteran Richard Noonan, “can you walk among heroes?”

For the first time this year, Bill Veno joined Noonan and Falvey and other Post 101 members at Calvary Cemetery.

“It seems like the right thing to do,” said Veno, a World War II Navy veteran. When Veno was a kid, his job on Memorial Day, he said, was to bring the lawnmower to the cemetery to trim and neaten the cemetery plots of family members. 

Across town, at Woodbrook Cemetery, on Saturday morning, Charles Culhane, a member of Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 543, said he has been placing flags on veterans’ graves “since I got out of the service.” That was in 1969. He served in the Army in Vietnam from 1966 to 1969.

“A lot of my friends didn’t come home,” Culhane said. Some who came home “are still suffering,“ he added.

Culhane places flags on the graves of three veterans and family members simultaneously. His mother, Gloria, was a veteran of World War II. His brother, Jimmy, "Bunka,” served in Vietnam. His uncle, Jimmy, served in the Air Corps. His dad, William, a Navy veteran, is interred in a different cemetery. Placing the flags on those graves makes him a little sad, he said.

Volunteers put some 4,500 flags on veterans' graves in Woodbrook and Calvary Cemeteries, where the largest numbers of veterans are buried, Culhane said Saturday afternoon, plus the graves of veterans in the Jewish cemetery and the two cemeteries downtown, the First and Second Burial Grounds

About those new flag holders

 The graves of about 100 veterans at Calvary Cemetery who served in either World War I or the Civil War also have flags this year, for the first time in some 70 years, thanks to efforts led by Woburn Historical Society member Kathy Lucero.

 The bronze flag holders on the graves of what had been estimated at 75 to 80 veterans from Woburn were stolen in the 1940s, probably for their metal, Lucero explained. In her research, she also found some unmarked graves, particularly of veterans of the Civil War. Lucero and Bill Sweeney, a Vietnam veteran and historical society member, placed flags in new aluminum flag holders at Calvary Cemetery on Thursday and Friday; Lucero was still working at the cemetery Saturday.

The flags will remain at both Calvary and Woodbrook Cemeteries for about 60 days, according to Larry Guiseppe, city director of veterans services, until the grass needs to be cut there.

 Flags didn’t always flutter at Woodbrook Cemetery. Sheila Edmonds said the land used to be a field where blueberries grew wild. She said she grew up in a house that abuts the cemetery.  She and her grandson, Will Edmonds from Boston, came to the cemetery Saturday morning. Shovel in hand, Will was neatening the ground near the headstone of his grandfather, and Sheila’s husband, Richard Edmonds, a veteran.  When Will’s dad was young, Sheila said, her husband and brother-in-law would make the annual Memorial Day trek to the cemetery.

 “Now,” she said, “another generation is doing this."