Crowds Welcome Back Memorial Day Parade
By Don Sweeney, Memorial Day Parade Committee Member and Founder of the Cranford 86 Project
For 101 years our town has held a Memorial Day Parade and Ceremony to honor our fallen military. In 1946, following WWII, when Cranford lost 57 young men within a four year span, 5000 townspeople came out to pay their respects. Throughout the years that followed, crowd sizes have varied. Two years of Covid-19 restrictions cancelled 2020’s parade and gave us a parade and ceremony in abbreviated format in 2021. In 2022, Cranford’s traditional parade and ceremony was back, and our townspeople answered our call of “Follow the Parade to the Ceremony” with the largest assembled Memorial Day Ceremony crowd in years.
For many years VFW member and WWII veteran, Bob Greco, would read the names of the 57 of his friends, classmates and teammates who died during WWII. He would always say, “To most of you, they will just be names, but for me, I will see each of their faces. I knew them all”. As the years have gone by, many of Cranford’s residents who knew these fallen men have either passed on or moved away. With Bob Greco’s words echoing in our heads, we realized that it was time to reintroduce all of the men, whose names are engraved on the bronze plaques that stand in Memorial Park, to the new generations of Cranford residents. Six years ago, our parade committee, coined the name “Cranford 86” to represent the total number of Cranford’s fallen military, and our mission to reintroduce them began. Each year, we have instituted a different means of establishing the identity of each of these 86 men to our community. The scouts have carried Gold Star Flags in our parade since the early 1900’s. In our first year, we individualized these flags, each with a streamer bearing the name of one of our 86. Year two was when we began writing a profile for each serviceman, complete with their photo, putting a face to the name. The profiles were bound into an ever-expanding spiral booklet and offered at Memorial Park for the first time to the attending public. In year three, vertical street banners were unveiled at Memorial Park and later hung on light posts throughout town, where the faces could now be seen throughout the year. In our fourth year, Covid-19 limited the public expression of our tribute to the Cranford 86 at Memorial Park, so we took to the studio to present an abbreviated version of our Cranford 86 profiles via TV35. This has now become a yearly tradition. Year five was the 100th anniversary of our parade and ceremony, and we created our first T-shirt. Its front design featured the digits 100 creatively filled with the 42 faces that we had unveiled since the inception of the Cranford 86 project. The parade anniversary was covered on CBS News by John Elliott, who graciously brought attention to Cranford’s 86 via his thousands of tri-state viewers. And finally, this year, we launched the “My Hero” T-shirts. High-tech digital printing allows a t-shirt to be custom printed with the image of any Cranford 86 street banner. Now a family member or any person that was touched by the story of one of our Cranford heroes, can wear the image of that hero. The wearer would have the ability to share their hero’s story, to anyone that may question the image on their shirt.
Of all of the many American towns that have Hometown Hero campaigns on the lamp posts of their streets, only a very few feature the photos and stories of the fallen. We are very proud that in our town of Cranford, in a short period of time, we are approaching the halfway mark of a task that seemed impossible at its inception. The incredible stories that have been uncovered have totally taken all of us, and sometimes even the families of our heroes, by surprise. This year, the ever-growing yearly tribute book volume 1-5 is now 158 color pages and available for a donation, as well as the new “My Hero” T-shirts. We welcome your contribution to our project, via donation for merchandise, banner sponsorship or your knowledge of one of Cranford’s 86. We would love to have a Cranford 86 tribute book on every coffee table in our town! We hope that someday, just as Bob Greco did, when our ceremony attendees hear a name, they will see the face as well.
Email us at info@cranford86.org for merchandise information, or text to 908-447-6511.
