A Memorial Day Remembrance

Long departed, but not forgotten; a soldier and a sailor who sacrificed their lives in World War II honored with flowers

By Mark E. Vogler

Robert Inman and his wife Carol drove down from Lynnfield last Saturday morning to put a pot of geraniums on two grave markers in the Veterans Lot at Riverside Cemetery. Inman, a 1966 Saugus High School graduate, has continued his family’s tradition of putting Memorial Day flowers on the marker for his uncle – William N. McLeod, 23, a radioman 3rd class, who died near the Philippines on June 29, 1945.

“There’s nobody there,” Inman said, pointing at the marker, where he placed the geranium.

“He died on a ship, so they buried him at sea during World War II,” he said.

Carol Inman placed the second geranium plant on the grave marker on the left of McLeod – for PFC Alden F. Moore, an 18-year-old Marine who died on April 10, 1944, in the Battle of Peleliu in the Pacific. “It always bothered me that there were never any flowers on the grave [of PFC Moore],” Inman recalled of his childhood days to visit the cemetery. “So, I’ve been putting the flowers on his grave for 53 years,” he said.

Down at Veterans Park, Sarah Batchelder, her husband Mark Parker and their seven-year-old daughter Scarlet Batchelder, a first grader at the Early Veterans Learning Center, waited for the start of last Saturday morning’s Memorial Day weekend parade. Batchelder said she comes to the parade each year out of respect for the close friend – a 19-year-old Army veteran who died in a hit-and-run motorcycle accident during the Memorial Day holiday weekend in 2011.

“It’s a hard holiday for us,” Batchelder said, referring to the death of SPC Christopher Joseph Wheeler, formerly of Gloucester, who died from injuries he received in the crash that took place in Colorado.

“We graduated together from North Shore Tech in Middleton,” Batchelder said. “I’ll never forget that night,” she said.