6 minute read
Opinion
Opinion & Viewpoints
EDITORIAL If it is within your means, please donate food for Thanksgiving
With Thanksgiving just over a week away, we at The Observer take this time to encourage all of our readers to consider donations to local food pantries and food drives.
The harsh reality is there are still many families who are in dire situations of food insufficiency. One only needs to look at the line that wraps around Laurel Avenue in Kearny from in front of the First Presbyterian Church of Arlington to know more and more families are relying on the generosity of others just to get by.
Whether it’s the Kearny Food Pantry Network, other church-based pantries, the outreach program led by Phil Stafford, or anywhere else, we have learned, in the most difficult of ways, that most of the food programs locally are in need of help — just a week away from the holiday.
These social justice agencies work so hard to put food on the tables of those who might otherwise go without.
And so if you’re in the position to donate, please do so, so that all sustenance programs may do what they do best by helping others.
It is at times like these that we realize just how generous our local communities are. So let’ s all do our part to make this Thanksgiving one we can all remember for a long time to come, despite all else going on in this world.
Four major locations where donations are being accepted include, in Kearny, police, fire and DPW headquarters and the office of The Observer (see reminder ad on page 8.)
Woman’s club awards scholarship
Lyndhurst resident Bella Banuls is the recipient of a $1,000 scholarship from the Woman’s Club of Lyndhurst. Bella, 18, is a freshman at Ramapo College majoring in education. She is seen here receiving her award, from left Janet Ricigliano, vice president; Marge Russo, past president; and Annette Bortone, president.
Rose: If Mr. Pelosi were an average ‘Paul,’ his attacker would be free
To the Editor:
We will probably never know the truth about how David DePape got into Paul Pelosi’s home, who was described as a friend on Pelosi’s call to the police.
It seems Paul rather than own a registered handgun, which the time line shows he would have had ample time to have in his possession, used the far left approach, and tried to reason with a deranged individual.
The result being he took a couple of shots to the head with a hammer.
The good news for Paul is that being one of our protected class, DePape will be looking at 50 years of jail time.
If he was just an average Paul, DePape most likely would be out roaming the streets of San Francisco.
Armand Rose North Arlington
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
In Memoriam Mary A. Tortoreti 1942-2016
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STYPLE
Continued from Page 5
to the enemy.
These suspicions were never confirmed in Kearny’s lifetime and Key stayed silent until his death in Ohio in 1869.
So determined was Key to ensure his anonymity, he arranged to be buried in an unmarked grave. Still, Styple said he managed to get a copy of Key’s will, only to discover Key had instructed his attorney “to destroy all his (personal) papers.” Styple, nonetheless, said he continued to search and, at last, “found some still-surviving papers in Michigan.”
From those records, Styple said, he learned Lee “was trying to negotiate a peace deal.”
Gen. Kearny, who lost his left arm during a battle in Mexico in 1847, was killed in 1862 at the Battle of Chantilly in Virginia, but Styple’s book doesn’t end there. In four additional chapters, the author assesses the general’s impact on his contemporaries — everyone from Abraham Lincoln to his first staff officer, the then 2nd Lt. George Armstrong Custer among others.
In July 1875, the general was immortalized by poet Edmund Clarence Stedman with the publication in Scribner’s magazine of “Kearny at Seven Pines,” which youngsters commonly committed to memory in public schools nationwide.
Veterans of Kearny’s old regiment successfully petitioned the Army to remove the general’s “perfectly preserved” body from Trinity churchyard in New York City to Arlington National Cemetery in 1912 — an event that, Styple noted, was covered by newspapers coast-to-coast and was captured on film by the Pathe news service.
An estimated 150,000 spectators lined Broadway in lower Manhattan to watch a horse-drawn carriage convey the general’s coffin to City Hall, where he was laid in state overnight before its conveyance to Washington, D.C.
Over time, the newsreel was declared lost, but Styple wouldn’t give up his search for the missing film.
Two years ago, his tenacity was rewarded when in reviewing a film archive, he came across images of a funeral procession listed for a military figure, but he said “something struck me” about the film not being accurately represented.
As he continued watching the reel, Styple said his suspicions were confirmed — it was Kearny’s funeral cortège. An excerpt from it may be viewed on his Facebook page.
In tracing the general’s life story, which takes in his soldiering in Mexico, Europe and the U.S., along with sojourns in Paris and the Kearny Castle, Styple said the general “took over my professional life for decades and I dragged my wife and kids around the planet” to do the research. “But it never got old for me,” he said.
Styple has been writing and speaking about Kearny “since 1988” and says he’s now “on the last leg” of his travels with the general. His final segment, he said he plans to film, complete with illustrations related to his subject. Then, he wants to turn his attention to the general’s art collection, much of which has found its way into various museums.
But if the state should rekindle a proposal to move Phil Kearny’s likeness out of Statuary Hall, you can surely expect the general’s greatest defender to come out of “retirement” to rise to the occasion and meet the enemy head-on.
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The Observer’s Ron Leir shows off his newly autographed book by Bill Styple about Gen. Philip Kearny. Barbara B. Goldberg image
— Bill Styple Kearny Historian Noted Author
