Embedded Files
The headline on the August 16, 1945 edition of the Mountain Lakes News screamed the good news: "War Is Over! Announcement Of Japan Surrender Made." We would excuse anyone then for just reading that article and throwing the paper down in celebration while ignoring the rest of the news that surely paled in comparison. However, there was an article on that first page with a much smaller headline that is for us today quite interesting.
Well, perhaps calling the blurb an "article" is a bit of an overstatement. Nevertheless, there it is under the bold font: Mountain Lakes Plans Memorial To Those Who Gave Their Lives.
Within a month the committee had decided to design a "Memorial Boulder," and in a subsequent ML News edition, it sought the names of Laker men "to be inscribed on a bronze tablet which will be erected in Memorial Park, Mountain Lakes, in honor of those who made the supreme sacrifice in World War No. 2."
In the seventy years since World War II ended, our nation fought in additional wars, and the men of Mountain Lakes continued to enlist in these new conflicts as their fathers and brothers did earlier. Unfortunately additional names were added to the boulder in which today honors 20 men who have died in war.*
On Memorial Day in 2009, a handful of Mountain Lakes High School students spoke on behalf of the 20 fallen heroes from our community who gave their lives to protect American ideals. For them, they had walked past this field without thinking about the names on the monuments. But then for over a month, they researched each of the men. For some, they found almost nothing; for others they had enough information to get to know them, especially when they went through the collection of MLHS yearbooks in our archive. Before their research, they were just twenty names, but now the students knew them as class artists, baseball stars, and classroom cutups.
In one of the yearbooks the students also found this image below. It shows MLHS students from the 1950s looking at the memorial boulder, honoring those Lakers who like them were once teeming with youthful exuberance, ready to take on the world. Our students found that connection when they considered the stricken soldiers as former teens like them. They saw themselves and their friends in the yearbook pictures and student writing. This website archives what they found and honors the Mountain Lakes Fallen.
Feel free to add comments to the pages of our Laker soldiers, especially if you knew them from school. If you would like to add visuals, please email them to Frank Sanchez at fsanchez@mtlakes.org.
* Perhaps the most interesting fact about the memorial boulder is that the final name added in 1989 was for the Laker who was killed seventy years earlier during the Great War in 1917. Since Mountain Lakes established the memorial after World War II, the town leaders mistakenly neglected to include Joseph Bowden who was killed in World War I. Bowden's name was finally included in 1989 because resident Jim Macfarland, a 79-year-old Laker who once met Bouden when he was a child, did much research and was able to prove that Bowden did indeed live in Mountain Lakes.
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